James McBride is one of America’s foremost storytellers, a contemporary urban griot whose works offer nuanced portrayals of America’s complex cultural landscape. He first captured our hearts and minds with his 1995 memoir, The Color of Water: A Black Man’s Tribute to His White Mother. Since then, he’s worked in multiple genres and formats to explore race, love, loss and the basic human threads that unite us all. Following a short story collection and a well-received biography of James Brown, Deacon King Kong marks McBride’s return to the novel. 

McBride’s third novel, 2013’s The Good Lord Bird, won the National Book Award in fiction. Following up a major award winner would cause anxiety in some, but not for McBride. “I never thought I’d win a National Book Award, you know,” he says. “So whatever I got out of it is gravy. The pressure was off. I’ve already demonstrated that I can write to the satisfaction of my peers and colleagues on the business side. I felt creatively free to do what I wanted to do. So I wasn’t that worried about it.” 

“Courage, modesty and morality are still the spine that holds America together.”

Deacon King Kong centers on the fallout after an elderly, grief-stricken Baptist church deacon named Sportcoat shoots a young former baseball player-turned-drug dealer named Deems at the Cause Houses housing project in 1969. McBride uses his sharp pen and incredible wit to explore the inner lives and interconnections of a diverse cast of characters who either live in or engage with the Cause Houses and nearby Five Ends Baptist Church.  

The book features a large set of characters, but the Cause Houses emerge as the central protagonist, taking an almost human form. The buildings are the body, and the characters’ experiences are the organs and organisms that bring it to life. The Cause Houses breathe, communicate, hurt and laugh. For McBride, humanizing the projects was an intentional move. 

“There is a dynamic that exists within the lifestyle of this neighborhood . . . and that dynamic involves a lot of love and a lot of respect for each other,” he says. “And a lot of diversity. A lot of mixing other races and not just white/black, but the mixing of Dominicans and Puerto Ricans and Haitians.” 

McBride grew up in a housing project in Red Hook, Brooklyn, but as he notes, it would be a mistake to simply trace the Cause Houses back to his own project experiences. “The Red Hook Houses were not like the Cause Houses, but the same love was there,” he says. “Some of it is based on my experiences living in Red Hook as a child, but a lot of it is based on my experiences living in black America as a man. Because the Cause Houses are in every city, but they just have different names.” 

The black church also stars in Deacon King Kong. McBride, who was raised in a black church, bristles at “poor media portrayals” that reduce it to unfortunate stereotypes. Five Ends Baptist Church is a corrective. It is his attempt to illuminate the black church as a site of great intrigue and inspiration. 

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: An interview with James McBride about his debut novel.

“I really wanted to present the black church as a dynamic place with fully dimensional characters, some of whom are likable, and some of whom are not,” he says. “Some of them are funny, and some of them are not. It’s not just a library or a community center. It’s not a social club. It’s a little bit of all those things. Ultimately, it’s a volunteer agency where people get together and have fun. The faith that holds them together is what makes them interesting, vulnerable and funny at the same time. If you look beyond the race and focus on the humanity of the people, the church is a fascinating place to write about.” 

Despite the seriousness of some of its themes, Deacon King Kong is an incredibly funny novel, with sharp comedic language and precise timing that never lets up. Aside from his own ingenuity, McBride’s brand of humor has a variety of influences. He considers Kurt Vonnegut to be the “most extraordinary literary humorist,” but he’s also gleaned much from stage comedians like cross-cultural titans Richard Pryor and George Carlin. He also highlights the impact of underappreciated African American comedians like Redd Foxx, Nipsey Russell and Moms Mabley. He reserves his highest praise for Dick Gregory, whom he suggests was “the one comedian who really understood a lot about the black experience in America.”

Deacon King Kong is an incredibly funny novel, with sharp comedic language and precise timing that never lets up.

When asked what he thinks today’s readers can learn from a story about a shooting in the projects set over 50 years ago, McBride is very direct. “The aim of the book is to show people that we are all alike, that our aims are the same and that we are more alike than we are different,” he says. “We’re currently at a time where we need to be reminded about humanity and our heritage, and the fact that courage, modesty and morality are still the spine that holds America together.”

