Keeping it real
Author Brandon Taylor reveals how he sought to break free from black stereotypes in literature in his new, Booker Prize-nominated book, Real Life
Brandon Taylor is a master of quiet intimacies — of their transactions and their economies, of what lies beneath the words chosen and the gestures traded. He understands our barbed words masqueraded as love, and the love felt, obscured by our barbed words. His debut novel, Real Life, is undeniable evidence of such. Released in February to critical adoration, and most recently a Booker Prize nomination, Real Life follows Wallace, a gay, black, grad student (perhaps the first protagonist of his kind) in a gorgeous, quotidian, campus-set exploration of queerness, boundaries, race, and connection.
Like many of us, Brandon spent his formative years searching for mirror images in the written word — the reassuring salve that only art and literature which sees us can provide — and coming up short. “When I think about how I wrote my first stories,” he explains in a Zoom call from Iowa City,
“it was in response to being told in a book store by a clerk that they didn’t sell gay books there, because they were a family store. My friends took me home, and I sat down at my desk and wrote my first short story. I had this attitude of, well, if you aren’t going to consider our lives like a worthy subject of art, then who needs you? I don’t need you to write a story for me or to make a movie for me or to do anything for me, because I have the skills to tell my own stories, and nobody’s going to be the boss of me,” he laughs.
The rest is, as they say, history: “That’s how I began writing my first stories. [It] was very much in response to that, and writing back to a culture that was, I felt, hostile at worst and ambivalent at the best of times toward me and people like me.”
When telling this story, it was important for Brandon that Wallace’s origins and identity as a black, gay man from the south be evident and foundational to his characterisation. “I didn’t just want to pick, like, a black New Yorker, or a black person from, like, Chicago or Detroit. I didn’t want to
land on what the sort of American popular culture imagines is the archetype of a black person, which is someone from an urban space, or a suburban state, like, north of the Mason-Dixon line,” he elaborates.
“I’m sick of [American] northern writers only writing about black southerners when it’s time for them to write their slavery book and win their Pulitzer Prize. I wanted to write about a black southerner who felt displaced [in] the Midwest and felt out of place and for a whole host of reasons, both racial and cultural. A big part of the impulse was I wanted to write a character, like myself, and to write about a kind of life that I know really, really well, and a life that isn’t just like my life, but [like the lives of] all the people who are dearest to me in the world, [who] are black, gay, southern men.”
Taylor’s work was born to satiate an undeniable and unjust black, queer cultural lack. “That is the experience that I wanted most desperately to reflect,” he states, “because I feel in a lot of ways that’s one that I don’t get to see a lot. And it just felt really important to me to get that down as best I could.”
Importantly, Wallace is also explicitly and canonically chubby — a characterisation that goes against the usual waifish conventions of the genre. “Anyone who’s read gay fiction on the internet knows that it’s always [centred on] the jock, it’s always someone who’s super fit, or it’s, like, a skinny guy who could be fit if [they] wanted to [be],” he starts to explain. “Yes, I get it. Abs. OK, wonderful. But the rest of us have bodies, too. The rest of us are [also] gay and we have the bodies we have. I just wasn’t interested in writing the kind of gay novel in which characters didn’t have bodies, or in which people can just assume that he’s very fit. I wanted to chronicle the experience of this character’s very particular body and his particular physicality because his body and physicality determine a lot of how the world interacts with him. The world looks at you differently, if you’re tall, if you’re fit, if you’re white, if you have abs, if you’re ‘toned’, if you have a swimmer’s [build].”
He goes a step further: “Your sense of what is possible for yourself, even in the sort of homosexual market, hinges heavily not [only] on your perception of yourself, but your perception of other people’s perception of you. Inside of every gay boy is a skinny, white, gay man judging them, to borrow from Margaret Atwood.
“I was interested in what happens when the person at the centre of the story isn’t this larger-than-life heroic figure, but just a regular person, a regular guy, who’s got all this baggage and has all these issues, and he’s just got to, like, survive the weekend. What happens when the person isn’t this gorgeous glamazon, eight feet tall, doing it, stomping for the gods, but, like, someone who doesn’t have access to all of that, and just has to get by with what he’s got, which is his ability to read the room. That’s really his only power in life, his ability to read social cues and context.”
In Real Life, Taylor wields the tender and the quietly erotic to transcendent effect. I can think in particular of one surprising, charged, and highly gorgeous scene involving a bottle of milk — an act of kindness — and that gentle reappraisal between two people for whom the universe is conspiring to close a gap.
“There’s nothing sexier than watching someone sort of readjust their expectations of you. That, to me, is hotter than sex, because they’re really seeing you in that moment and you’re really seeing them,” he says of the drive behind one of the book’s standout and infinitely tender moments.
“That’s a moment that’s as fraught and complicated and vulnerable as being naked in front of someone.” he adds.
“When someone really sees you and offers you kindness; I think it’s a really charged moment for both of those characters.”
As our conversation rounds up, I ask him if in the light of the overwhelmingly glowing response to his debut, he feels as though he’s achieved what he set out to with this novel.
“I come from this large southern family, grew up on a farm, my grandparents were illiterate, my parents were largely illiterate,” he begins to tell me. “For someone from this very intensely working-class background, like me, the fact that I ended up publishing a book feels, somehow, like a miracle. And so I just wanted to see the book into the world. And so everything else is just a bonus, you know, the fact that people have read it feels like a bonus, the fact that it’s been acknowledged by awards, and with these really wonderful reviews. I just feel like the world has really risen to meet the book. [It’s] every writer’s dream,” he beams.
“Most books come out, and they’re met with silence, and I certainly prepared myself for that. And so the run this book has had is not something that I even imagined, I didn’t think anything would come of it, I thought I would be happy just to publish this book and if it finds the five readers I had in mind when I wrote it, then that would be [enough].”
Real Life, unlike many of its predecessors and contemporaries, is not set in Holleran’s breathless, technicolour discotheque, not swaddled in Waugh’s cable-knit jumpers and imposing sandstone Oxford quads, nor does it find itself in company with Aciman’s soft-focus, cicada-soundtracked and peachscented Italian villa. It finds its magic not in the pretension that its present moment is some unrepeatable supernova at the centre of the universe, but rather in the quiet value and dignity of the ordinary and the everyday. Its subtleties and its arresting intimacies shine all the brighter for it.
“I wanted to write