Advertisement

Raven Leilani Is Your New Favorite Novelist

Photo credit: Courtesy
Photo credit: Courtesy

From ELLE

Amid all the fanfare surrounding the release of Luster, Raven Leilani’s debut novel, the Brooklyn-based author is wondering if perhaps it’s all the result of one long fever dream. “I took acid for the first time a while ago, and they told me about a person who ended up in a closet with an orange, but thought they’d been in there for a year with a friend,” she says over the phone while strolling through her local park. “A part of me is like, is this still a part of the trip?”

She’s referring to the surreal sensation of watching the book she worked on for years on nights and weekends—a razor-sharp coming-of-age story that sends Edie, its Black twenty-something narrator, careening into an older white couple’s open marriage—generate rave reviews and stamps of approval from critics and literary peers alike. But watching New York City tentatively emerge from the throes of a pandemic adds another layer of peculiarity to the whole thing, too. “This moment, it's so very bizarre.”

Like Edie, one of Leilani’s many day jobs over the years was in publishing. “There was some anxiety about writing the kind of story that might be suitable for the market, because I've looked at the data, and I saw what's being published, and what room it's being made for,” she says. Luckily, Luster is succeeding with all of its darkness and sharp corners intact, an unflinching chronicle of a young woman’s attempt to make sense of the cards she’s been dealt.

Here, Leilani talks about the idea of the unlikeable woman, how she approaches writing sex scenes, and why autobiographical details end up woven into her fiction.

During quarantine, "how are you" can be a very loaded question, so—how is today treating you?

That's a much better question. Today is good. Honestly, every day right now feels kind of unprecedented, because we're in the middle of this [book] launch, and I’m generally a very introverted person. The private and public are colliding in this moment, and that is very strange. I first started writing under my first and middle name, because as a Black professional woman, I wanted to have a sterile, professional avatar, which was my first and legal last name. Now those two identities are one.

As far as the book is concerned, I never expected it to hit like this, but it's been an absolute dream that people really seem to care and be invested in a thing I've made. That's all I wanted.

Was the assumption that these two versions of yourself—Raven Leilani and 9-to-5 Raven—would always remain separate?

I thought so. Almost every teacher I had told me, “If you want to do this for real, you need to make sure you have a job on the side that you don't care about so much, so that you have energy to write.” And I took that as gospel. All the work I did, including Luster, was after the 9-to-5, because I was like, this is how I know I'm going to be able to fulfill this part of myself and also eat. And now, it feels unreal, the extreme privilege of the fact that those two selves almost don't exist anymore. The Raven Leilani has cannibalized the other one, and I do feel lucky for that, because that part of me is the part that is my heart. I think I'm most myself when I'm on the page.

Did you write Luster during your MFA program?

I started it the second semester of my first year. I came in with a different book that I thought would be my first novel, but then I had these really meaningful and very frank discussions with editors in the program about my work and what I felt I wanted to put into the world. I had been toying with doing an MFA for years, so the stakes felt very high. When I went home and looked at the previous novel, I saw that I could do better, and I started Luster.

Many writers spend a lot of time wondering whether they should go for an MFA. What was that process like for you?

I would go online and read all the essays about the pros and cons, and to be frank, the cons were not insignificant. It was an enormous financial consideration and a decision that would uproot both me and my partner, but not necessarily lead to a book. Because of that, I waffled for a long time. With an MFA, nothing is really, truly promised in terms of what it will yield, but I wanted a community of writers who were earnest and vulnerable. There's something so beautiful about being in a room and talking about characters on the page as if they're real.

Then I had a really weird medical emergency, where, for a summer or maybe a bit longer than that, I couldn't breathe. I went to so many doctors, and no one could tell me why. It felt like I was going insane, almost. Eventually they decided to do this major surgery to figure out what was happening, and as they wheeled me in, they were making small talk and asked me, “What do you do?” And I said, "I'm a writer." It was the first time I had ever articulated that. I knew—I could feel it—if I didn't do this thing, I would disappoint myself. So I got into NYU, and, just to speak to the real financial consideration that kept me from it for a while, I immediately got a Postmates gig along with the full-time job I had, in order to build a cushion so I could come to the city and maybe have a little room to breathe.

In Luster, as well as some of your short stories, it feels like danger is always around the corner for the protagonist.