McBride has had a remarkably successful career by anyone’s standards. Aside from his hotshot debut and award-winning novel, his books have been optioned and adapted for film and television, and he collaborated with legendary filmmaker Spike Lee on the script for Red Hook Summer. When asked to envision the next stage of his career, McBride’s answer illuminates his ultimate purpose as a writer: “I hope that one day my work around the subject of race will be irrelevant and that we’ll find something else to write about. You know, in a hundred years I hope that we’ll be writing about how even though Martians have two heads and one eyeball and look like two-headed Cyclopses, they’re really pretty much the same as us.” 

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Read our starred review of Deacon King Kong.

Editor’s note: An earlier version of this article incorrectly described The Good Lord Bird as McBride’s first novel, not his third.

Success, we often hear, is a double-edged sword. Just ask Emily St. John Mandel. Her surprise bestselling fourth novel, Station Eleven (2014), launched her into the literary stratosphere. That was a very good thing. For the most part.

“When you have a wildly successful book, you have a sense of audience that wasn’t there before,” Mandel says during a call to her home in Park Slope, Brooklyn, where the Vancouver Island native has lived for almost 17 years. “That’s about the least sympathetic problem in the entire world, so I don’t talk about it too much. But before Station Eleven, I had no sense of anybody waiting for my next book. I could just go out and write. Afterward, I had this internal pressure that I needed to replicate its success. I was aware that people were waiting for the new book, speculating about it.”

“Everybody in [this novel] is haunted in some way by memory or by actual ghosts.”

Much of that speculation had to do with whether or not the new novel would also be a chilling, post-apocalyptic tale like Station Eleven. It is not. Instead, The Glass Hotel tells a more intricate, haunting and enthralling story, drawing some of its narrative energy from Bernie Madoff’s Ponzi scheme. It’s about money and the compromises and moral panics of gaining it, having it and losing it—a topic that Mandel acknowledges is rarely talked about, let alone written about in fiction.

“I grew up in a very working-class environment,” Mandel says. “I have no complaints. I had great parents and a really good childhood, even though we really didn’t have much. But what growing up without much money gives you is a sort of painful awareness of money. You’re very aware that you’re wearing secondhand clothes and your friends aren’t. Then, as you get older, you encounter people who have grown up in very different circumstances, and you start to see how much of life can be influenced by how much money your family has.” 

Mandel’s literary success has placed her at events where she spends time with very wealthy people like the ones she so sharply characterizes in The Glass Hotel. “To be clear, they’re often lovely people I adore,” she says, “but I do sometimes feel like a tourist in the kingdom of money.” This phrase is echoed in the novel by one of Mandel’s most riveting characters, a woman named Vincent who grows up in working-class circumstances on Vancouver Island and, through intelligence and personal magnetism, goes on to become the “trophy wife” (loosely speaking, since they’re not actually married) of a Madoff-style investment-scheme mogul named Jonathan Alkaitis. (This is one of three lives Vincent inhabits in the story; she also takes on the roles of bartender at the titular hotel and, later, cook on an international shipping freighter.)

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Read our review of The Glass Hotel.

Now that Mandel has some money herself, she is paying for a younger brother’s college education. “It’s an honor to do it,” she says. “For him it would have been a matter of deciding between getting an education and taking on massive debt.” Her newfound affluence is also helping her and her husband (and their very young daughter) renovate their Brooklyn home. At the time of our conversation, her house is in chaos. Her office, she says, is filled with all the couple’s books and “thousands of boxes.” The hammering thunder of workers is, to say the least, distracting.

Her husband, Kevin Mandel, is also a writer. “Probably it’s not the easiest thing to have two anythings—two writers, two lawyers, two therapists—in one household,” she says, laughing. “But I would say that it’s wonderful to live with someone who profoundly understands the way you want to spend your days. . . . There’s not that kind of bafflement you sometimes get from people who don’t understand why you would want to close yourself in a room for six hours just to write about fictional people. Also, having an in-house editor is a really nice thing.” Kevin, she says, is her first reader.

Regarding the ideas that eventually bodied forth as The Glass Hotel, Mandel says she didn’t have much interest in Bernie Madoff himself. “He seems like a garden-variety narcissist,” she says. “What was fascinating to me was that this was a sort of double mass delusion, where on the one side there were the investors, who were smart people who were getting [financial] statements that really made no sense but were just letting it go because they were making so much money. And on the other side was the staff that was actually carrying out the Ponzi scheme.”

