The WD Interview: Brandon Taylor
Before me, separated by 600 miles and a glitching video call, is Brandon Taylor. Behind him is his library of books, ensconced on his bookshelves, in a stack on his coffee table, enjoying the late-morning sun pouring in from the windows along their spines. Our conversation has been littered with references to Alexander Chee, Samanta Schweblin, Lauren Groff, and Karl Ove Knausgaard, among others. It takes no time at all for me to know this is a person who loves the written word in its various forms—from literary fiction to romance novels, the classics to fanfiction. “Beverly Jenkins,” he says, and then simply, “So amazing. What an icon.”
We’ve just been discussing the necessity of kindness one must offer oneself when you’re no longer writing in the dark but writing in the public. It’s a lesson he learned after the meteoric success of his first novel, Real Life. Published weeks before mass shutdowns in the early months of 2020, he assumed the book would be received quietly. “It’s about a scientist in the Midwest; nobody really cares about that,” he says. And yet, his modest expectations for his work were to be proved wrong, with the book receiving universal acclaim and reviews in The New Yorker online, Time magazine, The Washington Post, and The New York Times. It was unexpected, at times a dream come true and at other times a discombobulating unreality. And just as all seemed to be settling down, it was announced that Taylor was one of the six authors shortlisted for the 2020 Booker Prize. Suddenly, he found himself on British radio several times a week and attending countless Booker Prize events.
The experience was at once thrilling and overwhelming, combined with a global pandemic which left him spending much of his debut year alone in his apartment and developing a panic disorder. “It was just very challenging and very surreal and very strange, even as it was very exciting,” he says. Since, he’s learned the act of inner kindness. “As I’ve gotten older as a writer and as a person, the one thing that I feel like I have gotten better at is not brutalizing myself for not doing the thing that I set out to do. I try to be really firm with myself and really rigorous with myself, but I also give myself a lot of grace.”
His upcoming novel—and the third of four books in what he is loosely referring to as his Midwestern Quartet—is The Late Americans, a deeply felt novel about a group of young people at the intersections of their own lives, and of each other’s. Those intersections are where we begin our conversation.
I’m curious about this theme of unexpected intimacy between people that I’ve noticed in a lot of your writing and how that can mean something different for every character—whether it’s a forced friendship, surprise romantic or sexual intimacy, or something more sinister. How do you go about building these intimacies?
It does feel somewhat fundamental to what I’m trying to do when I sit down to write. The way I think about it is that I just try to be receptive to whatever my characters are going to do. I try to follow them in a very organic, almost documentarian style. And when it seems like there’s another character who would naturally sort of cross this character’s path, I always feel like, well, they should. [Laughs] Like if there are these characters in a world who are living in the same world—or in the case of The Late Americans, in the same town—there are these people who seem like they would naturally kind of be in and out of each other’s lives. And so, it feels quite important to the verisimilitude of the world that I sort of let my characters intersect.
The other thing that I will say about that is it’s just more fun that way. When you’re writing a novel, or even a short story, and you have all these different characters, it seems like such a shame that they should be isolated in their little bubbles. I generate a lot of narrative energy from letting characters intersect and come together.
That’s also where a lot of the tension lives too, between these characters that are communicating, or maybe even miscommunicating. There’s a sense of simmering without always boiling over. The lack of relief is part of the joy of reading it. How do you decide how much to put on the page to keep the tension versus letting the tension spill over into this point of no return?
This is going to be somewhat maybe silly of me to say, but I grew up watching a lot of reality TV. And the thing about reality TV, the lesson that it can teach us, is how tension doesn’t always get relieved, how there are moments where there are two people who are in conflict and there’s no easy resolution, and they have the sort of small, increasingly fraught confrontations until you get to the big confrontation. You see the same thing in drama and in theater. There are always those conflicts that seem to start small and as the play goes on, they get more and more fractious and sometimes destructive.
I come to writing kind of from that world of narrative. And so, when I’m writing characters, I don’t want there to always be conflict release. Sometimes what’s more interesting is letting a conflict build across the whole arc of the story. But as a writer, I am also a human. So, it’s very difficult for me to let conflict go unresolved. … the more advanced I get in my craft, the longer I can let those conflicts bleed out and the longer I can let them go. Something I always tell my students is let the camera run longer. Let the scene run longer, longer than you think you can stand. Because that often is where you’ll find something really surprising.
At the Story Prize event where you won for your short story collection, Filthy Animals, you mentioned that you don’t like saying goodbye to your characters and that you think of your writing as existing in some way in the same universe.
