from an Interview with Mary Gaitskill

When did you realize you wanted to write a novel that engaged in some way with Rand’s philosophy, and how did your conception of Two Girls, Fat and Thin change over time? Did you see it from the start as a satire? [The Nervous Breakdown]

I've heard it said about satire, that for it to work, the satirist has to have some sort of secret love or empathy for the thing she's satirizing. That's probably true, but I didn't start out thinking in terms of satire. I felt it poignant and weirdly moving that people wanted to base their lives on the deeds and opinions of fictional characters. Especially since these characters were created by someone so sternly and humorlessly purporting to represent objective reality and rationality; I can think of few things less rational or realistic than trying to imitate made-up people. [1] Yet I didn't have the impulse to just mock it because it came out of an idealistic impulse plus need. Also what these people were doing seemed just a more extreme version of something a lot of people, maybe everybody, does: cobbling together a sense of self or purpose through a combination of ideal and fantasy that gets superimposed over actual experience, and which can seem real, or at least non-nutty if enough people are buying into it. And shared fantasies, like the kind pop culture or fashion create naturally, do have elements of reality that get bigger the more people are acting like its real. That is part of the irony of Rand's appeal; supposedly she was a pure individualist, and the kind of phenomenon I just described is by nature collective. [2]
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[1] I envision this applying to anyone imitating anything as received through media-- behavior on reality shows or fashion as delivered through the internet or crimes reported by the news is filtered and tidied up and sensationalized, and has already lost its ability to claim a state of pre-made-up. All of those people on a screen or page are "made-up people."
[2] I like this-- it could apply to any movement that expresses itself as apart from "a crowd" but that relies on representative figureheads and visible proponents.

** emph. + notes from b.