At the time the Madoff story broke, Mandel still had a day job as an administrative assistant in the Rockefeller University’s cancer research lab. “For years, I couldn’t stop thinking about the camaraderie that one has with one’s co-workers,” she says. “Just think of how much more intense that camaraderie would be if you were showing up at work every Monday to perpetuate a massive crime. These people had to somehow convince themselves that they weren’t bad people, that what they were doing was somehow OK.”

Each of Mandel’s characters is haunted in one way or another. Vincent is haunted by the death of her mother, who drowned off the coast of Vancouver Island when she was a child. Her half brother, Paul, is haunted by his betrayal of his sister and others. While in prison, Ponzi-schemer Alkaitis is visited by apparitions and vivid images of an unlived counterlife. Alkaitis’ mostly younger criminal associates have their own ghosts and regrets. In the novel, Mandel writes, “There are so many ways to haunt a person or a life.”

“I see that as almost the entire thesis of the book,” Mandel says. “Everybody in every section is haunted in some way by memory or by actual ghosts. . . . I’ve always loved ghost stories. I’ve found them fascinating since I was a kid. I can offer a lot of very plausible reasons for why it makes sense to put that in the story, but the real truth is, I just wanted to write a ghost story. It just kind of developed.”

Still, Mandel says, the development of this novel was difficult. First, she was writing it after having just given birth to her daughter. And then there is her standard messy process.

“I’ve never had an outline for any novel I’ve written,” she says, laughing. “That has some plusses and minuses. The downside is my first draft is a big mess. The positive is there’s a good possibility of surprise. You might start out writing a white-collar drama about a Ponzi scheme that somehow evolves into a ghost story.”

And about Vincent’s dangerous post-trophy wife existence as a cook on a freighter? “Until I did my research, I hadn’t really thought about how vulnerable people are [when] working in international waters,” she says. “I read a story about a young woman working on a container ship who accused a co-worker of rape. She disappeared from the ship that night. It was in international waters, under the jurisdiction of no country nearby. Legally a ship is a tiny floating piece of whatever country it’s flagged to. So if you’re flagged to Mongolia, Mongolia is not going to investigate a possible crime in international waters. That’s just not happening.”

The perplexing practical and moral predicaments that build throughout The Glass Hotel may seem random—but in the end, the story packs a powerful punch.

“To my eye,” Mandel says, “The Glass Hotel is a more interesting novel than Station Eleven. Because it’s weirder. It has a lot of different threads. It’s more complicated than my previous novels. And more subtle. Because it was so much harder to write than my previous books, it feels like more of an achievement. I’m proud of it.”

Author photo © Sarah Shatz

The events in Raven Leilani’s debut novel, Luster, are indeed dramatic: A young Black woman named Edie begins a relationship with an older white man named Eric, who’s in an open marriage with Rebecca, who is also white. When Edie loses her job and apartment, Rebecca moves Edie into their home, where the younger woman becomes a type of mentor for the couple’s adopted Black daughter, Akila. This arrangement is fraught with strange, unspoken tension, with power, violence and control forming a complicated structure that holds aloft their generational, social and racial imbalances.

But for all this drama, what is most transfixing about Luster is Leilani’s uncanny ability to pin her characters down and to preserve the utter truth of Edie’s thoughts from one harrowing moment to the next. Leilani answered questions via email about the economic precarity of her young Black protagonist, the want and rage of her female characters and what a “millennial novel” even is, anyway.

There seem to be three layers (or possibly more) to the title: lust (a feeling of desire), luster (the sheen of something that is desired) and lust-er (one who desires). What are you introducing to the reader with this title, and how does its meaning change?
Along with desire, I would say it is also about how luster is tarnished as Edie reconciles the fantasy she has cultivated with the reality of earnestly seeking it out. There is the luster of memory—death and grief underpin much of the story, and Edie’s painting is partly about preservation, art as record keeping—and luster is also speaking to the degradation of the body. Her body often doubles as currency, which comes at significant personal cost. A more optimistic take could be that she manages to preserve her luster despite this, and the preservation of nerve and daring and bodily autonomy while wanting unabashedly is what this is partly about.