Yeah, I discovered that about myself when I was writing those early stories, that I didn’t like saying goodbye to them. I also realized that it didn’t have to be a fault. Instead of trying to spin a story out into a novel, I could just write these stories where characters would come in and out of each other’s lives and I could follow them.
And a model for that was Mavis Gallant. She has these great interlinked short stories. So, very often I’ll write a story, and in the process of trying to populate the world, that story, I’ll come up with some characters who are sort of important in the main character’s life. And then at the end of that story, I’ll be like, Oh, I still sort of miss that one character, like, what are they up to? And then I’ll write a story about them. And then very soon, I have this whole constellation of stories. …
I always think of my first four books—Real Life, Filthy Animals, The Late Americans, and this upcoming novel Group Show—as being my Midwestern Quartet. There are a few Easter eggs in The Late Americans. There are characters from Filthy Animals who are now in The Late Americans. And for someone who has, you know, abandonment issues, it’s a great way to write. [Laughs]
You also mentioned in that Story Prize interview that writing a novel is a little bit like a spiritual death and that you are a short story writer. Is your approach to writing short stories particularly different than your approach has been for your novels?
I would say yes. I mean, Real Life was a spiritual death. In part also because that was such a condensed period of time. I wrote that book in five weeks. It was like climbing inside of a world and staying there for five weeks and then coming back out and the whole world has moved on without you. It just took so much from me.
The Late Americans was a different process. I had a draft of that book at the end of 2019, and then revising it and shaping it into the novel that it is now was just so arduous. Because now I wasn’t just writing a novel out of a compulsion, I was trying to do it on purpose. And I had learned all this other stuff in the interval between those two novels. I learned all these ideas about what a novel was and what a novel wasn’t. I had changed as a person and as a writer. And it was just so hard to shape the book. It was ruinous in so many ways.
I basically gave up writing for all of 2021. Like, I just could not do it. I took up film photography. I was like, I’m done writing. I will never write another book. It was the most painful writing experience of my life, trying to shape The Late Americans. And then at the end, I found my way through it and came out the other side. And I’m like, Wow, what an experience that was. Don’t want to do that again. So, they were both quite intense moments in my life where I had to break and remake my conception of myself.
Let’s talk about The Late Americans. The novel centers around a group of almost-graduates in Iowa City and how their lives often intersect and sometimes almost intersect. How did the concept of this novel come about for you?
I started writing it because I was at the Iowa Writer’s Workshop and I was reading Lan Samantha Chang’s excellent novel about writing programs (called All Is Forgotten, Nothing Is Lost.) I love that book and I was like, I want to write a story about writers because I like stories about writers and also, I am really hating this program. [Laughs] So, I wrote the first chapter of what would become The Late Americans. Then I was like, That was a lot of fun. Maybe I’ll do it again.
I started writing these things I thought were stories, but now I realize were always chapters. Then it was this thing of trying to figure out how to put it together. Because I have writers, dancers, meat-packers, this guy in business school, a mean landlord who’s roaming the town beating up young gay men. And I was like, “What is this?” [Laughs] I was sort of lost in the wilderness and trying to assemble it and put it together. Then I read Karl Ove Knausgaard’s newest novel, The Morning Star. That novel is a kind of relay among these characters in this town in Norway and I was like, That’s like a really good structure. I’m just going to borrow that idea.
So the book becomes this relay among all of these characters. But the early impulse to write the book came out of wanting to write a book about young people who desperately want to be artists, but who don’t know how to do that and who have to pay a steep price for it. Because I had just sold my first two books and suddenly art had gone from a thing I wanted to do, to how I was making my living and a commodity in my life.
Something that I love about your writing is how there is emotion on every page, but it’s never sentimental or saccharin. How do you keep the emotion of the moment authentic, and how do you decide when it’s time to move on from it?
You know, I think it’s because I grew up reading romance novels. … one thing that’s true about romance novels is that romance novelists are not afraid to write emotion and feeling. That’s why those books are so compelling—it’s people having feelings. So, it just would never occur to me to want to remove the emotion from fiction.
I also grew up reading fanfiction. My narrative fictive education very early on was these incredibly, some might say melodramatic, sentimental forms. So, when it comes to my writing now, I’m quite the sort of austere, lyrical realist. But emotion is such a big part of how I experience life and how my characters experience life. And I’m not afraid of writing about emotion because I think emotion is an important texture in life. … I try to observe things truthfully, honestly, rigorously.
Would you ever write a romance novel?
I have too much respect for the genre. It’s hard to write a good romance novel! Even a “bad” romance novel is so carefully constructed. I feel like the flaws show in a romance novel in a way that they kind of don’t in a literary novel because there’s nowhere to hide. It is a very unforgiving form. I’d have to be on my A-game to write a good romance novel. And romance novelists—if you ever want to talk about characterization, plot, and structure, they’re the ones you want to talk to. I love romance novelists. They’re my people.
