Book One: Emma Straub in conversation with Raven Leilani
Next in our interview series, Emma speaks with Raven Leilani, author of the debut novel Luster, released today, that we at Books Are Magic, along with everyone else in the book world, have been raving about all summer.
Emma Straub: How are you?
Raven Leilani: I’m ok, you know, it’s definitely a lot. There are so many things we could say about why it’s a lot. I know you must know when we were thinking about publishing this book and when we knew the date was going to be August 4th, 2020, the thing was how do we publish a book during this crazy election cycle, and then everything happened. And I mean, really, truly, so many things happened, and it feels both weird and almost inappropriate to be talking about my book right now, but also kind of heartening that people have really rallied around books and seem to care, still, to read. But also, this is my first time around so I’m really learning as I go and I’m learning a lot.
ES: I hope that a lot of people in your life right now, like your editor and your agent and your publisher and all that, are also telling you things like, it’s not always this terrible! The world is not always this terrible. I mean, publishing...don’t let anyone fool you that publishing is not terrible, because it kind of is, but it’s usually a lot more predictable than this. It’s usually problematic in ways that are really easy to see and understand and react to and get in front of but right now that doesn’t exist.
RL: I mean, it's funny because it's only today that my bedroom, because that’s where I am right now, is free of boxes. Because normally I’d go to the publisher and I’d sign the books that they’re going to send to the bookstores, and they’d send them out. I used to work in publishing so I’ve seen the other side, but in this case, because of the COVID, what they had to do was they sent 700 books to my house. And I live in a normal–which means small–apartment in Brooklyn and so it was just...the drama of it, of the kind of coolness of all these boxes of my book.
ES: I mean, enjoy it, celebrate it. Because right now the thing we are all missing the most of is joy and happiness so if you can celebrate, please do. I think the first thing that really just sang to me from your book, before I was really invested in the characters and the story and the humor, were the sentences. Your sentences are just sublime. And here you are, your debut, number one. I want to know how this book came about: if this is something I’ve been working on in secret for ten years, hiding piles of pages under your mattress or if you’d been reading this aloud to yourself nonstop. I would love to hear a little bit about your writing.
RL: So I started writing it in the MFA. I had come in with a totally different book, which I thought was going to be, hopefully, my debut novel. But then I had these really meaningful conversations with the mentors I met in the program really early on, and so there was a moment when I went home and I looked at the book I had come in with and spiraled because I was like, oh no, I think I actually could do better, I think I could write a book if I lean a little more. And you know, every book–to finish it you have to love it, right, to sustain that attention. And I loved that book, but like anything that doesn’t really pan out, it’s still really hard to hear.
In my second semester in my MFA at NYU I was in Katie Kitamura’s workshop and I had just a couple chapters. I didn’t really know what it was yet because that’s how I write–I couldn’t tell you what it’s going to be, I feel like I have to write to find out. And then I really just kept writing that. It became really apparent that that was going to be my main thesis or project in those two years and I finished about a couple months before I graduated, so it took me a little over a year to finish this book.
ES: That’s quick! You’re quick!
RL: Yeah, I guess it was. But I just had a real fire beneath me because the years that had preceded me coming back to New York felt like stasis a little bit. Before I moved here I was in DC for four or five years, and I was working–and I was just working, just trying to live. I was living with my partner, I had met him there in DC, and I knew I wanted to come back to New York at some point. I had only left because I followed a job, you know, I needed that job; it was 2012. I followed it to DC and while I was there I was always working on things, just after the 9-to-5. The book that I was telling you about that I wrote before this was technically the second book that I wrote. So Luster is really the third book I managed to finish, but the first two were not good. They were things that I had to exercise.
ES: They’re supposed to be bad–that’s why you leave them behind.
RL: Right!
ES: Honestly Raven, I shouldn’t say this because it’s not always true or fair, but I don’t–but I will say it–I don’t trust people who write one thing and then publish it. I don’t trust people, I really don’t…
RL: I feel that, I really feel that, right? Because there has to be a path, like some sort ‘how did you get there’, and for me how I got there were those books and publishing in literary journals for the four or five years before this started to happen. You know, I submitted, I put my work out into the void. Only short stories–they were the first part, and poetry. Poetry is where I started, and then I moved to short stories, and submitted through submittable and kept an excel spreadsheet of all of my rejections as I went. And in general, when I’m writing I need to have both: I get crazy energy that I have to put somewhere else or else it’ll sabotage what I’m trying to do. And so I think by the time I got to Luster I feel like I had really been working on it for a while but more just in the dark, and a lot of people weren’t seeing the things I was doing.