“I think the sense of dread you feel, and what I felt writing it, was knowing it wasn’t going to end without some kind of carnage.”

The pacing in Luster is absolutely brilliant. The chapters are broken up into smaller passages, and sometimes a single paragraph is a total gut-punch, while other sections sweep along breathlessly for several pages, like when Edie loses her job and apartment back to back. Tell us about the rhythm of your writing and how you use that flow to tell the story.
Thank you so much for saying that. For me this was, and is, one of the hardest parts of writing. I knew the book was going to be short. When I write, I like to get in and get out, say what I need to say as immediately as I can. Part of it is craft, and part of is my own anxiety about maintaining the attention of my reader. So I think that, along with the frenzy of Edie’s experience, brought a kind of urgency to the structure. And I am obsessed with sustaining a high level of energy in the language, because it’s fun, and because it lends itself to a more robust depiction of chaos, and those are the scenes I live to write. So much of this book takes place in Edie’s mind, and I wanted readers to feel the tumult of that processing, the whittling down of that bandwidth.

Speaking of Edie’s lost job and apartment: I can’t think of a better representation of how quickly a person can slip from just-hanging-on to losing everything. With a blink, Edie tumbles from a low-paying publishing job into the gig economy. This seems like an important aspect of who Edie is—that things can tumble out of control, and she’s just doing what she can to keep going. Tell us a bit about Edie’s situation, and how this can happen.
It was important to me to write frankly about that precarity. As I tried to depict the messiness of the artist’s journey, I felt a responsibility to also talk about the social and economic forces that shape, or in this case, impede a person’s ability to follow that path. In Edie’s case, when we meet her she is a young, Black professional, prone to lapses of judgment, of course, but deeply engaged in the performance demanded of her at work and in her personal life. She understands what she is up against, and she is always calculating, always adjusting and always observing, because her survival depends on it. But those demands are impossible and ultimately dehumanizing, and for a lot of Black women, the margin for error is thin. I wanted to write about this tenuousness and how it shapes how, when or if you can make art.

Control and power—who has it and who wants it—play major roles in Luster. Edie seems to have given up on having control over her life, and she has a complicated relationship with sexual power and violence. Rebecca seeks control over her body (and, it seems, her adopted daughter’s body) but also over the open-marriage situation; she also dabbles in violence through her taste in concerts. What is at the root of all these bids for control?
When I came to this book and began the work of trying to honestly depict want and rage, especially within the lives of women, I found I was also writing about disorder. The disorder that is a byproduct of living in a body that is subject to extremes, and that is made unruly by how closely it is policed, and how it lives in defiance of that surveillance. So these characters are doing their best to create some sense of control, which can mean seizing it, wielding it against someone less powerful, as Rebecca does, relinquishing it entirely, as Edie does, and trying to maintain some homeostasis, as Akila does. I wanted to make room for their responses to be human, so I tried to present these contradictions in a way that was nonjudgmental.

Rebecca performs autopsies, which you’ve said in other interviews that you learned about by watching your mother work. Why did you give Rebecca this job? What does it say about her?
My mother worked as a medical examiner at the VA, and I was really struck by the tenderness and rigor of that work. I gave Rebecca this job because this work made an enormous impression on me, and I really wanted to write more about it, but it was also a great window into Rebecca’s character. She is a person who likes to know how things work. She likes to keep a record, and the body is a record. It is another way into writing about the work of witnessing and preservation. Eric does it as an archivist. Edie does it through painting.

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Read our review of Luster.

There’s something sinister about Rebecca’s apparent kindness when she invites Edie to move in, partially because it’s clear that Edie has been brought in to be a type of mentor to Akila, Rebecca and Eric’s adopted Black daughter. What is this sense of dread we feel?
I think the sense of dread you feel, and what I felt writing it, was knowing it wasn’t going to end without some kind of carnage. You get to know Edie before she becomes a part of this family, and you understand her desperation. Desire and powerlessness create a combustible byproduct, and that is threatening to an arrangement that is predicated on rules. There is never any real sense of balance, and this instability feeds this feeling of dread. And also, you understand that in this new environment, Edie is imperiled in a different way. The surveillance is overt, and her unruliness becomes more prominent and more dangerous.

