FIRST FICTION
For this year’s roundup of the summer’s best debut fiction, we asked five established authors—Danzy Senna, Mira Jacob, Maggie Nelson, Emily Raboteau, and Gary Shteyngart—to introduce our group of talented new authors: Zinzi Clemmons, Hala Alyan, Jess Arndt, Lisa Ko, and Diksha Basu.
whose debut novel, What We Lose, will be published in July by Viking.
IHAD the pleasure of reading a section of What We Lose several summers ago, when I was Zinzi Clemmons’s workshop leader at the Bread Loaf Writers Conference. I was struck then—as I was later, when I read a whole draft—by the language, which is so spare and poetic, yet cool and crisp. There is not a word out of place, but it somehow feels effortless. The story is quietly devastating. It is a story about death and birth and also about race and identity. The main character is complicated, both African and American, mixed and black, vulnerable and strong. She is grieving and falling in love. She inhabits so many spaces at once. Thandi presents herself, with all of her contradictions, and the reader is swept up into this intimate vision. The work never feels anthropological. It is written from within, and Thandi’s specific world immediately feels universal.
Were there writers—contemporary or classic—whose work specifically inspired you on a line and voice level? Other books you looked to as models of how to use language as you were writing this?
I was steeped in the postmodernists when I started writing. Doctorow, Pynchon, Foster Wallace, Whitehead, Sarah Kane. I had a wonderful high school teacher who somehow got away with assigning us DeLillo, and he’s been a favorite ever since. I was drawn to the odd flatness of his voice and his mimicry of advertising language. Around this time I also started studying critical theory, and I was fascinated by how those writers at times used language as a very elaborate barrier to meaning. So I started crafting my voice as a wall, as I like to think of it, with different access points to meaning. It keeps you at a distance most of the time, but at key moments it invites you inside. I do this by modulating register. In the book, there are a handful of distinct registers that you can easily categorize: a scientific register that imparts facts and theorizes, a narrative register that tells the story of Thandi’s life and her family, and finally, this highly personal, highly fragmented voice that gives access to Thandi’s feelings. In the course of writing this book, I found a couple of other voices that resonated with what I was doing. One you recommended to me: Toi Derricotte’s The Black Notebooks was very instructive in this manner; and Claudia Rankine’s Citizen came out when I was almost finished, though I’d read Don’t Let Me Be Lonely years ago—one of my favorites that I teach every year. It makes sense that I would learn from poets when it comes to voice, because I primarily write in the first person, and you could somewhat reductively refer to my voice as “confessional,” though I would probably argue with that label.
Your main character is both African and American. She has a mixed identity. I have a friend like this who calls herself “Halfrican.” This is your background, too, yes? Has this ever felt like a tension or an identity conflict for the character or for yourself? Race seems often submerged—something lurking below the surface—in this story. How has it functioned for you, and how do you see it functioning for the character?
I often joke that my life has been one long identity crisis, and as another mixed person, I don’t think I’m presuming to say that you may know what I mean. Just like Thandi, my mother is South African, and my father is American; my mother is also a coloured South African, and my father is black with Asian heritage; his grandfather was Chinese. When I straightened my hair, people had a hard time telling what race I was.
My identity has always placed me just outside whatever group I happen to find myself in. It’s not just because of my race. I’m quite a combination of identities: I’m American and African, as you say; I’m also from an upper-middleclass background, and multiracial, and black, and a woman, and a tomboy, and an intellectual, and I love pop culture and have a very expensive education. To Americans, any of those categorizations contradict all the others.
I’m constantly disappointed by how racism is represented in our culture, because it tends to be in a very direct,
obvious way. We either experience intense racism, or we live completely outside it. Of course, that is unfortunately how some people experience it, but it’s not a constant, everyday thing. This has been mine: I’m reminded in subtle ways of the fact that I am different, and there is an implicit message to “keep out,” so to speak. To use an example, I wear my hair naturally, and it sits in a big, curly Afro. When I go out in public, I can usually count on a white woman coming up to me in slight wonderment and exclaiming loudly, “I love your hair!” It’s clear, from the volume and tone, which is almost always consistent, that this gesture is meant to draw attention to my difference and, more important, to mark that white woman as appreciative of my difference, so that I’m no longer a human being but a proof of her openmindedness, or, horribly, because this is now a term white people own, their “wokeness.” This is how I experience racism on a daily basis: not through a burning cross or a racial slur, but a compliment. This is not to say that we should ignore those more obvious instances—we can’t, especially now. But I find that often the failure to recognize more subtle forms of racism means that we misunderstand what racism is and how it works…and that’s partly how we got Trump.
