Author Raven Leilani.Nina Subin/Supplied
Raven Leilani’s first novel, Luster, is so good you may need to recline momentarily and wonder how someone so young – she’s 30 – can be so talented. At the very least, once you pick up the story of Edie (which could have been titled Portrait of the Artist as a Young Black Woman) you won’t be putting it down. By turns dark, daring and hilarious, Luster is the story of a young Black woman who can’t fit in. Published last fall, the book was named one of the New York Times’s most notable books of 2020 – a year that offered lots of competition for readers’ attention. Raven Leilani spoke to the Globe and Mail’s Ian Brown via Zoom from her bed in her apartment in Brooklyn.
Luster is a book that collapses expectations. Edie, the main character, is a smart young Black woman, but she’s also a disaster. She loses her job because she sleeps with 14 different people in the publishing company where she works, and is forced to deliver takeout for a living. She’s selfish – she almost loses a seat on a bus to a slower pregnant woman – but painfully vulnerable: a would-be painter who is not good enough to be a painter. She has a sometimes wilfully violent affair with a white, married, emotionally reclusive man who’s twice as old as she is. She cries at Olive Garden commercials. She’s not a domestic terrorist, but that’s pretty much the only taboo she doesn’t break. How did you come to write a book like that?
The point of her vulnerability and her fallibility on the page was to afford a Black woman space to be human. Rather than deferring to the temptation to make this Black woman pristine, or to have her behave in a particular way to earn the reader’s empathy. That felt like replicating what I’m trying to write against, which is this idea of respectability: that there is a particular way to behave in order to be afforded care and empathy, instead of just being a Black woman who is hurt, who yearns, who wants, who makes mistakes, and is still worthy of consideration because she’s human.
I think a lot of Black women and Black people are hailed for their stoicism and resilience in the face of suffering. The people who came before me, my ancestors, they had to be resilient and strong, and they had to sublimate their wants and desires in order to survive. And that’s the only reason I’m here today to write this messy story. But I wanted to write against the idea that stoicism is a virtuous thing. So my project was to write a Black woman who does not defer to that mandate of containment, which ultimately is dehumanizing.
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A lot of Luster is about being Black in a racist, white-dominated world. But it’s also about dealing with what you beautifully describe as the ‘meticulous polyglottal origami’ of dealing with other Black women in a multicultural world. Aria is the only other Black woman in the publishing house where Edie works. Why is that relationship so difficult for Edie?
You have two Black women in a professional context who are trying to survive, but the costs of surviving are almost antithetical. Aria is an example of someone who has to rise to the occasion of that expectation of respectability and containment. She’s willing to curtail the jagged edges of her humanity in order to advance. She understands it’s a game she has to opt into. Edie sees that, and is both disappointed by it, but also jealous of it. Because she sees a Black woman who manages that kind of shape-shifting in a way that is working for her. But the sad part is that they’re both adapting to an environment they have no control over. The environment they’re in has a razor-thin margin of error for Black women. And Eddie is the example who fails to rise to that. I tried my best not to write in judgment, because I’ve absolutely been both.
Let’s talk about Edie’s affair with a married white man twice her age. Of Edie’s attraction to this older guy, you write ‘beyond the fact of older men having more stable finances, and a different understanding of the clitoris, there is the potent drug of a keen power imbalance. Of being caught in the excruciating limbo between their disinterest and their expertise. Their panic at the world’s growing indifference.’
Edie is a person who is desperate for human connection, for intimacy. We see desperate attempts throughout where she’s trying to find it, and in some cases where she finds it at work – just a battery of bodies.
But with Eric, they meet online. The screen between them, the veil between them, facilitates – and this is more about just online-ness – a different kind of intimacy, because there is still this protective barrier. You’re not meeting this person in the flesh yet. And so you can still both curate yourselves in the manner in which you want.
As far as the power imbalance between them, I think that is exciting to her because she is a person who has in some respects very little power. And so in the most practical, material way, he is a person who represents stability that is beyond her grasp. And he is a person who also, because he is white and he’s male, can exist in his skin in a totally authentic way compared to the way that she exists in the world.