Luster feels like a defining millennial novel the way Ling Ma’s Severance did, but I have trouble pinpointing why—perhaps because Luster seems to acknowledge something dark and truthful about the world, but without overt complaint. How would you define a millennial novel, and is Luster quintessentially millennial?
I think the connective tissue between a lot of millennial fiction is a sense of rootlessness, desperation, a disgust with and complicity in the farce of work under late capitalism and occasionally, total surrender to this debasement, but I have to admit I’ve always felt uncomfortable with the generalizations that find their way into the critical response to books authored primarily by women, which to differing degrees are grappling with how to assert personhood and find meaning within a context of extreme social and economic precarity. Of course there is much to lampoon, and I think a balanced work is also spotlighting the parts of millennial life that are ridiculous, though I don’t feel at all qualified to speak for a generation. I didn’t set out to write a millennial novel, but it absolutely is one, partly because my own experience is deeply present in the work. Edie’s life is pressurized by the intersections of her identity, by racism, sexism and class, and I felt moved to write it because it felt urgent to me, and I noticed, too, that when we talk about millennials, we often seem to be talking about millennials who are white.

Like Edie, you are a talented painter, primarily of portraits. Does your writing world overlap with your painting? Is it a similar creative process, or are you tapping into something completely separate when you paint?
I think my writing world overlaps with my painting world in that art is always creeping into my fiction. I’m obsessed with the role of failure in art-making, probably because this was the first creative endeavor where I felt the frustration of coming up against my own limits and being unable to communicate what was in my mind. It’s a horrible feeling, and I can handle that feeling with writing because if I work long enough, I’ll find my way through. With painting, if it comes together, it feels like luck. Most of my painting process is correcting mistakes. It’s very disorganized, which is very much how I write, but with writing I have a little more control. They both feel like time travel. During the days I’d like to exist a little less, writing or painting is a great anesthetic.

How did the writing of this novel change you? Or perhaps, what most surprised you in the writing of it?
I’m not sure if this is how you mean it, but writing this novel and having it now be a thing in the world has forced me to articulate its intent in a way I don’t think I would have otherwise. It’s made me more rigorous, having to justify why I did what I did, which is not how I write. Not to diminish the role of craft, but I’m always just feeling my way through. What feels good, what feels true. Talking with people who’ve taken such care with it has been so illuminating; in some ways the book has become new to me again.

What are your writing rituals?
My main ritual is to write in bed, totally alone. Regularly, even if I don’t feel particularly inspired. I like the idea of going to get a coffee and working around people, but I can’t shake the feeling of being in public, and I can’t write in that kind of defensive posture.

Author photo © Evan Davis.

After publishing eight books in her native Australia, Charlotte McConaghy makes her U.S. debut with the deeply affecting story of Franny Stone, a young woman always on the run, with no real sense of home. Migrations is set in an imminent future in which nearly all of Earth’s animals are extinct. As Franny joins a fishing vessel to follow the last migration of Arctic terns, we begin to learn more about the loss and pain that have brought Franny to this place in her life.

A wrenching adventure tale, Migrations reveals the brokenness at the heart of a so-called “wild” woman. We reached out to McConaghy to discuss her novel and how to find hope amid humanity’s destructive impact on the earth.

Tell us a bit about the research for Migrations. Did learning more about climate change and the environment make you feel better or worse about this issue?
My research had to be quite wide and varied, as I chose a subject matter that of course I knew next to nothing about, just to make it really hard for myself! But it was a great experience learning about things like migratory birds and fishing vessels and far distant lands. My research into climate change, however, wasn’t as enjoyable. It definitely made me feel worse. Although of course I knew things were bad, I’d had no idea of the severity or speed of the decline in animal numbers. In the last 50 years alone we humans have caused the deaths of over 60% of all wild animals on earth. That was a staggering number for me to learn, and it became a huge component of the novel. I knew I needed to set Migrations in this very near future, to show how close it is and how inevitable if we don’t do something to stop it.

