When did the protagonist, Edie, come to you?
I knew I wanted to write about an artist. That creeps into my work—everything I write, there’s that
preoccupation with art and what it means to pursue it and honestly what it means to fail in pursuit of
it. I was also trying to write what I wanted to read. I wanted to read about a young Black woman who is
allowed the latitude to mess up and make mistakes. To be able to create a character who gets to be
angry, full of desire, perverse. That’s hugely important in creating a human character: talking about
the dark parts, the grey parts, the uncomfortable parts—along with the joy. I wanted to write about what
it’s like to be pulled along, to want so much, to seek human connection, to fumble through the dark as a
lot of us have. But to try to tell it in a way that’s humane and honest about the process.
Your book is very funny. How did you approach the dark moments in it?
When we’re talking about trauma, to be able to express what it was is often much or most of the power
that tellers have. When I was writing about being a Black woman, being dogged, and being hungry—up
against sexism, racism, capitalism—it was so important to me not to have my character be fully defined
by the pain that she has to endure. It was important to me to have her not bear that trauma well. For
her to have some complaints. For there be room for a human, messy response. How I tried to handle that,
in part, was writing in the first person. So you’re inside her mind: You can see her interior, her
actual, honest thoughts. And you can see that up against her external performance. So you understand
because you see both sides. Edie still has a sense of indignance and rage, which I think is dignity,
knowing that she deserves more. You can see her endure these things with great complaint. She expresses
that this hurts, this sucks. That was important to me, that it not be made a noble or virtuous thing.
She doesn’t bear it silently. When I was writing about these dark moments, at the same time, we
understand the human element of it, the part that makes room for contradiction. There’s an idea that
there’s one correct way to respond to trauma—it creates an almost impossible environment for people who
experience trauma to be human. I wanted to keep the doors open when I was writing to explore various
responses. Some of it is desperation. Some of it is anger. It was important when I was writing this,
too, that there was an energy to it. And, I hope, a humor.
Perhaps the most charged relationship in the book is between two women (Edie and Rebecca)—why?
I wanted to write about what it looks like when two serious women meet and actually push each other and
challenge each other. In my life, it has been women who have held me accountable, treated my work
seriously, and urged me to be vulnerable on the page.
Edie and Rebecca’s relationship has a very tricky balance. It’s predicated on an extreme power
imbalance, one that Rebecca deliberately indulges and wields. There are class and racial barriers to
their immediate connection. I wanted to be honest about the way their different places in life create
differences that they have to reconcile in forming this really intimate bond. Edie literally needs
somewhere to live. She is coming from an extremely pressurized moment. Even her pace in the suburbs is
different from Rebecca’s. She’s being surveilled, as Akila is. Her body is imperiled, in a way, and she
has an economic-social precarity that Rebecca cannot understand. That is something they are trying to
reconcile. And that perhaps a lot of Black women and White women who love and know one another do have
to reconcile. There’s also an element of seriousness, immediacy, to women who get to know one another.
There’s something almost—you know, the sex in this book…there’s a lot of it. And it doesn’t happen
between Edie and Rebecca. But it’s there. Even if there’s not something inherently romantic about the
way women get to know each other. There are none of these frills. Immediately, we’re talking about the
guts of this thing. I wanted that. I wanted to talk about what that looks like and how that has great
bearing on art-making and work. It’s complicated. There’s an extreme power imbalance—both Edie and
Rebecca sort of recognize their powers in different situations. And they are slowly beginning to reveal
themselves to each other.
Who knows how to write sex?
I really, really loved Susan Choi’s My Education. Which is almost a direct line for me—it
has the
conceit of the girl who comes into a marriage through the husband. And it’s really more about her
relationship with the wife. And in My Education, their relationship is explicitly sexual. And
those
scenes are—boy—they’re really tactile and almost violent in the word choices.
Carmen Maria Machado, her writing. There’s one story in particular, “Inventory,” that I really love and
look to for how to write about character through sex. The story is an inventory: She’s writing about a
global calamity—honestly, kind of a pandemic—and you experience that pandemic through the relationships
this one person moves through. And you experience time through sex and character. It’s so strong and
sensory.
Alissa Nutting, Tampa. It’s a controversial book and also extremely
bodily. There’s a degree of
attention and obsession that becomes intimacy, that breeds sexual energy.
Toni Morrison—I mean, she’s a master. She writes sex so beautifully. She doesn’t defer to form. She
lets the page do what it will do. And she also has a wonderful way of moving through time through the
body.
Garth Greenwell is incredible.
There are so many. I love reading good sex. And even good writing about bad sex.
What’s a book that made you jealous?
Jennifer Egan’s A Visit from the Goon Squad. That book makes me
insanely jealous. I teach it when I
can. One of the reasons is it’s a book with interlocking narratives. It takes an insane degree of
organization. And there’s something really beautiful in the skill and care of introducing a character in
a little glimpse and then following that through line to their full story. And she has that energy about
her writing. She strikes the balance of having abundance on the sentence level without it feeling like
it’s out of control.
I would say, too, Brit Bennett’s The Mothers. It’s so good. It’s so careful. And it’s
so sensitive to
its characters. It allows them room to be human, in the way that I try to do. It grapples with the idea
of God, even, in a way that feels subtle and interesting. And it talks about motherhood—there are parts
of my book where I try to talk about motherhood. The Mothers talks about motherhood in that way that is
profound and measured. There’s no judgment in the writing of what motherhood should be. It allows its
characters to have complex feelings about it. Her writing is clear. And strong.
What are you looking forward to doing in New York once the city is fully open?
Oh man, I want to be able to gallery-hop again. I miss that. I miss just going out into the city and
popping into galleries and the bigger museums. That’s something I do over and over again. I’m not
unfamiliar with the museums here but they center me in a real way. Right now, I put on my mask and take
my long walk from Brooklyn to Manhattan, and I’ll stop at the stairs of the Met. And I’ll just kind of
look at it.
Loved reading your Esquire piece about faith and
Comic-Con. What should fandom be in one
line?
It’s so wild to be in close proximity to the makers and voices of these properties that you grow up with and identify with. Fandom should and can be an earnest act as opposed to gatekeeping. It’s all beautiful and works best when it’s communal.
