Cartoonist Noah Van Sciver has created three graphic novels about Fante Bukowski, a fictional writer whose comical delusions of literary greatness are matched only by his lack of talent for anything but drinking. Apparently, three books weren’t enough.
This month, Van Sciver and Fantagraphics have teamed up to publish The Complete Works of Fante Bukowski, a hardcover compilation edition that includes the three previous works along with a cache of bonus new material. This new book is an authoritative, albeit tongue-in-check, account of the life, works, and dubious character of the fictional Bukowski.
The new volume includes Fante Bukowski, Fante Bukowski Two, and Fante Bukowski Three: A Perfect Failure, all published by Fantagraphics. There’s also a cheeky, passive aggressive foreword by novelist Ryan Boudinot, and a section of visual tributes to the character by cartoonists Box Brown, Nina Bunjevac, Ed Piskor, Leslie Stein, Simon Hanselmann, and others.
Created in deference to the character’s self-proclaimed literary genius—born Kelly Perkins, he renamed himself for legendary tough-guy writers John Fante and Charles Bukowski—the new volume is tricked out to look like an iconic Library of America hardcover edition. The parody volume features LoA’s distinctive black cover jacket, the famous type font, and red/white/blue ribbon marker (running vertically down the cover rather than horizontal), as well as the aforementioned mock appreciation by Boudinot.
The Millions talked with the Ignatz award-winning Van Sciver about the many qualities of Fante Bukowski.
The Millions: You’ve written three books about Fante Bukowski, a delusional, arrogant, and slovenly character. Do you find something admirable in his belief in his own greatness?

Noah Van Sciver: I’m always interested in people who are obsessed with one thing, like people who become obsessed with comics history. I think it’s admirable to dedicate your life to this role. But now I have to think about it. Is he admirable? He’s dedicated to being a drunken writer. I don’t know if that’s admirable, though.
TM: Do you think deep down he may actually be a good writer?
NVS: He doesn’t have an interest in it. He doesn’t have an interest in learning the craft. He has an interest in being a writer and just having that title. He has an interest in being an alcoholic. He thinks that seems really cool. He would never go to a writing workshop or anything like that. Because in his mind he doesn’t need that. He’s already a great writer and he’s not going to work on that.
TM: So he’s more alcoholic than writer?
NVS: Actually, no. He doesn’t have the disease of alcoholism. I just think he thinks there’s something cool about being downtrodden. But he’s not. He’s someone who drinks and likes the typewriter.

From The Complete Fante Bukowski by Noah Van Sciver.
TM: You use his megalomania as a comic foil. But can writers actually relate to his poverty and desperate need to be published?
NVS: Sure. But I wasn’t really trying to make a character that writers would relate to but a character that writers would run into. Like this was somebody that I knew in Denver, Colo., this self-obsessed writer, the person who’s like “I’m a genius.” Absolutely. I mean, I have [met people like him] in real life. But they wouldn’t see themselves as that.
TM: The books also lampoon the publishing industry via the character of the literary agent Ralph Bigsburgh. Does this reflect your publishing experiences?
NVS: Yeah. A lot of that came from me. When I was in my 20s, I was a big self-promoter and it felt like I wasn’t getting a fair share of attention, I wasn’t getting the attention I wanted. So, in self-defense I had an attitude of, “They can’t handle what I’m doing, it’s too raw for people.” That agent reflected how I felt people were dismissing me in my twenties. It was all about self-preservation. But if I hadn’t had that dumb ego at that age, the kind of ego that blinded me to how bad my work was, I would have stopped doing comics and done something else. I needed that. It was almost like beer goggles for seeing the world. A lot of Fante comes from my own self-delusion.
TM: An artist’s self-delusion can be a form of armor that helps them survive the rejections. It must be especially tough as a graphic novelist.
NVS: As a graphic novelist, it’s like, anybody can do it but the hard part is spending 10 years creating really bad work until you get to something that is passable. I had to build up that armor where it was like everybody was against me just to get through those years where I wasn’t producing anything valuable or interesting.
TM: At first glance the new book looks like a Library of America edition. Would Fante approve of being a part of that list?
NVS: Fante always felt like he deserved to be in it. But if he was actually given that kind of prestige, he might find some way to sabotage it.
TM: You’ve said this will be the last of the Fante Bukowski books. Is that part of your creative career in the past?
NVS: I think that’s fair. I don’t have the drive or desire to focus on that kind of character anymore. I’m done analyzing that part of my life.
This piece was produced in partnership with Publishers Weekly.