By the time I got to the program, which came after a moment of, oh my gosh, am I going to uproot my life to do an MFA? Nothing’s promised if I do that, you know. When I got there I was like, I have to take advantage of this. I was working at Macmillan and in the MFA at the same time, and I was really exhausted when I needed it. It felt like...some people really hate it when writers say it just happened, it just came out. There’s craft in it, but it really just...like, I was waiting for this moment. I came back to New York and it just had to happen.
ES: What was your job at Macmillan?
RL: I was a digital production associate, which is one of those things where, what does that mean? But I worked with e-books. It was like an archival position where I worked with all of the imprints there, so I kind of got to see everything that was coming in, what they were publishing, and that was really important data to have.
ES: I think that’s another thing that helps get the dross of those early books out. Certainly for me, I had three of those books, too. And I think that I was so young and so dumb when I was writing those early books, and part of that was because I was reading whatever books pretentious 20-year-olds read. I wasn’t reading a lot of contemporary literature, I was reading War and Peace and Middlemarch, which are great books and I love them but reading Anna Karenina and Jane Austen doesn’t tell you what people are doing now. So I think that having access to so much great contemporary literature helps one’s writing.
RL: So I have a sort of adjacent experience that’s sort of totally outside of publishing where that book that I wrote right before Luster–I had actually tried to get agented with it the summer before I started my MFA, and it was rejected all around, entirely. And the rejections were invaluable, really truly. Sometimes you get a form rejection like, oh she’s not really the best, but then the letters that forced me to, maybe, better try to articulate my intent of what I was trying to do, and me realizing that I didn’t really particularly have one or a focus. I wasn’t even thinking–this is really cynical to say, but I didn’t think about who do I want to read this. It made it so that the product that I had was kind of confused. It kind of oriented me to write in a way that I was trying to be deliberately communicative. I think I wanted to be inspirational, you know, that was all I wanted to do. And so the product that came out was really confused and it was ponderous, and it didn’t really say anything. And then I realized I’m writing this because I want it to be read, so what can I do in service of that, and that moment in which I was reading what agents were saying was a crystalizing moment.
ES: Yeah, so that leads me to one of my questions, which is that one great thing about your book is that, from a bookseller’s perspective, I feel like I can put it in the hands of so many different kinds of readers. You know, here at Books Are Magic we had sold like one trillion Sally Rooney books, and I feel like I can hand this to any person who has read the Sally Rooney books and they will love it, but I also feel like the Mary Gaitskill reader is going to love it and the Kiley Reid reader, which are really different audiences. And this big juicy blurb you have on top here from the queen, Zadie [Smith]. I think that it’s sort of incredible because I think the tone is so strong and so fresh that it’s really in it’s own little category, but it’s a tone that I know is going to appeal to so many people, so I want to talk to you a little bit about it. I want to talk to you about how funny it is. It’s so funny, Raven, it made me laugh out loud over and over.
RL: That’s amazing to hear. That’s actually a conversation I have a lot with my boyfriend, even about TV, about books–books specifically had to hit that fun spot, and I don’t consider myself a funny person. I started writing this book and I knew I wanted it to be welcoming. I knew I would sort of be plumbing some dark real estate and I wanted to make room for joy and for a breath, and so there are jokes in there. I wrote jokes that are funny to me, but I do feel like the deepest root of humor in the book is coming from rage.
ES: This book is full of rage and pain, like psychological pain and physical pain, and yeah. I think it does just that, but you provide humor inside those moments. I mean, I think of humor as my coping mechanism in life and in writing, and I feel like that’s true for Edie too, where some of the things she is thinking about and that are truly weighing her down are so heavy that even she doesn’t want to look at them straight on.
RL: Yes, yes. Humor is definitely a way to elide the brutality of her reality and I think that element there is present even in how she relates–physically, sexually–to people. Something that I’m really passionate about is–this is so corny, but–feeling; is an earnest engagement, is the sort of impossibility of feeling everything there is to be felt when you’re human. And the things we do to look away, even just for a moment, or to feel less of it. I think writing this–writing Edie, and writing about a Black woman who is living at the intersection of these identities that make her environment so pressurized, that existence is too much. And I don’t want to say it like that, because I’m trying to be careful about how I talk about it. I don’t want to talk about Blackness as if it is inextricable from pain and trauma, and in fact I tried to write against that in a way that you see, because you see inside of her mind, she is not bearing it super well. You can see her humanity and the tenderness she craves, but there is an element of obliteration as comfort, and I think the humor is actually a case of that too.
ES: It is, it’s all mixed up, it’s all mixed up with her, and which makes for a really compelling character. She’s so much fun–I mean, “fun”. It’s so enjoyable to be with her because of these highs and lows. If it was all lows it wouldn’t...the reading experience would be really different.