Which of the settings in Migrations do you most connect with?
I have a personal connection to the south coast of New South Wales, which is where the protagonist, Franny, spends her adolescence. My dad has a farm there, and I’ve spent a lot of time on that beautiful stretch of coast, so I connect with it, certainly. But I’ve also visited Ireland a few times, which is where she lives as an adult, and I really love the country, so rich in moody weather and landscapes, in music and poetry and art. And while I haven’t been to Greenland or Antarctica, I did a trip to Iceland, which was where I first heard the sound of great cracking, thunderous icebergs and fell in love with wild, icy lands.

“We can be nurturing and tender to our planet and the creatures we share this earth with. There is joy in that.”

What do you love about Franny Stone, and what do you wish for her? What do you most connect with her about?
Franny is so dear to my heart. It sounds a bit crazy to say, but after spending so much time with her and connecting so deeply, I really do love her like a best friend or a family member. I want all the best things for her, despite having put her through a huge amount of torment! I’m very sorry about that, Franny. I think I connect most with her love of nature, her passion for the people she loves, her desire for connection and wilderness, her need to be apart from society. She’s far braver than I will ever be. She’s earthy and grounded and has zero ambition. But there are also parts of her that I’m very glad I’m not: She’s a tortured soul whose wandering feet and restlessness, while deeply instinctive, lead her away from her husband and cause her no end to pain. She’s wilder than most of us and very creaturely, which means she feels the loss of the natural world keenly.

Of all the creatures for Franny to follow, why Arctic terns?
I fell in love with the terns when I learned they have the longest migration of any animal in the world. They fly from the Arctic to the Antarctic and back again in a year, and so in the span of their lifetimes that means they’ll fly the equivalent distance of to the moon and back three times. That blew me away and struck me as incredibly courageous, particularly given the journey is becoming more and more perilous for them by the year, what with human impact making the world a harsher environment for them. So they became a kind of metaphor for courage in my mind, a metaphor for the courage that Franny needed on such a journey and in facing the extinction crisis.

Some of my favorite parts in Migrations were with the crew of the Saghani. What inspired this crew? Do you have experience forming the types of particular bonds as a group of people like this, in which they’re all each other has when they’re away at sea?
As much as I would love to be at sea, I don’t think it’s ever going to happen because I get quite seasick! So no, I don’t know what it’s like to be confined with a group of people for months at a time, but I do have a close-knit group of friends who are like family to me, and I think we all know a little of what it feels like to bond with people you might not have expected to. I wanted all the crewmembers to be interesting and distinct in their own rights, and I wanted to love them, so I tried to have fun with their stories, always aware that these people would need to be interesting and loving enough to bring Franny back to life. They’re the people who provide her with the family she’s never had and remind her of the joy of being alive, even after immense loss.

The structure of the book allows the facts of Franny’s life to unfold slowly, so that her trauma and pain—and revelations about where it came from—ultimately become the beating heart of this book. Why did you choose this structure?
I get bored easily when writing, so the thought of writing a single POV in a linear structure didn’t engage or challenge me enough. It felt natural to be telling Franny’s present-day story alongside the past moments of her life that have impacted her. This way, readers get to experience those moments intimately with Franny. You get to feel them in a way you don’t if you learn about backstory through dialogue. Franny’s whole life became the basis for this book, in a way. It felt important that we get to know all the facets of her, all the phases and relationships that have shaped her. I also find it a really great way of creating tension and high stakes in a story. You can seed in information slowly and use reveals to create catharsis. And you can highlight the transformation of a character by showing who they are now versus who they used to be, and create a mystery around what changed her.

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Give a warm welcome to these eight new novelists.

If you had to follow any type of animal in order to reveal some truth about yourself, what would you choose?
Oh wow, that’s an incredibly difficult question! I guess it would be birds of some kind. I really love the greyling geese that travel from Iceland to the U.K. and back. My current obsession is wolves, as they’re the topic of my next book. Their mysteries seem infinite, so I’d love to spend time watching them. And I love whales. Their migrations through vast oceans are extraordinary.

"It’s very hard to be optimistic in the face of what’s going on in the world, but this is a story of a woman who has lost all hope and yet is able to reclaim it."