With the publication of Wolf Hall—the first book in what was to become a trilogy chronicling the life of Thomas Cromwell, the lowborn man who became one of Henry VIII’s closest advisers—in 2009, novelist Hilary Mantel became a global superstar. Three years later, its sequel, Bring Up the Bodies, cemented the deal. Now, Mantel wraps up the most critically acclaimed and widely-read historical fiction saga of the 21st century with The Mirror and the Light, which begins with the death of Anne Boleyn and ends with the death of Cromwell himself. On the eve of the book’s publication, we asked Mantel about the challenges of writing historical fiction, what it was about Cromwell she found so fascinating, and what tricks of the trade she relied on.
The Millions: You recently told The New York Times that, now that you’ve finished telling the story of Thomas Cromwell, you’ve finished with historical fiction and will pivot to writing plays. What is it about Cromwell that made his story irresistible where others were not?

Hilary Mantel: I’ve had Cromwell in view all my writing career. It seemed like a story with endless ambiguity, which is what sustains a writer. You can’t completely account for Cromwell and you can’t add him up. There’s so much we will never know, and what attracts me as a novelist is the combination of documented fact—the heavily-inked paper—and what’s missing and unknown—the white space.
TM: Which characters in the Court of King Henry VIII were you surprised to find yourself drawn to throughout your research, besides Cromwell?

HM: I try to see my characters through Cromwell’s eyes—that’s the essence of the enterprise. So I find Thomas More endlessly intriguing. Among less famous figures, I’m drawn to Rafe (or Ralph) Sadler, Cromwell’s apprentice, who grew up in his household. Rafe survived Cromwell and survived Henry, and was still working for the Tudor dynasty in his 80s.
TM: What do you think it says about your readership in the U.S. that so many were drawn to a nearly 1,800–page trilogy chronicling 16th-century English politics?
HM: Perhaps it shows that it’s about more than 16th century politics—that it addresses certain lasting truth about power and sex and love, public image, and private dreams.
TM: Setting aside the work of Mary Robertson, which you’ve often cited as a major influence, what sorts of works did you find yourself drawn to: primary or secondary sources? narrative or scholarly histories? historiographies? Why?
HM: I found myself drawn to the sources. I like to get as close to the 1530s as I can. One of my tasks was to reappraise Cromwell, who has not been well-served by biographers or popular historians till very recently. Now there has been a new interest in him, a return to source, and an end—I trust—to the rolling forward of some of the old mistakes and misperceptions.
TM: What’s a skill you developed over the course of writing the series that is specific to adapting a historical saga into a work of fiction?

HM: I think I developed my skills in handling information when I wrote my first big historical novel, A Place of Greater Safety, set during the French Revolution. I’m old-fashioned, and believe in a card index—or a series of them, as needed. The making of them is what puts the data into your head. But only time and imagination makes that data personal and useful.
TM: What are some works of historical fiction you find extraordinary that have flown under the radar and that you hope readers of your series will find and read?

HM: Barry Unsworth had a robust historical imagination, and won the Booker prize for Sacred Hunger, but less famous is his novel Losing Nelson, where a present-day observer interrogates the legend of the 18th-century admiral, and has to rethink his hero worship. It’s this questioning attitude that speaks to me.
TM: This book was initially due to publish in 2018, and the British press hasn’t let you forget it. Is this a case of journalists not understanding how, or the pace at which, novelists and historians work?
HM: The press has all sorts of fantasies about dates when books are due. (I have even seen announcements of books I have not started, and perhaps never will.) But as you imply, novels take their own time, and my publishers in every country were willing to let me have the time I needed. But it is mildly irritating to be told you are “blocked,” when you are writing every day of the week.
TM: What’s harder for you: finding the right fact, or turning the right phrase?
HM: The first needs some luck and the second needs plenty of practice.
TM: What one fundamental aspect of history do you wish readers, or the culture at large, knew that you now know after years of researching the period you’ve fictionalized?
HM: The past has to be respected and valued for its own sake. It is not a rehearsal for the present, and its people are not us in a primitive form.

This piece was produced in partnership with Publishers Weekly.

Early in This Brilliant Darkness, the new book of essays and profiles by Jeff Sharlet, we see a photo and short profile of Mike, a 34-year-old night baker at Dunkin’ Donuts. This is his final shift. He’s going to paint the walls of a church, high up on a ladder: “You can’t be afraid up there.” A tear, tattooed by his right eye, is for his son—”who died when he was two months old.”

These moments fill Sharlet’s fascinating, heartfelt book. He has a knack as a writer, as a person, for capturing people in image and word. Sharlet has always been interested in the way the stories we tell shape and reveal the meanings in our lives—with good and bad results (see The Family; and the Netflix series version, for an example of the latter).

Sharlet teaches at Dartmouth College, where he is associate professor of English and creative writing. He is an editor at large for Virginia Quarterly Review, and his writing has appeared in Rolling Stone, Harper’s, GQ, Esquire, Mother Jones, The New Republic, Oxford American, and The New York Times Magazine. The Family, a celebrated Netflix series, was based on his book The Family: The Secret Fundamentalism at the Heart of American Power.

We spoke about belief, sharing stories, and bearing witness to this world.