RL: Right, I didn’t want it to be drudgery, for me or for the reader. Fun actually is exactly what I wanted. It’s funny, in the MFA I read Jhumpa Lahiri’s “A Temporary Matter” and I thought about that story because it is a story that is quite familiar, well-trodden territory but it is actually deeply specific, and so because of that specificity it is novel. And so when I started writing this and I thought about all the things I wanted to say and all the things I was interested in and had gotten rid of that idea of, let’s just do something 100% original. I thought, how do I say what I want to say in a way that is inviting and universal but also specific, and that the specificity makes it something that makes people feel like it’s worth reading and that they haven’t already read.
ES: On that note, I think that your novel is the first novel, and probably the only novel that I will ever read, that has a scene set at the Javits Center that actually made me want to go to the Javits Center.
RL: Oh that’s great!
ES: Because...I hate the Javits Center, it’s a horrible place. But the Comicon scenes, these cosplay scenes are so amazing that–yeah. I mean, yeah, they’re so amazing. I feel like that really speaks to exactly what you just said about specificity, like the more accurately and clearly you can describe something the more universal it feels but also does it justice. It does these particular characters justice, too, that it’s not just this free floating description of a space, it’s everything working together.
RL: Yeah, that was important to me. That was how I felt okay about potentially wandering into territory that–not specifically the Javits Center; like a marriage, an affair. You know, we read them and honestly I will never get tired of it myself, not ever. I realized I really had so many come-to-Jesus moments in my MFA, and one of them was that there is nothing really, really, truly too private or too strange that you could put on the page and someone won’t feel some familiarity, someone won’t see themselves. In fact I think they see themselves more; it is more resonant because it is that specific.
When I was teaching for a little bit after I graduated, that was one thing I was trying to hammer into my students which is like–I think when we come to workshop and we talk about why we wrote what we wrote, I think like everybody had this feeling like, I’m going to write this thing. I know people, you know, like the idea of comfort, of writing an accepted thing because you feel like you want to engage that shorthand and there’s a kind of safety and comfort to that, but I think vagueness is actually more alienating. I think it’s definitely always more resonant to write towards what feels secret to you, what feels ugly to you.
ES: In your book, what resonates for me in terms of that is her body. So often in books, movies, television shows, whatever, it’s like every single human has been replaced by a robot that never goes to the bathroom, never gets their period, and has no fluids. And Edie’s got some fluids, she’s got stuff. And to me, I was like okay, okay, right. Here we are–in reality. Like why is this not true in every book?
RL: I feel the same way, and I feel that way even about work. Like why don’t I see people, either in books or on TV, at their jobs, which is most of life? But you know, the shows that I watch...have you seen I May Destroy You?
ES: I never watched the whole thing because it was a little intense for me at this moment. I have to come back to it, but I watched the first three episodes and I think she is brilliant.
RL: Okay, so you’ve seen the episode, then, where she’s sitting on the toilet and she’s putting on a sanitary pad and and that just feels so good to see. And just like, that’s what I want, that’s what I tried to do. I wanted to show the body–the drama, the insane drama of the body which we all have and we should talk about, so that was important to me to get in there. I think when you get those, you know–ugly is the worst word that I’m looking for that is the umbrella over these–the sort of unmoderated body, the beauty of the body, I think, is more severe.
ES: Okay, this is for the bookstore. You’ve mentioned a couple of writers, Katie Kitamura, who’s just out of sight, and we talked about Zadie for a second, but I was wondering who you love and whose books you just feel so excited by. It doesn’t have to be the last thing you read or anything like that, but just who just sets you on fire.
RL: So, this just always feels...like Toni Morrison, right? Every time I go to her and I see how she moves through time and the body, I see on a language level the care and the insane brilliance. It is one of those things that throw the book–you don’t throw Toni Morrison’s book, you know but like Jesus, those texts are important, the ones that make you feel the chill. But also one book when anyone asks me that question that’s often the first one that comes to mind is Jennifer Egan’s A Visit from the Goon Squad. I think it’s a perfect book. I really love Lolita. That also is, I’m very sure, a common answer. For new books, I really, really love Megha Majumdar’s A Burning, Emily Temple’s The Lightness, Megan Giddings’ Lakewood, and Pam Zhang’s How Much of These Hills Is Gold, oh my gosh. There are so many. I’m looking at my bookshelves over there: I really loved Three Women by Lisa Taddeo. I actually read with her at an event before I read the book and wish I could just fangirl over her.
Those are a few. Books that have great care on that sentence level and abundance, and just kind of fatty and caffeinated in that really great way. And books that manage, like Egan does, on the structural level to do something genius. And also Brit Bennett, she’s definitely incredible, and Ottessa [Moshfegh] was huge for me when I wrote this book because she has this beautiful meanness about her prose. And I feel like I’m missing just one last person–Sally Rooney! Like her books are so smart and they’re so sexy and, I mean, I absolutely love her.