How do you find hope in a story about humanity’s destructive impact?
You have to look closely at the acts of kindness and generosity that people display every day. Yes, our impact as a whole is destructive, but what I wanted Franny to understand in the book is that our impacts, individually, can be positive. We can be nurturing and tender to our planet and the creatures we share the Earth with. There is joy in that. And once we start to feel powerful in those abilities, I think we’ll start shifting things. It’s very hard to be optimistic in the face of what’s going on in the world, but this is a story of a woman who has lost all hope and yet is able to reclaim it. She’s able to see the beauty that still remains, and she’s brave enough to take up the fight for it. I hope that’s what people take from this book, that there is still time, and we must have hope.

What are your writing rituals?
I’m more of an afternoon/evening/night writer. So my mornings are usually spent on finding ways to feel inspired—reading, watching, walking, listening—until it gets to the time of day when I start to feel creative, and then I sit down to work. It doesn’t always happen, and I don’t force it too much because that can really throw you off, but for me it’s all about mood. You do whatever you have to, to get into the right mood. To tap into that deeper well of emotion and thought. And that might be listening to particular music or reading a poem I love.

How did the writing of Migrations change you?
It has been an incredible journey for me, from the start of this book to now. It’s taken over my life in a big way. Writing it has made me more thoughtful, more aware of my actions and choices and the impact I have on the planet. And it’s made me more confident in my ability to dig deeper, to go places within myself I didn’t think I could go or didn’t even know existed. It challenged me to be a better writer, to demand more of myself. It taught me to be braver. To cherish every part of the natural world. To try not to take for granted the people in my life and what a gift they are. Life really is a joy, and we are so lucky to be here.

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Read our review of Migrations.

Author photo © Emma Daniels.

Life has become a lot more complicated since Bryan Washington started writing his debut novel, Memorial. The United States is contending with a global pandemic, civil unrest, climate change and a contentious political atmosphere—but not everything is terrible. This past winter, former President Barack Obama included Lot, Washington’s 2019 collection of short stories, on his year-end reading list—a bump that placed Memorial high on many lists of the most anticipated books of 2020. Lot also recently won the New York Public Library’s Young Lions Fiction Award, an annual prize given to a fiction writer who is 35 or younger.

“For the most part, things are going good in the immediate vicinity,” Washington says during a Zoom call to his home in Houston, Texas. But especially regarding Memorial, things seem to be going great. The book has received praise from authors like Jia Tolentino and Ocean Vuong, who called Memorial “a new vision for the twenty-first century novel” that “made [him] happy.” It’s apparent that Washington has struck a chord within the literary community, but Washington especially leans in to the latter part of Vuong’s praise. “As weighty as that particular diagnosis is, the fact that it made him happy means so much, if not more, to me, because it is a tricky novel tonally,” he says. “I was trying to hit a mark that was not quite straight down the middle.”

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Read our starred review of Memorial.

Memorial focuses primarily on the intricate relationship between Black day care worker Benson and his boyfriend, Japanese American chef Mike, two young men in love who are being torn apart by the separate forces of their lives. On the same day that Mike’s Japanese mother, Mitsuko, arrives to stay with him and Benson in their home in the Third Ward, a historically Black neighborhood in Houston, Mike announces that he’s leaving. He’s going to Osaka, Japan, to visit his sick father—“Just for a few weeks, he says. Or maybe a couple of months”—leaving Benson and Mitsuko behind. The two reluctant roommates form a bond, sharing delicious meals in their one-bedroom apartment, while Mike journeys to the other side of the globe. Emotionally and physically, the young lovers are drifting apart, a process that readers experience in intimate first-person narration that alternates between the two men.

Memorial makes the reader feel a lot of feelings and ask a lot of questions, not just about the book’s narrative but also about the state of love and relationships today. Washington grappled with many of these questions while writing the book, but there’s one question he says he wrestled with the most: Will they or won’t they stay together? This quintessential back-and-forth between Benson and Mike is what drives Memorial. “I always had that question in the back of my head,” he says, “knowing that I would have to answer it, even if I didn’t know what the answer would look like from the outset.”

“Within the various traumas that people experience, you still have the things that make you laugh and the things you enjoy eating and your crushes and your first loves.”