The Millions: Early in the book, there’s a scene of you driving “over the Green Mountains, to Schenectady” to visit your father. It’s a frequent trip, and you almost always drove at night: “It seemed easier, the steep twisting road more likely to belong to me alone; the radio, when I could find a station, less clogged with news and yet more alive with voices. Night shift-voices.” Those voices, you write, believe “in God, or aliens, or blue-green algae.” You wanted to believe “in other people’s nightmares and dreams, projected onto the black night-glass of the car windows.” It’s beautiful writing, and it makes me wonder: now that the book is finished, do you believe in those nightmares and dreams? What do you believe the night does to them, to us, to you?

Jeff Sharlet: I believe in nightmares and dreams the way I believe in God—what matters most about stories, I think, is what people do with them, how they shape our lives. Whether they’re “real” or not matters, too—I’m a journalist, I love that creature we call “a fact”—but I’m moved by the great modernist poet Marianne Moore’s definition of poetry as “imaginary gardens with real toads in them.” The stories we tell with those “real toads,” the facts, are the imaginary gardens in which we live. Night is a fact, but my experience of it, then and now, is the imaginary garden for which I’ve attempted to write a geography. In the book, I write that darkness isn’t the absence of light, it’s the presence of ink, the stuff from which letters and words and stories are made. I’m not such an insomniac anymore—making this book maybe cured me of that—but I still see night in those terms.

TM: Late one night you stop to see Larry, owner of Treasure Center—“a grackle’s shop of shiny pop culture detritus, samurai swords, and Franklin Mint collectibles.” You say his store also has the best “religious kitsch” that you’ve seen in a while, but he doesn’t like that description. You buy plastic hands—”painted pink matte over veiny knuckles and long pointed fingers, as if they’d come from a horror model kit repurposed for prayer”—and when you think of them later, you write the “faith that put them in a glass case” was “as free of irony as I am of the divine.” Here—and elsewhere in your writing—you often come back to God and absence. Why the frequent return to these subjects? Why—if the perceived irony of Larry’s kitsch exists—are you still drawn to belief?

JS: I think of something my writing students sometimes say, about a book or a story dealing with some reality very different from the way they understand their lives. “I can’t really relate to it,” they say. To which I respond: we read, we look, we try to perceive the world because whether or not we can relate to any given reality, it may well relate to us. That is, the story—broadly speaking here, belief—matters to my life whether or not I believe. I’d better try to understand it. But that’s just being pragmatic. I’ve always been drawn to belief as a nonfiction writer because to engage with it you have to reach beyond the stack of facts that comprise ordinary journalism. Who-what-where-when-why does not account for what Larry saw in those prayer hands, which matters as much or more than any kitsch I might perceive.

TM: In one photo, a man is on the ground, spread in front of a gated archway, smothered in birds. It’s an almost impossibly perfect shot: some birds are mid-flight, others scurry toward him, and one faces the camera. Early in the book, you write that phone cameras can capture a state of reality that the technological perfection of more advanced cameras cannot. Phone cameras, you describe, capture “sort of what it looked like, something like what I saw, something like what I felt.” Like so much of This Brilliant Darkness, this is really worth pondering. What is that space between reality and artifice? Is it art? The man smothered in birds—is that moment real?

JS: The pigeon man—he preferred not to use his name—a sort of St. Francis of Dublin, where I met him, is real, and that moment—that snapshot—is as real as any other moment that’s past. The snapshot is its memorial, its echo, its ghost. A friend calls these pictures+words “ghost poems,” and adds, “only, these ghosts show up in photographs.” That feels right to me. The space between reality and artifice—which is, of course, the only means we have to attempt to represent reality—is what we speak of when we speak of documentary art. I’m drawn to work that accounts for the approximation, the mediation of the one who looks and listens and tries to understand. I think there’s a transparency—a hopeful transparency—in recognizing that I can’t tell the pigeon man’s story, or anybody else’s story, any more than I can be a “voice for the voiceless,” an inadvertently arrogant bit of phrasing. These people’s stories, and voices, are their own. What I can share is my story about the moments between us, stories that are made up of bits and pieces of both of us. There’s an idea that empathy is something you extend to another. I don’t think that’s quite right—I think it’s something that happens, usually in brief moments—maybe only the duration of a snapshot, a conversation—between people. Maybe it’s a process of seeing and being seen, that vulnerability like a flickering current between you.

TM: Mary, a 62-year-old woman who lives in a motel, cracks open her door when you knock. “You want to interview me,” she says. “Why? I don’t have any power!” She finally invites you inside. Why did she let you in? Why did people—strangers—talk to you during the years you worked on this book?

