Book Two: Emma Straub in conversation with Bryan Washington
Bryan Washington spoke with Emma Straub about his debut novel, Memorial, for our interview series. It comes out later this month and we can’t wait to share it with absolutely everyone.
Emma Straub: First, I just want to say congratulations because Memorial is the number one Indie Next pick for November which is amazing. You’re the homecoming king, the prom king, I don’t know–whatever it is, you’re the king of it and it means that literally more indie booksellers across the country are more excited for your book than for any other fiction coming out in November, which is a big deal. How do you feel? Did they send you your crown and your sash yet?
Bryan Washington: No. I’m glad, I don’t know that I’d wear either; I’ve just been wearing the same thing as of late. I think that the energy behind the book from booksellers, from bookstores, from folks on my media team at Riverhead and folks from the larger reverberations of the team have been among the most exciting parts of the process on my end, you know? In conjunction with the excitement from my friends and loved ones who actually finished the book. But it’s been really lovely to see, especially in a moment where there are so many different ways we could be spending our time that it is a bit–or it is very discombobulating that folks are choosing to spend their time with Memorial. So it’s a nice feeling, and it’s an energizing feeling because I think there’s always the impulse to wonder, okay, there’s a lot of other things happening simultaneously so what am I doing. But the energy surrounding the book has made it really….it’s really concretized, if that’s a word, or it’s really cemented the–I don’t know, it’s just a really nice feeling, it’s a warm feeling.
ES: Good! And I can’t help but notice that there’s another big book coming out in November on the nonfiction side, which is this lil memoir by this guy, president Barack Obama. And my thought was that because president Obama put Lot on his favorite books list that year, I was thinking that maybe he was just–you know when you have a book out you become really aware of all of the books around it. You know, you’re on the same lists as all these people, and I feel like maybe it’s just his way of being like bookstore buddies with you. He timed it so that your books could be on shelves together.
BW: Maybe. You know, he giveth and he taketh away; in either case he was kind enough not to have it released on the same day. But no, originally Memorial was being released on the 6th and it was a super rad cohort of books that were being released simultaneously, and kind of having a chance to talk to The Bookseller last week to see if we could figure something out. And then it got bumped, so it’s always interesting to reorient and see who you’re on the same frequency as. But so many great books are coming out this month or came out last month and going forward, so it seems like we got an embarrassment of riches in that regard.
ES: For sure, and I think it feels almost like the writers who you’re in that little moment with end up feeling like the people on your hall freshman year of college or something where you’re like, you might not be great friends but you bump into each other a lot and you feel a real lasting sense of camaraderie.
BW: Oh yeah, absolutely. It’s been just a community of folks with shared problems and shared concerns because we were being released and navigating the same system at the same time. It’s been really wonderful to be able to reach out to folks and be like hey, is this happening to you?
ES: Especially now. So Lot, your collection of stories, was a debut obviously, but Memorial is also a debut. It’s a debut novel, and so you get to have this sort of splash twice, and I was wondering how this feels different. How you approached the writing of Memorial differently–if you had written novels before, I don’t know, or if this was your first time writing something significantly longer–and if you were sort of aware of the ways that your short story brain would have processed a story and if you had to carve new paths?
BW: Yeah, that’s a really lovely question. I think Memorial certainly is the first project I finished at that length. And it was actually born from having written a handful of notes that could’ve sufficed for a story and then those notes becoming a short story for a zine, and not really thinking that it could extended or that it would have the narrative thrust of a novel, mostly because I did not think, or rather did not have the structural acumen or the comfort on the page in order to have pulled it off when I was initially drafting it. So I was working on the thing that I thought would’ve followed Lot, like the very poor second novel attempt that is never going to be released, but I would always turn back to Memorial or like the iteration of Memorial that was on the page. And I would tell friends about it, like bookworld friends about it, and they’d be like, obviously you should be working on this other thing. And then I would tell folks in my author cohort and they would mirror those sentiments and be like, what are you doing? And then eventually...it took me longer than probably any other person to come to that conclusion. But, you know, I talked to my agent about it, I talked to my editor about it and they were both very receptive and very generous as far as the initial inkling of–
ES: So what–and forgive me if this is too personal–but like what were those threads? What were those little notes? I mean, I have maybe one or two guesses of what it would be but where did it start? What were the two or three little note-y threads that you had?
BW: Interestingly enough, the title was always Memorial; even from the very beginning of its conception that was the title. There was always going to be a sort of triad at the heart of the novel; the iteration of Benson was there, the iteration of Mitsuko was there, and the iteration of Mike, that was there; and there was always going to be a cooking component. There was always going to be a dual vantage point component, although I didn’t know how to make that feasible or effective at the time. And I knew the emotional pocket that I wanted to end the novel on, but I did not know the route that I would take to get there and what that would look like specifically.