But Memorial is bigger than any one question, and Washington’s motivations for writing the book show deep respect for his myriad communities and found families. When he began drafting, Washington realized his book would “not have a lot of thematic or plot [comparisons] in contemporary American literature.” Rather than being disheartened by this absence, however, he embraced it. “The fact that it’s a departure is what encouraged it,” he says.

One major departure from other queer fiction is the way Memorial handles trauma within the story. “There’s a way that narratives in contemporary American literature—if they do feature queer characters, and especially queer characters of marginalized communities—are trauma-based,” Washington says, “and it was very important for me not to center trauma in the midst of the novel. . . . Within the various traumas that people experience, you still have the things that make you laugh and the things you enjoy eating and your crushes and your first loves and the acceleration of relationships and the deterioration of relationships. I wanted to find a way to center community without solely underlining the traumas in the story.”

Decades of literary discussions and debates preceded Washington’s creation of a book like Memorial, and he’s aware of the special place it holds in the chronology of queer literature. From Langston Hughes to James Baldwin, all the way to contemporary writers like poet Danez Smith, the conversation around how queer characters and communities are depicted in American literature has been going on for a long time, and Memorial continues that lineage. “A lot of other people had to have written the books that they wrote in order for the possibility of a novel like Memorial to even get to the precipice of publication,” Washington says. “It feels nice to be able to contribute another facet, I hope, to the conversation.”

Washington’s unique place in literature isn’t something he’s overly concerned about, though. It was only after writing Memorial that he could look back and ask himself which writers he had been in conversation with. During the writing process, he just wanted to make the best book he could.

In fact, when I ask him what books inspired him, he can’t think of any. All that come to mind are films. He mentions the 2019 dramedy The Farewell, starring Akwafina, as a standout inspiration, particularly for its relationship with the audience. “We get the events and we get the things that happen,” Washington says, “but we aren’t told how to feel about it.” Films like Edward Yang’s Yi Yi and Céline Sciamma’s Girlhood helped him to be less proscriptive in his writing, and to strike a balance between showing and not showing.

Another goal of the novel was to foster communication with readers, making them think critically and deeply about modern love and relationships. Washington describes this as an especially difficult part of the writing process, as he tried “to find a way to direct every conversation and every gesture . . . toward not answering [the reader’s] questions. I don’t think I’m really interested in answering questions so much as lengthening the conversation, so that the reader can take what they have and do what they want with it.”

I pitch him a metaphor, about how experiencing art is like hearing a gavel strike, a moment to decide whether or not to pass judgment. “I’m certainly interested in holding the gavel, but I don’t need to be the person who actually makes contact with it,” Washington says. “I’d prefer if that’s the reader. The final judgment can be what they want. Then the narrative relationship becomes symbiotic, and it’s not just me saying this is what happened.”

“I feel like narratives that really stick with me are those that allow space for the readers.”

This consideration of the individual reading experience isn’t new in the world of literature, but it transforms Washington’s intimate novel into an opportunity for reflection, for the reader to glimpse into their own mind, rather than some kind of indoctrination by the author. However, this style of storytelling stands out as unique in the information age. When so much mass media is trying to tell us what to think and do and buy, it’s refreshing to be encouraged to think for ourselves.

Books like Memorial, which require emotional investment and internal inquiry by the reader, hold a lot of power, and Washington wields it with grace. It’s not that he doesn’t have the answers to the questions he raises in this book; it’s that he’s more interested in all of us searching for them together. “There is a difference between a narrative that simply refuses to illuminate what it’s going after, and a narrative that comes to a logical conclusion that is still open to the world of the reader by way of their personal experiences and that allows them to fall into that world,” he says.

Empathy is the goal here. All these open-ended questions encourage readers to understand the characters’ motivations and their own reactions to those characters. “By the end of the drafting process,” Washington says, “I felt as though I understood where [the characters] were coming from, but I didn’t need to like them. . . . If I knew where they were coming from, I had a better understanding of why they did the things they did.”

To Washington, shifting interpretative authority to the reader is a vital element of literature. “You really don’t need to answer every question for a reader or for someone in the audience. As long as you are extremely calculated in how you are giving information and details on the page, everyone will end up in the general pocket,” he says. “I feel like narratives that really stick with me are those that allow space for the readers.”

Author photo by Dailey Hubbard