JS: Because I asked? I don’t know. As a journalist, with an assignment and a notebook in hand, it’s easy for me to break the fourth wall of daily life. That’s my job. This book was different. I told people I was working on a book, but nobody cared one way or the other about that. I wasn’t on assignment. I found it awkward and embarrassing, sometimes, to approach people who I hoped to talk with often for reasons I myself didn’t yet understand. And those people opened the door, when they did, for as many reasons as there are people in the book. We speak of “taking a photograph,” and some writers thank “subjects” for allowing them to “take their time.” But those manners obscure a much more interesting and often more intimate exchange. I can’t “take” Mary’s photograph, unless I’m sneaking up on her, which I’d never do. For better or worse, we made those images together. Mary wasn’t much interested in them—she’d glance at them—but maybe that was because her contribution—her body, her self—was already so vast. Likewise, I can’t “take” her time. She’s not really my “subject,” I have no authority over her. She opened the door for her own reasons, and this is my story about the time we spent together. Maybe that seems limited, but I don’t think so—I keep coming back to this beautiful line from Leslie Jamison’s brilliant book The Recovering—“the saving alchemy of community.” Leslie’s writing about the recovery community, but I think that alchemy is possible—I think I felt it, anyway—in the smaller exchange of stories that make up this book. This is sentimental, I know, but here I embrace that—there’s a poem in the book my daughter said when she was very little. She’s sort of a quiet current throughout the book—there are ways in which it was written to her and her brother, though they may not read it for years (or ever!). She said: “The night I was born / you were born / we were born / we were born together.” That to me is what the book is about. I think it can be true far beyond the bounds of family.

TM: “Sensation is what’s possible when seeing won’t change anything, when you don’t know enough to bear witness, when all you have is the fact of your eyes, the fact of the camera: a record of things, seen and unseen.” What a fantastic line. Bear witness, seen and unseen, there’s the vocabulary of belief (almost liturgically so). Do you still take photos? What sensation remains now that the book—these stories, these images—is out in the world?

JS: I do still take photographs, though since the heart attack at the end of the book—mine, three years ago—not as many. I’m fully recovered, healthy, I move more than ever, but I do feel sometimes as if even just the fact of my eyes is enough, that the fact of the camera is sometimes more than I need. That line accompanies an image of a burning car, [which I believe] is the same as is on the cover. There’s a body in the car. I was second on the scene; shortly after a young cop arrived. There was absolutely nothing he could do—the car was an inferno. But the next day in the news the police said he had tried to rescue the burning person. That broke my heart a little. I thought that shamed the cop in a way that was terribly wrong, because the undercurrent of that false statement was that somehow he had failed because he had not incinerated himself to recover a body from which any soul was already smoke. I get where the impulse to tell that untrue story comes from, I think. We don’t like to admit the damage done, we’d rather believe it’s never too late than learn how to live with hurt and loss. Bearing witness is, I think, a big part of how we live with hurt and loss. Sometimes when we insist on greater powers than we possess, we obscure powers we actually have. You ask what sensation remains. I think witness remains. The book—originally I subtitled it “a memoir of other people’s lives”—is just a marker of what I saw. Like any book, really. A snapshot. As real as all the other moments that pass and still linger.

Bonus Links from Our Archive:– The Jeff Sharlet Memorial Award for Veterans— Jeff Sharlet Revisits The Fellowship

When I’m in a slump, I have friends who know how to put me back on track. Last fall, the state of the world and my place in it—and, by extension, my writing—had reached a low point. At just the right moment, a friend handed me an advanced reading copy of Jaquira Díaz’s Ordinary Girls, a debut memoir about family, queerness, identity, and being seen.

I wasn’t ready for this book. Yet all my life I’d been waiting for this book. In Ordinary Girls, Díaz writes about vital subject matter with a brilliance I wanted to understand. It’s not hyperbolic to say that, at times, I literally had the breath knocked out of me reading Díaz’s words on the page. I asked myself over and over again how she did this, and then I thought, what if I asked her?

I was thrilled when she agreed to the interview. When we got on the phone together, we talked about grief, complicated relationships, craft, and just whom Díaz is writing for.

The Millions: I love on the last page of Ordinary Girls you talk about the girls you wrote the book for. Why is it so important that the book reaches these girls?

Jaquira Díaz: It was important for me throughout the process to remember whom I was writing for, because otherwise I would have stopped writing. It was so difficult to get this book out. And to be honest, the book wouldn’t let me go. I had to get it out of the way before writing other things, before moving on to writing fiction. And, in order to do that, to finish the project, I needed to remind myself whom I was writing it for. So it helped to keep returning to the opening. I kept thinking about all the books I needed when I was growing up, when I was in school, and all we read in class were books by cis, straight, white men. And I kept thinking about how this book might be the first time a queer Latina, a queer Afro-Latina, sees herself in a book, and how that would have been important to me growing up.

TM: This was one of those books I read that made me feel seen in a lot of ways I hadn’t before, and I could imagine how impactful it would have been if I had this book when I was younger. You write about carrying the weight of intergenerational trauma and the history of your people no matter where you go. Do you feel that writing this book has changed the feeling of that somehow?