ES: I love that Bryan! Because sometimes there are some writers who say, if I don’t know what the ending is then I can’t get there, right? And there are some writers who are like, no, if you know what the ending is, like what is the point of writing it, how boring. But I feel like the way you just put it is a very beautiful and helpful way to think about it, which is the emotional pocket. It’s not the like, and then there’s an explosion and the death star is a mushroom cloud; it’s not the plot that you’re talking about. It’s not the end of the plot, it’s the feeling that accompanies that action, which is just good. I feel like I’m going to think about that for a long time, Bryan.
BW: Yeah, in a lot of ways I feel like I wrote the novel to see how it would end. It’s not something I was cognizant of at the time, but now that I’ve gotten the chance to process a little bit about it, that was one of the more significant drivers for it.
ES: Yeah, and isn’t that nice? I find it comforting as a novelist that I’m often doing things that I don’t understand or writing things that I don’t understand because I don’t understand them. Because I want to understand them, but it actually takes, often times, longer than the writing of the book to actually look back and be like oh, yes, yes.
BW: Yeah, and I mean I’m still not as far removed from that to see many of the things that may or may not be there. But it’s also been interesting to get to talk to folks about it and see the threads that they themselves are noticing and then I have to think about whether I was conscious of putting them there myself, because that’s always an interesting tangent to fall on.
ES: Yeah. Even you describing the book as this three-cornered thing with these three characters is so interesting because the way that I have been thinking about it has to do with pairs. It has to do with Mike and Ben, and their fathers and their families, and sort of lover-lover, son-son, father-son, father-son–in these pairs. Which makes Mitsuko one of my favorite characters because she shows up almost like a character from a fairy tale or an O. Henry story, where you want this but you get that instead. You lose what you need in order to get what you wanted sort of thing. And I just loved her so much because I saw her as a character outside of all of these other pairs in the book. I just loved her, so where did she come from? Because I feel like the couple at the center...they feel so grounded in contemporary life. Like I feel like I could open the door and they’d be there, but she feels somewhat outside of that to me and I wonder how she ended up on your doorstep, or on their doorstep.
BW: I don’t know. I feel like...I literally don’t know, I don’t remember. I know that there are friends that I’ve had, aunts that I’ve had, neighbors that I’ve had, cousins that I've had who live and behave and operate in the way where you could probably squint and see similarities in their characteristics and Mitsuko’s. I think that I knew even from the very outset, and it was something that calcified as the drafting and editing process continued, that she would be one of the handful of characters–because I think that Lydia does this to some extent, Ximena does this to some extent–who is honest and is direct, but not in a way that is meant to harm and not in a way that is meant to belittle. Like I don’t think that she does that. I think that if anything she’s the one character that, as far as emotional intelligence and emotional competence is concerned, she’s the character that’s the most fluent in that because she’s constantly comforting the characters around her. Whether or not they recognize that is a different question entirely. Perhaps Benson doesn’t really see it because that directness is not something that he’s used to so it feels like an affront. And yet even from the very first scene she asks some questions and yet she’s nourishing him, like immediately. She doesn’t know him, she’s at this guy’s home and immediately she’s looking to make him feel alright. And Mike doesn’t see it to some extent because for a good chunk of the novel Mitusko is like his mom, and not like a person. Just mom. And then she becomes Mistuko and that sort of shifts his paradigm.
But it was really important to me to make sure that her character worked on the page emotionally and structurally because she’s, like you said, the character that is there for most all of the book. Because Benson and Mike in linear time, they really don’t spend too much time on the page with one another, and yet she sees all these different parts of them and she sees how they change and where they end up, and she nudges them when she feels like she has to and she doesn't force her hand about it. She’s not very forceful, so much as saying here’s a change that needs to happen and whether you make it is entirely your decision. So trying to have her be as dynamic as she could be on the page, or rather as I could make her on the page, was mostly my goal with her character.
ES: I mean, the cooking in this book is so wonderful, and I just love food in books. It’s one of those things that I think that if you’re not looking for it you could read so many books, so many hundreds of books, where no one eats, ever. But when you get a book where someone eats and cooks, I find it so grounding and nourishing to me, too.
It's my unscientific theory, totally unproven, that people who write food well are people who eat well, whether they cook well. I don’t know, maybe it’s just because I spend a lot of time thinking about food, and therefore I just find it really satisfying when people in books also think about food and enjoy food and taste food. I guess the question is why do you think it’s important for your characters to show them cooking?
BW: For me, I think that there are structural and thematic answers to that, but I don’t think that they overshadow the fact that food is delicious, you know? Like, I like food, so writing about it. The writing process is grueling in a lot of ways and it feels as if, though it is a never-ending hell train in others, so to find something that I like to write about is always nice. But I think that again I agree with you that in a good chunk of fiction no one utilizes the restroom in any capacity and also no one goes to work and people don’t eat so they’re just sort of living in this liminal space of whatever their issues are on the page at any given time.