Shifting gears, there’s some personal trauma for the characters in The Late Americans, but there’s also this idea about how we choose to hold our trauma and who we choose to share it with, and what those people do with that knowledge or with the vulnerability of it. I’m thinking in particular about the poet’s storyline in the novel.
Yeah. Sometimes I am writing a character and I’ll just be going along and they’re minding their merry little business. Then I will reach a point in writing them where I’m like, Oh, there’s some sort of dark, dense, swirly place deep down beneath the surface of the narrative. With some characters that deep, dark swirly place is really important to their story. And for other characters, it’s not so important.
A character like Seamus, the poet, his whole thing is that he has been shaped by this thing that happened with his dad and feeling abandoned by his parents. It has informed so much of his life that, when he is writing these poems, he’s trying to write away from that trauma. It’s only when he accepts that he has this wound that he’s able to make his peace with it and then start to write the things that he’s been meant to write all along.
But then you have a character like Fatima who, you know, there’s some sort of wound in her as well, but it’s not super important to her situation. Like, her situation is that she doesn’t have any money [laughs] and she has to dance. So, she’s got to figure that out. I’m interested in the way that these wounds that we all carry and form who we are, but also I’m cognizant of the fact that it’s not always relevant to the story that’s happening in your life, you know?
Setting plays an interesting role in The Late Americans as well. Do you have the setting and then the characters go into the setting? Or are the characters and the setting sort of one thing for you?
I think it’s both. Often when I’m writing about a place, I’m always like, Who lives here? What’s the vibe? I always try to imagine the kinds of people who are kicking around in a place and how they might walk into the story or walk out of the story. With The Late Americans, Seamus was the first character I had, and I was like, Oh yes, writing students. Got it. I know those people. I am those people. [Laughs] … for me, place forms because a place like Iowa City, it’s a college town. But what people don’t realize is that yes, there are students there, but then there are also all the people who just live there. And have for years and years and years. Not everyone is a professor. Some people just live in a town and have jobs. So, then I start to wonder, Who are those people? Who are the people who just live and work in town?
I think place informs the kinds of questions I ask about who lives there. And it tells me something about the kinds of people who might live there. Sometimes it’s fun to introduce a random person who has no relationship to anybody and see what they do, see how they change my conception of who lives in a place. Setting is very, very important. And setting informs character, and character informs setting.
You tweeted once a response to someone asking how authors are still able to publish short story collections, and your response was something to the effect of “sneaking it into your contracts.” Do you think there is a hesitancy to publish short story collections?
By and large, I think the small press world is what’s keeping the short story collection in circulation, and they’re doing phenomenal work. And I think that there is a hesitancy in the publishing world, but that’s why when I was looking for agents, I was like, “Look, I’m a short story writer. That is my main thing. And I have a novel, but I will not show it to you.” [Laughs]
So, the agent I signed with was a story writer, and when we were talking to the person who would become my editor at Riverhead Books, I was like, “Look, I know that you are excited about this novel thing, but I’m a story writer, and … I want you to be excited about publishing my book of stories.” That was one of the main reasons I wanted to be with Riverhead Books in the first place, because they had done such a beautiful job publishing books of stories by writers I really love, like Lauren Groff and Daniel Alarcón and Samanta Schweblin, and all these other writers. This is a publisher who cares about short stories and knows how to publish short stories. …
But I think, yeah, there is this hesitancy and it sucks because there are writers who are writing incredible stories, and these stories should be collected, and it makes me really mad. [Laughs] … I just try to take it very seriously and to signal to people that there is this incredible hunger for this form. Because I think there is—I think people love short stories.
What advice do you have for aspiring novelists and short story writers?
Remember that when you’re writing that first thing, you’re in an incredibly precious time. When you’re writing that book or that early story, write for yourself first and foremost. There’s going to come a time when that won’t be the case anymore, when there are going to be all these people who are involved. So, don’t be in any great hurry to publish or to get it out there into the world. Take your time to hone and craft that first book. Appreciate those early years where you’re writing for yourself because it never is quite the same once you start publishing.
The other thing I would say is write the thing that you feel urgently compelled to write. Write the thing that you feel drawn to write, and write it in a way that only you can do it and trust your instincts. I wish I had known early on that I didn’t need to try to be anyone else and that I just had to write the way that I write. [Laughs] You waste a lot of energy trying to be someone else. So, be yourself and trust yourself. It will be fine.
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