JD: Yes, absolutely. It felt like in all these years of writing, I had been avoiding writing this book, avoiding talking about sexual violence, colonialism, trauma. I felt that in some ways by being silent I was contributing to the violence and erasure that is so prevalent in our communities, that haunts our communities. Talking about sexual violence and colonialism and other kinds of racialized violence—how not talking about it can feel like a burden. The process itself was grueling, but being done with it felt like such an accomplishment. It’s the hardest thing I’ve ever done. It took 12 years to finish the book, and I’m definitely changed after having written it. I have more faith in God now. I have more faith in myself. I feel much stronger, definitely much stronger than I was right in the middle of writing it. The book literally made me sick. I had the worst insomnia of my life while writing this book. I gained weight. I lost weight. I gained weight again. I had to go to the hospital because I wasn’t sleeping. It took a real physical toll on my health; so being done with it feels like such an accomplishment.

TM: You write about very complicated relationships with your family and chosen family in super difficult situations. And I feel like you do so without anger or bitterness. Instead, you do it with fairness. How did you do that?

JD: First of all, I needed to be honest about my role in all of this, about who I was and who my family was. It was very important to me to write about the real people, to be as close to the truth as possible. I needed to interrogate not just everyone else’s role, but myself and who I was. The project of this book became much more about making connections and interrogating things about the larger world than it was about telling a story. Which is why I keep returning to certain themes of girlhood, of sexual violence, of silence, of secrets, of monsters. And it became much more about making those connections and speaking out than it was about following one linear story. For years, I avoided writing about my mother, for example, because writing about my mother was so painful. She was one of the hardest people to write about because, in so many ways, she broke me.

I also thought, If I am not honest, readers will be able to tell. In that process of digging for the truth—for me, but also for my family members and my friends—I started thinking about forgiveness. In the middle of writing this book, I was able to forgive my mother, and we have a very different relationship now than we did back during the years that were covered in the book. We’re very close now. We have a loving relationship, and I think part of that was definitely forgiveness. You know how they say that when you forgive people, it’s much more about yourself than it is about them. It’s for you. And being able to forgive all the people in my life, and myself, that made all the difference. I definitely wanted to write something without pity or glory or anger, something that was honest. That spoke to a factual truth but also a larger truth.

TM: How did you write about grief when it came to complicated relationships? You talk about when your maternal grandmother passed away and you had not seen her for a while, but the grief hit you so viscerally. And it’s such a complicated relationship because there was a deep family bond, but there was also distance out of self-preservation. Can you talk more about that?

JD: When my mother’s mother—she died by suicide—when I found out that she died, I didn’t really understand what I was feeling because our relationship in life had been so painful. She was abusive. She was racist. She was homophobic. She was abusive in more ways than one. Physically, emotionally, psychologically. And I didn’t even know that what I was feeling was grief. During the years she was alive, I spent so much time telling myself that when she died, I wouldn’t feel anything. And when she actually died and I was finally facing the reality of it, I was actually questioning whether or not I was feeling grief. I wasn’t sure. I had this limited idea of what grief actually was, because of my experience with it, which had been mostly dealing with my paternal grandmother’s death. That was painful. But then I realized after Marcy died that grief was more than just one feeling. Grief was painful, but it was also joyous. And it was anger. And it was depression. And it was anxiety. Grief was like experiencing every single emotion you’ve ever felt all at once. And navigating that when my maternal grandmother died was much more difficult because I didn’t know what I was feeling.

TM: I’ve always had this question of what we are allowed to feel when it comes to grief and complicated relationships.

JD: I definitely felt that when Marcy died. Because I was sad and because I felt pain, I felt I was in some way betraying myself— she had inflicted so much pain on me and on my family.

It took a few months for me to feel like it was okay to feel what I was feeling. That it would never truly make sense but that that was fine.

TM: Near the end of the book, you wrote about the differences in how you processed the grief for both of your grandmothers. With your paternal grandmother, what do you feel like she would be most proud of?

JD: I think she would definitely be proud of the book, but she would be prouder of the way I live my life. That I have faith. That I found love. That I’m living in a way that’s true to who I am, that I’m not pretending to be someone else.

TM: Is there something about writing—about the kind of things that your book has—that you wish you would see more of in memoir?

JD I definitely wish that there were more writing about girlhood and navigating a certain kind of home. I definitely wish there was more writing about girls growing up in poverty. Queer girls, black and brown girls. I didn’t have any books like that growing up. I mean, I certainly looked for them. I went to a library and what the librarians handed me were books about white people written by white people, written mostly by white men. I wish that there were an abundance of books about brown and black girlhood, about girls who grew up working class or in poverty. I also wish that there that there were just more books about Puerto Ricans, both in Puerto Rico and in the diaspora. When I was writing this book, I mean, I searched out almost every book written by a Puerto Rican in English that I could possibly find. And there weren’t that many.

TM: Yeah, I feel like when Lilliam Rivera’s novels (The Education of Margot Sanchez and Dealing in Dreams) had come out, I had similar thoughts.

JD: If only Lilliam had been writing when I was a girl—that would have changed my entire world.