But I think that a really cool thing about the cooking aspect of it is that it can be a way of exploring the transactional nature of so many of the relationships that are depicted on the page. And as someone who is really interested in these pillars of comfort and pleasure, and not only the difference between the two, if there is a difference, but also who is benefiting within that transaction, and when, and what happens when the beneficiary is perhaps not who you would think it would be in that transaction, or what happens when neither party is a beneficiary, or when there’s a disruption in that transaction, or what steps characters will take to insure that both parties or all parties are left with a desirable outcome as far as pleasure and comfort are concerned. And food is a great way of doing that because there is an endpoint to a meal. The very nature of a meal–like if you’re cooking, eventually you’re going to stop cooking, and if you’re eating, eventually you’re going to stop eating, so it’s a moment in time that is implicitly always a memory because at some point you will stop doing it. So it was important to me, while writing a novel that is in some ways very concerned with memory and the different vantage points from which memory can be viewed, to use cooking as a narrative tool.
I think there’s a reading where Benson is someone who learns to speak up for himself for his own arc, and Mike is someone who learns to listen for his own respective arc. And I think that they do that through language: they do that through, you know, texting, they do that through typical conversations, but largely through cooking as Benson establishes a language for himself in the kitchen, right? He goes from someone who just loses his shit, someone just cracking an egg and frying it to being competent and comfortable enough to make his partner’s favorite dish. Whereas Mike, although he has a firmer grounding from the outset as far as culinary comfort is concerned, goes from just forcing his will and his meals upon people to being really cognizant of what they need in any given moment, or what they don’t need or even being receptive and understanding that maybe he isn’t even the person to provide one thing or another. I mean even though Mike can be abrasive on the page, in a lot of ways he’s constantly himself reaching out to his neighbors trying to make them feel comfortable because that makes him feel comfortable, and it’s just his way toward that.
So it was a tool for both their arcs; it was a structural tool for me, as far as getting a sense of time, how much time has passed–like how much time does it take for someone to be comfortable in the kitchen? That was a good time marker for me. But that was one of the more fun parts of the text. And I mean, Mitusko, she’s constantly cooking, constantly trying to make people feel better. And it isn’t until the end, where she says I’m not going to cook like the night before I leave this country, where she is the sole beneficiary of that comfort and that pleasure. And that’s when she’s able to tell the story about this thing that happened to her and how Mike came to be and how they all came to be in that particular moment. So really playing with that transaction and different things that could happen were really important to me.
ES: Yeah, it is. And it works, it works so beautifully in this book, Bryan. Ok, I don’t want to take up too much of your time so I just want to ask before I let you go what your reading and writing life has been like since March. I think for everyone, across the board, our lives have changed, and especially when it comes to reading and writing. And some people have taken up like, you know, maybe more ambitious reading projects than they would have, or some people are returning to beloved favorites as a form of comfort. What about you? What has your reading life been like?
BW: It’s the one thing that’s been really consistently solid, because there are so many lovely books that have come out or are coming out. I mean, some that immediately come to mind are Days of Distraction, the Alexandra Chang novel–I’m constantly thinking about that novel. I was really happy that Samantha Irby’s collection dropped when it did because that was just a balm in a lot of ways. Yaa Gyasi’s Transcendent Kingdom was really beautiful and great. The Aoko Matsuda collection I think comes out in a week or two, it’s super exciting to see...Simon Han has a novel, I think Nights Where Nothing Happened is what it’s called, but it was super great and lovely to read. Brit Bennet’s novel–you know, brilliant–came out. What else have I read that’s just been so lovely? There have just been so many great books that are on the way. I don't know, this might be a secret–I’m reading My Year Abroad, Chang-Rae Lee’s novel and–
ES: Why is it a secret that you’re reading it?
BW: I don’t know! I don’t know that other people are supposed to know that it is a thing you can read yet, but it’s so thorough and it is so warm and it is so much like the world that it has just….I mean, there are always so many great books that are always coming out, and you’re always happy to be writing in an ecosystem with your peers. But I feel like there are certain books I’ve rea,m like Helen Oyeyemi’s story collection, Hwan July Wang’s story collection Home Remedies, Ocean [Vuong]’s novel, Transcendent Kingdom, and you know, My Year Abroad, where you can feel your gears shifting, so to speak. And I finished it once things slowed down, I will re-read it again, but that has been an experience to read. That’s been a lot of fun to read. There’s been so much great stuff coming out, I mean Rumaan [Alam]’s novel comes out next week, it’s going to be rad. Luster came out–every week feels like a year. Like Luster was such a joy to read, so there’s a lot of stuff.