My impression is that my generation resists online relationships. We say, look, real intimacy comes afterwards, with the body. Whereas your generation says, to hell with the body, the body’s mundane: you have to park the car afterwards. The real journey is in the head, online.
Yes, absolutely. That kernel of mystery is preserved by the fact that your two physical bodies are not in the same space. But I am just one millennial. I have plenty of girlfriends who say “I’m so tired of talking online with men!” So sometimes I think perhaps we are still animals. We still need the body.
The book begins with Edie’s affair with a married white guy, but it quickly becomes much more about her connection with his wife, Rebecca, with whom Edie ends up living in their suburban house. How did that happen?
I didn’t know that was going to happen. I said, I’m just going to follow this wherever it wants to go. And where it wanted to go, I suppose where I wanted to go, is toward the kind of tricky, often hairy union between women of different lived experience. In my experience it’s a phenomenon that is really unique to women. There are relationships as a woman that you have with other women that happen and start right away, and are profound immediately. And I think that is the case usually when it’s two women who are allowed to mutually indulge that conspiracy, of letting down the mask that they have to wear, for whatever reason. It’s probably the most erotic relationship in the book, too, even though they don’t actually have sex.
What was it like publishing a book in 2020, the year from hell? The pandemic, George Floyd, Trump, the election. Your dad died of COVID-19 last March. Your brother, who was sick, also died. That’s a heck of a year.
A lot of books got lost. I feel really lucky that despite that, people still saw my book and came to it with generosity. Every now and then I’ll get mail from people who are reading it. What seems to be a common theme in those letters is that, in a year where we have all desperately needed that space to be human, people are resonating with this book’s depiction of a person who is trying to remain intact, despite the violence of her environment, despite the expectation of how she performed. And the fact that she often fails is almost what people have connected with – permission not to be handling it so well.
It has been really overwhelming in some ways. You have this reckoning, which is cyclical, because it happens all the time, where we wake up and open our computers and there is more Black death. I’ve spoken to all the people in my family who have gone through much, much worse. And I asked them, When that was happening with George Floyd, do you feel like this is a turning point? Because I want to have hope.
[She pauses.] My dad died of COVID-19. We talk about state-sanctioned violence, and there is a real kind of indifference to that loss of life. And that exists along with the kind of George Floyd reality. So to live and remain intact and keep hope intact is a very complicated thing. But yes, it’s been a year.
Did your dad get to read your book before he died?
He didn’t, no.
Would he have done so? Would you have wanted him to have done so?
Absolutely. Yeah.
I’m sorry. The connection a father and daughter can have over writing is beyond the limits of my composure to describe. I have one last question. You’ve had immense success with this book: New York Times bestseller, and on its Ten Best Books list of the year. You won the Kirkus Prize. But I wonder if that success frightens you, given that hardship and discomfort are so important to what you write about. As Edie says at the end of the book, ‘I’ve made my own hunger into a practice.’ Does your success frighten you in any way?
I’m a deeply introverted person. So there’s a part of the frenzy around the book that does freak me out a little bit. It’s exciting, but it’s not what I expected.
But as far as hardship and art making go, I am very much of the mind that the starving artist idea is a lie. The grind to create room to do the work that’s meaningful to you is not romantic. It’s flattening and exhausting. And a lot of people who are capable and talented and who have the stuff, they never get heard, because most of their bandwidth is spent trying to figure out, how they gonna eat? I feel extremely, extremely privileged to not be there right now. My generation, we’re trying to find a bit of stability in a world that is increasingly unstable.
But many of us do not make our way around that. It occurs to me every day how easily one thing could have happened for me [with the result] that this couldn’t have happened. A lot of the greatest work, the most lasting writing, seems to be done by people who can walk on the periphery of tragedy, but who don’t get sucked into the tragedy. That’s their luck. They can observe the tragedy, survive it, and maybe get it down on paper.
But they have to survive.
This interview has been condensed and edited.
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