TM: And I felt similarly about T Kira Madden’s memoir, Long Live the Tribe of Fatherless Girls, and then I felt the same thing with your memoir. There are so many different elements for me that resonated like being mixed race and what that means and how you’re looked at in this world. Why was it important to include writing about being mixed race?

JD: Well, one of the things that I always knew growing up was that we definitely were not white. We definitely did not belong. We were made to feel—and by we, I mean my sister, my brother, and I— like we didn’t belong in my mother’s white family. We definitely didn’t look like them. Also, my black grandmother made it clear to us that we were a black family, and that no matter how we looked to the world, we were a black family and we would be treated like one. Those are things that in our families I knew, but when I went out into the world, when I went to school, nobody saw me as black. People didn’t know unless I told them. And sometimes people didn’t believe me. It always made me feel like I was both invisible and hyper-visible, living in some liminal state where no one really saw who I was. And it was very important to kind of get that through to the reader. How much of my childhood and adolescence and even much of my adulthood was spent without really being seen. And also how exhausting it is to go out into the world and have people look at you and not really see you, never really understand who you are.

TM: Do you feel like writing this book was also a way to bring some of that together?

JD Yeah, in some ways. We all have to have some sort of reckoning with race. Being biracial, being a light-skinned black person, also means that you might be racially ambiguous, that you walk in the world with a certain amount of privilege that other black people don’t have. And for me, I definitely feel like it’s my responsibility to use it to open opportunities for other black people who don’t have the privilege of being racially ambiguous or treated the way that I’m treated. I definitely feel like I’ve had access to a lot of things that some of my friends haven’t had access to. And there have been moments in certain organizations when I realize that there is a possibility that I got this opportunity because they didn’t know I was black and it certainly made me feel like shit, but also made me feel like I had a responsibility to try to open doors for other people.

TM: I know this was very hard to write, but what was a joyful element of writing your memoir?

JD: God, that’s a very difficult question because it was so, so hard. One of the most joyful moments, to be honest with you, was to be able to write the acknowledgements, to thank people who have meant something in my life and have helped me, even if they just helped in very small ways. And to show them how that very tiny thing they did was very important in making me who I am, in helping this book become a reality. That was probably the most joyful moment.

Bonus Links from Our Archive:

— ‘Ordinary Girls’: Featured Nonfiction by Jaquira Díaz
— A Year in Reading: Jaquira Díaz

Sarah Moss’s Ghost Wall was published in 2019 to a chorus of near-unanimous praise. Reviewing it at The New Yorker, Margaret Talbot wrote, “[Ghost Wall] is a worthy match for 3 a.m. disquiet, a book that evokes existential dread, but contains it, beautifully, like a shipwreck in a bottle.” The novel tells the story of Silvie, the sheltered daughter of a brutish father obsessed with the ancient lifeways of pre-Norman conquest Britons. Silvie accompanies her father and mother on an anthropological journey through Northumberland with a university professor and group of graduate students. As they move through the countryside and bogs, they move back through time and the journey becomes increasingly harrowing, as it invites the reader to ask, “How far removed are we really from our ancient ancestors and their traditions?”

The paperback edition of Ghost Wall was recently released, and I was lucky enough to have a chance to talk with Moss about her novel-writing process and technique in the first of what will be an ongoing new column at The Millions focused on craft.

Adam O’Fallon Price: One thing I love about this novel is that it’s short! And I don’t mean because it couldn’t be longer, or because I wasn’t enjoying it, but I simply like a short novel, and in my limited publishing experience, it is quite difficult to get a very short novel through. We need short books! Can you talk a little bit about the length of this book and related process?—i.e. was it whittled down from a much larger draft, or did this always feel like this was the right size for the story? And was there any pressure from the publishing side to pad it out more?

Sarah Moss: It really just came that way. I finished it and there it was, short. At first I thought that meant it was an interesting exercise but of no use; I was working on a longer novel anyway and this was the distraction project. But I mentioned it to my agent and she wanted to see it, and then to send it to my editor and so it went. At first I kept protesting that it wasn’t a novel and I didn’t want to give readers short measure, but I was more or less persuaded that people really don’t buy books by weight. Certainly no-one suggested padding.

AOP: On a semi-related note, I think one of the reasons for Ghost Wall’s brevity is it doesn’t muck around with a great deal of backstory or throat clearing. The main narrative puts us right into the reenactment excursion and keeps us there, a perfect choice as it creates a sense of readerly discomfort that matches the unnerving journey of the characters. Was there a temptation to do more exposition and general setting up?

SM: I think all my books start rather suddenly. I like to put the reader behind the narrator’s eyes in the first sentence and worry about setting up later. As a reader I’m patient with exposition and landscape and weather—I rarely read for the plot and like slow books—but as a writer I want every word to be earning its keep.

AOP: I’m also curious about when you really felt you “knew” your main character, Silvie: her thought process and personality. Was there a particular place where she emerged, or was it gradual? I’ve been asked this question before and my best answer is that I tend to feel like I know a character when I know their sense of humor. Is there, generally speaking, a way that you tend to find “into” your characters’ heads?