Aside from that, my experience of never fitting in, of constantly being on the outside, absolutely informs my writing—I’d go as far as to say that I think that’s what makes me a writer in the first place. I like how you describe it, as lurking under the surface. This is because I’ve fully internalized my “outsiderhood,” so it’s not something that I even really write about anymore; it’s a position that I write from. It’s inextricable from who I am as a person and as a writer.
This is obviously a story about grief as well as birth. How does your autobiographical material turn itself into fiction? Are there techniques that help you make that leap into the imaginary? Is this an important process, and why? I know you’ve written in both genres, but do you see yourself as more of a fiction writer or a nonfiction writer—or is this not a choice or distinction you make?
I’m glad you asked this question, because I see the parallels between our first books. I think they both take off from autobiographical stories, and we’ve elaborated on them with fiction. There is an absolute dearth of writing about experiences like ours—some call it the “mixed-race experience”— so I think we probably both felt the impetus to tell these stories as they are, because they need to be told.
The heart of this book is a very true story. My mother was diagnosed with cancer around 2010. In 2012, when I had just graduated from Columbia, I was on my first day at a new job and got a call from my dad saying that my mom’s doctor had told him she had only a few weeks to live. The next day, I took a bus to Philadelphia and stayed there with her as her primary caretaker until she passed away, about six months later. The parts about the mother’s disease are reproduced from journal entries that I wrote during this time.
I was somehow also writing a novel through this, I think as a distraction, and months later, my agent read those pages and declared all of them useless. Except for those journal entries, which had somehow made their way into the manuscript. I realized that I was avoiding that story, but that was the story I was always meant to tell. I had always written about my mother as a way of talking about nationality, race, immigration, maternity, gender, and a host of other issues, and when she got sick, it intersected with issues of grief and mortality and all the structural issues that are intertwined with those issues.
I started with the bedrock of that real experience, and from there I crafted Thandi’s story. The most difficult part was depicting motherhood. That took a while to come to me, and I had to just let it come; I couldn’t force it. At the time, because I had just lost my mother and I was not far from thirty, I was thinking about becoming a mother myself, but I couldn’t access what having an actual child was like. Because how can you? So I did some research. I read other women’s stories—not books, but blog posts, recounted stories—raw, unfiltered stories, and eventually the voice just came to me, and I sat down to write.
To answer your other question, before I started writing, I saw myself as an artist. And I still do see myself as an artist, full stop. I’d like to make a film one day. I see writing in different genres as simply partaking in different aspects of expression, and that’s what I aim to do every day: learn, question, express, repeat.
How did you go from your MFA program to publishing this book? You landed in such a strong house, and the book is getting great early blurbs and attention. Can you talk about that trajectory, from student to writer to author?
The typical or safe answer to this question is probably something like, “I worked hard, and I got lucky a couple times along the way.” The truth is, around the time I left college ten years ago, I made a goal for myself that I would publish a novel. Everything that’s happened since has been a winding path to achieving that goal. I was never totally sold on the idea of an MFA; it was more of a means to an end. When I applied, I had a good job in publishing with people I liked and was working on the novel in my spare time. At some point, I realized that I wouldn’t finish it in the time that I wanted to unless I quit my job and went to grad school. I enjoyed my MFA and gained a lot from it. But that was because I went into it with this goal in mind and never wavered from it. I’m a
relentless person: Anyone who knows me well would most likely identify this as my most annoying trait. I’m dogged in pursuing my goals, and I don’t take no for an answer. After I received my MFA, I realized again that if I wanted to achieve this goal, I’d have to put everything else in my life aside and just focus on finishing the book. So I did that. I shut the world out, and I wrote my ass off. I left New York and dramatically reduced my expenses so that I didn’t need to work. With the help of my agent, Jin Auh, I got here.
Did the MFA program help you? Who did you work with there?
I’ve always had a bit of a chip on my shoulder because I don’t feel I have a traditional background for a novelist. I entered college as a pre-med major and was pretty advanced in my study by that time. I’d already started taking biology classes at Swarthmore College, which was in my hometown, and at the same time, I practiced studio art. In my second year I realized that if I had to spend my life in a lab I might kill myself. And my parents, in typical immigrant parent fashion, decided I was wasting their tuition money on art classes. So I started writing as an alternate form of expression. This meant that there were pretty big holes in my knowledge of classic literature, and Columbia was very useful to me because it helped plug those holes. It’s about the only program I know where you take more seminars than you do workshops, so I actually learned quite a lot; I didn’t just practice.
I also met some incredible people there who I’m still connected to today. I founded the journal Apogee there and met Emily Firetog, who first published my essays at Lit Hub. I also worked very closely with Paul Beatty, Margo Jefferson, Hilton Als, and Ben Marcus. Paul introduced me to my agent, Jin, and I owe much of what is happening in my career now to both of them.