She came, saw and conquered. Nell Zink, until recently almost the embodiment of the stereotype of the poor author, alone in the attic, grew into a literary hype in no time when the American author Jonathan Franzen praised her work and she received an allowance of six figures. From nobody to ‘Her Nellness’, it just shows how strange a human life can go. We interviewed her in Utrecht and her hometown Bad Belzig, in part for the literary magazine Livre. ‘To say it is therapeutic sounds horrible, but it really is true. Writing is my way to decompose life.’