SM: I think for me it’s maybe about inhabiting the character’s body. Once I can feel her skin and push her hair behind her ears, feel her shoes on her feet, I can start.

AOP: Ghost Wall features a good amount of area-specific (Northumberland, correct? I’m a hopeless American.) flora and fauna as well as a great deal of information about Iron Age lifeways. I wonder how much this background inspired the novel, and how much writing the novel simply necessitated this information. Chicken, or egg, or both?

SM: Yes, Northumberland. I love that landscape partly because I have no history there, no personal or familial claim on it. My desire to be there is simply aesthetic and I feel no need to belong to or own it. I became suddenly interested in the Iron Age before I had any idea I might write about it, which is how it often goes for me; a passion for Japanese textile design or the history of obstetrics grows in my mind and later I find it’s for a book. (Or not; sometimes the fascination comes and goes without producing anything much.) So background first. I always start with a place: weather, birdsong, soundscape. And then history, archaeology, architecture. Characters come later.

AOP: One of the interesting choices in this novel (among many) is the lack of quotation marks, with dialogue embedded in the narrative. It seems right to me, though in a way I find difficult to articulate—something, perhaps, in the way it captures Silvie’s budding, confused consciousness. I wonder what you think it does, and how you feel the book would read differently with standard dialogue?

SM: I’ve been surprised by how much some readers mind about speech marks. After all, different languages do it differently, and I wonder if readers who are upset by the dialogue in Ghost Wall are similarly bothered by French or Spanish. I’d been playing with dialogue and interior monologue in my previous novel, The Tidal Zone, and here I wanted to take it a bit further. It’s all in Silvie’s head anyway; the narrator is older, remembering, so the speech isn’t exactly direct in the first place.

AOP: Were there any moments in the drafting of Ghost Wall that really surprised you? Not asking for spoilers, but were there any character moments or small but significant plot turns that seemed to pop out of nowhere?

SM: I liked the way the animals emerged and made patterns. It wasn’t planned until I saw that it had started to happen, and then I developed it.

AOP: Finally, a very dumb, but perhaps thematically appropriate question to end: in terms of writing a first draft, are you a plan ahead-er or flashlight in the dark walking through the woods-er?

SM: Both! Spend two years making a map and then put it in your back pocket and ignore it while you hack a path through the wilderness. Just remember that you invented that wilderness and, however it feels, you’re responsible for everything from the mining rights to the sunset.

Teddy Wayne has an interest in loneliness. “I’ve always been most drawn to novels about protagonists who are deeply alienated; it’s where I’ve felt artistic empathy the most intensely, with both the character and, often, the author, in that the character’s attempts to break free of his or her solitude can be mirrored by the attempt of the writer to connect with the reader, or vice versa,” Wayne told The Millions. “It seems as worthy a subject of artistic exploration as any, and possibly the one to which literature is best suited.”

Wayne’s latest novel, Apartment, which brims with desperation, brilliantly captures the complex and complicated layers of loneliness. Set in the 1990s and largely inside and around Columbia’s MFA program, Apartment follows the lives of an unnamed narrator and his budding friendship with classmate Billy, a man with a background far removed—by politics, class, and geography—from the narrator’s own experiences. Once the narrator offers Billy the opportunity to live rent-free in his apartment, the pair’s friendship begins to change. And not for the better. What follows is a subtle, sly page-turner about disconnection and its impact.

Wayne and I spoke recently about loneliness, desperation, and, of course, Apartment.

The Millions: When I see that a new Teddy Wayne book is on the way, I feel like I know to expect a novel that’s going to be about loneliness in some measure. Kapitoil, The Love Song of Jonny Valentine, Loner, and, now, Apartment each explores what it means to be lonely in such profound ways. What is it about loneliness that attracts you as a writer?

Teddy Wayne: I’ve always been most drawn to novels about protagonists who are deeply alienated; it’s where I’ve felt artistic empathy the most intensely, with both the character and, often, the author, in that the character’s attempts to break free of his or her solitude can be mirrored by the attempt of the writer to connect with the reader, or vice versa. To get highbrow, loneliness is the emotional equivalent of Wittgenstein’s private language argument: a language incomprehensible to anyone other than the speaker is therefore not coherent even to the speaker. In reductive, more metaphorically social terms: without other people, we can’t know ourselves. It seems as worthy a subject of artistic exploration as any, and possibly the one to which literature is best suited.

The other main focus in each of these books is psychological life under capitalism. There are numerous spokes radiating from this, but the intersection with loneliness is the one I’ve been most interested in—how the scrabbling for resources in a finite world divides us up, whether into individuals or tribes, amplifying our distance from one another.

TM: Contemporary culture has a tendency to blame technology for why so many people feel lonely, but Apartment, which is a perfectly realistic story set in the mid-’90s without really any reliance on technology, serves as a good reminder that loneliness isn’t an exclusive characteristic of the technologically-focused 21st century. Did that have anything to do with why you chose to set your novel in the ’90s or did you make that choice for an altogether different reason?