There's this one Morgan Parker poem called "All They Want Is My Money My Pussy My Blood." And there's one line that says, "I do what I want, because I could die at any time / I don't mean YOLO I mean they are hunting me." That line hit me. I felt that immediately in my heart. In my work, there's an element of me wanting to convey the real pressure and brutality and almost absurdity of what a body is like when it is constantly imperiled. I always try to be careful about talking about this, because I feel very strongly that there is so much joy in being a Black woman, and that occasionally we talk about Blackness as if it is inextricable from trauma, as if that is the only thing. At the same time, I wanted to be honest in that depiction of a character in a world where the intersections of her identities have great bearing on how she can live her life.

I was blown away by Edie, the protagonist of Luster. The idea of the woman who's in her twenties and flailing, making bad decisions, it's a tradition that is so steeped in whiteness. The idea of the unlikeable white character is so storied.

I can't pretend that I don't eat that up every time. I'm watching Girls, I'm watching Fleabag, you know. But then I'm like, where are the Black women in this? And the answer is—I'm not going to say it's simple, but it's immediate. Unlikeability is a very different thing to navigate for Black women. In general, when we're talking about women, “unlikeable” is a way of saying that we get to be privy to the darkness of her interior mind. She gets to be complex, she gets to be angry, and it has different baggage when the woman is Black. I wanted to speak to that rage—that was the origin of Edie, rage. It's funny that it kind of became humor. What we call unlikeability in white women, I think Black women feel, but have to suppress in order to survive. It felt like I had to be very careful, but at the same time I tried not to be careful. I tried to be free.

You said you didn’t want her to be a “pristine, neatly moral character."

I'm working within a tradition of Black women who have made space on the page to show the interior lives of other Black women. Toni Morrison, she makes room on the page to talk about Black women who hold those human contradictions. I wanted to be part of the canon, but I also wanted to write against what I think is a very real expectation that also exists. I guess respectability is the best, closest word I could come up with—the idea that there are so many people and institutions that are invested in policing our feelings and behavior, and I wanted to write against that. I wanted to write against the idea that there is a way to conduct yourself in order to be afforded humanity, or the idea that probably a lot of writers of color feel, that, Wow, so I've actually been given that rare space to tell a story. Maybe I should represent well. That felt extremely dehumanizing.

There are other snippets of your own life that emerge throughout your work, from your visits to Comic-Con to your character Rebecca sharing your mother’s profession of medical examiner. How do you think about which elements will emerge or be held back from your writing?

These are things I'm obsessed and preoccupied with, and the writing I think I do best is the writing where I am being led along by something I'm really invested in. There's an element of writing for me that feels deeply subconscious, that feels really inadequate to say at a reading or an interview where people are seeking your intentions, but there really is a part of this that is just coming out. During interviews, I've learned so much through this process of trying to articulate what I was doing.

E.L. Doctorow talked about the way he writes, and it's like you have a car on the road, and the headlights illuminate three feet of what's ahead of the car. He writes what's in those headlights, and he keeps going as he drives. And that is 100 percent how I write. I admire writers who start a project and are like, I'm trying to do this, and I know how this is working—but for me, it's kind of like an exorcism, in some ways.

How do you approach the literary sex scene?

When I wrote this book, I didn't think the sex would attract as much attention as it has. I just wrote the only way I could, which is sex that doesn’t pan away to the drapes. Sex where you get to see the silliness, the awkwardness, and the tenderness, which is a function of showing the underbelly, the negotiations people make in those private, bare spaces. And it's another way to explore power, which is central to this book which hinges on a power imbalance. Sex for me is character, too. It's not one of those things where I feel it's irrelevant to the prose. It’s a way to illuminate who a character is and what they want, and I wanted that for Edie, I wanted to be able to show a Black woman expressing her agency, and asserting what she wants.

How has the weirdness of these past few months affected the way you're moving through the world, and working, and interacting?

It’s actually made me return to painting in a way that I didn’t really anticipate. There's no way to say this and not sound grim, but one reason I love writing and painting when I can is that I literally feel like I can disappear for a moment. The pandemic has created more of an appreciation for the art I have that absorbs me. That feels like a miracle, that I can even turn to a book and just be there for a moment. It’s forced me into the incredible imagined worlds of other artists—and it's forced me back into mine, too.

You Might Also Like