Grief and denial in ‘Long Beach, California’
Venita Blackburn draws on the pandemic experience for her central character's madness over a death in the family
For her latest book, Venita Blackburn left her comfort zone — big time.
The author, a Los Angeles native who was raised in Compton, had been known for her short stories, many of which were collected in her first two books, “Black Jesus and Other Superheroes” and “How to Wrestle a Girl.”
She found herself a bit at loose ends while writing her latest book, “Dead in Long Beach, California” — her first novel. “I come from writing flash fiction — the very, very short story,” she says. “Coming from that love and that comfort, and jumping into the novel, it was not an easy transition at all for me.”
It might not have been an easy process, but critics have appreciated the result. Blackburn’s novel, which has drawn glowing reviews, follows Coral, a writer who discovers her brother, Jay, dead in his Long Beach apartment. Struck hard by grief, Coral chooses to pretend that the death never happened, taking over his cellphone and pretending to be him to his daughter, Khadija, in a series of text messages. Coral, mired in denial, slowly but surely loses touch with reality.
The novel is narrated by a group of characters from Coral’s own novel, mysterious figures who Blackburn says have a “deep appreciation of humanity in all the gruesome, grotesque and glorious states that we find ourselves in.”
“The voice of the story was the first thing that came to me,” Blackburn says. “I knew I was going to have this (voice) that was able to reach far, far into the past, and also knew the end of the world already.”
Blackburn discussed her novel via Zoom from her home in Fresno. This conversation has been edited and condensed for clarity and length.
Q
Can you talk about how this novel came to be?
A
I knew it was going to be about loss because I was writing it during the pandemic. It was this period of great transition, giving up on a way of being and also thinking that you can somehow get it again. There’s this illusion that we just have to wait it out, and we’ll be back to whatever normal was. But there’s no going back. Nothing is going to ever be what it was in 2019 and all the years before. That’s something that people struggle with, and I knew that was going to be some of the core of the story as well. But I wasn’t quite ready to write the bigger story yet. I spent a lot of time working on the frame, this futuristic narrative about this world far, far away.
Q
Coral is such a fascinating character. Did she appear to you fully formed before you wrote the novel, or did she evolve as the novel progressed?
A
The voice I already had. I knew the kind of voice that I was dealing with, that it had to be sort of far away. She couldn’t be too close to the moment because that wasn’t the space of grief that I was going to be able to write about. But all the different levels of her past and her sense of self in the present, that kept evolving from one moment of writing to the next. I did write the final parts of the book at the end. I was done with pretty much everything else when I came to that point of her final goodbye. I understood her really well there, and I was able to do a clear inventory of her experiences at that point.
Q
She is obviously reacting to her brother’s death with an astounding amount of denial. How did you decide that would be her response?
A
I knew she was not going to handle this well. It became this sort of fantasy for me, just the very premise that it starts with: If you could avoid a nightmare and you had this opportunity to do so, to keep her brother alive, in a way, and also to exercise that sense of control that she wants to have about those around her. She’s not a narcissist in general, but someone that thinks she knows everything.
And that was easy to access. That’s me. I always think that I know exactly how everybody should live their lives, and what would lead them to a great deal of happiness and contentment. I have all these ideas and philosophies that I think will really, really work and help the world. And nobody listens to me. Everybody keeps making all their wild choices. It’s all vanity and pride. It’s just who we are and it’s how we operate. That’s my spiritual journey, to tamp down that constant frustration of watching people make bad decisions. So I wanted to sort of see, what if we can have her make all what she thinks are the best decisions for her brother, this kind of act of charity in the state of great catastrophe. What would that look like?
Q
Do you think there’s any part of her that thinks she’s protecting her niece, Khadija, from the truth?
A
It’s a sense of selfishness on Coral’s part to not have to confront this yet, to still live in denial, to live in that space before acceptance. She’s in the early part of grief; everything is white hot and chaotic in her brain, so she’s able to detach that way. But she has these moments of lucidity where I guess she wants something peaceful and still whole for Khadija. That’s the gift she thinks she’s giving by denying her the truth, by holding that back. But of course, Khadija is too smart for that. She’s figuring things out piece by piece, and all the things are just falling apart. And Coral keeps saying, ‘Oh no, it’s fine,’ while she’s doing her madness, standing in the alley eating a taco. And of course none of it’s OK, but it’s still all real for her. This is just her reality at that moment where she can’t do much better than this, both the gift and the selfish act of holding back grief.
Q
Can you talk about the narrator, or narrators, of the novel?
A
I’ve described them as sort of like robot AI librarians of the future. There’s this kind of hive mind. They’re definitely a first-person plural narrator. It’s a collective, and there’s this sort of femininity about it. I describe them as very much like a bunch of lesbians, but they’re not human. They’re not human voices, but they mimic us. Their entire intention is to celebrate humanity, to be in this state of constant awe and euphoria over us, which is also very sensual and sexual. They have data on all of us, which is sort of a nod to where we are right now. We’re constantly leaving all this data that we can’t even quite visualize, but they have access to all of it, and they’re able to put together whole people and identities and everything from it.
And they can go even further beyond just the technology that we have now, but into the past to read into what has happened then, and then of course deep into the future. They love every terrible thing that we’ve ever done. They love every amazing thing that we’ve ever done, from the smallest level to the biggest, the things that we don’t even think about that we’re investing our time in. They’re amazed by it.