TW: I wanted to set a novel about friendship in the last pre-Internet age, when we were forced to turn to the people nearest us for companionship rather than to a screen. The Internet, of course, has been as much a balm for loneliness as an accelerant, rendering physical barriers immaterial and aiding people who do better at a keyboard than a party. But the bigger themes on my mind for choosing the mid-’90s were the post–Cold War politics of the era—the start of the contemporary culture wars and the rightward movement of the country, Clinton’s re-election notwithstanding—and its shifting notions of masculinity and gender (to cite one popular culture example used in the book, it’s hard to imagine a unisex fragrance like CK One gaining mainstream appeal in the ’80s). The narrator and Billy are emblematic of these dynamics; it was the last time two guys from the “two Americas” could have realistically become friends, as these fault lines have become canyons during the Bush, Obama, and especially Trump years.

TM: Apartment is a complex character study, and the narrator and Billy are both dynamic and complicated characters. I want to ask about their friendship. (I think I can call their bond that.) Loneliness is what brings them together. What do you see as being the reason they stay together for as long as they do?

TW: It certainly starts off as mutual loneliness, in that the narrator has been physically isolated as an adult (since his sublet is illegal and he can’t take the chance of harboring a roommate) and never had a truly close relationship of any kind. And Billy is a newcomer to New York and hasn’t breached certain levels of intimacy, either; they end up genuinely connecting across their differences. But then money enters the equation more perniciously—the narrator lets Billy live in his spare room rent-free, in return (at Billy’s insistence) for some cleaning and cooking—and soon Billy is something of a kept man, tethered to the narrator’s patronage. Why the narrator keeps Billy around is up to the reader’s interpretation, since the narrator himself refuses to answer the question honestly.

TM: Did you find one character to be more difficult than the other to write?

TW: Billy had gone through several iterations before the final version. He’d always been more of a man’s man than the narrator, but his autodidactic skills were more polished in previous drafts, and his politics were far more liberal. He was a little too perfect, in all ways, and striking the right balance of plausible strengths and flaws was challenging. The narrator changed, too, especially in one central way (that’s never explicitly spelled out in the text) that helped define him for me. In a very early draft, that element didn’t exist at all, then after a revision it was front and center; neither extreme worked well.

TM: Do you mind talking about your decision in keeping the narrator nameless?

TW: There have been a lot of semi-autobiographical novels lately in which the narrator is unnamed as an intimation that he or she is the alter ego of the author (with the real name on the cover of the book), or out of some conviction that character is inherently unstable and thus we shouldn’t ever attempt to create fictional personages, so why bother naming them. For Apartment, I thought of anonymity as the narrator’s permanent affliction: he’s a background figure, an observer rather than a participant who, it’s suggested, won’t leave behind any kind of legacy, and even in his own story he doesn’t get the honor of a name.

TM: Apartment is a dark novel, but it’s also darkly funny in sections. When the narrator’s story “Camp Redwood” finally gets published and he realizes his classmates won’t see his success without some added action on his part, he says: “Columbia’s library didn’t carry the journal, but I planned to put one of the contributor copies that I would receive in its magazine rack so everyone could see what had become of the story they’d spurned.”

With a novel that’s so focused on loneliness and desperation, did you intentionally set out to add in a few moments to lighten the story a bit?

TW: As an example of how subjective humor is, I didn’t intend for that passage to register as comic, but as, in fact, lonely and desperate—though now, seeing it out of context, I can see how you might have read it that way. (At the same time, his desire to show off the literary journal in the library isn’t that different from the modern urge to tweet “My latest, in the ____”.) But that is, at least, the kind of comedy I like best: humor that is twinned with sadness, one the temporary absence of the other but marshaling power through its missing cousin. Apartment has the most understated humor (read: is the least funny) of my books, and I’ve noticed that I, unfortunately, have become less funny as I’ve gotten older, too, whether through an attrition of wit or, I hope, greater contentment and less of an antic need to entertain. As I personally dislike books that have no comedy to them whatsoever, and because I was going for an overall elegiac, poignant tone, I did consciously sprinkle in lighter moments, mostly via secondary characters (especially Robert Stockton, a hard-drinking, self-mythologizing writing professor).

TM: So much of the book revolves around writers and their work, so I want to ask about artists. The narrator and Billy have an interesting conversation—in the middle of a political argument by the way—about what kind of people become artists. The narrator says, “I suppose it’s people who have something to say, with the talent and discipline to express it, and the empathy to see other viewpoints.” Billy replies, “And also the people who have enough of a financial cushion to fall back on in case they don’t make it. Which means not many people like me.” From a 2020 lens, do you think both perspectives are still pretty accurate?

TW: Yes, likely more so now, given the increasingly marginal financial rewards of these fields and the skimpier safety nets below. We justifiably talk a lot about race and gender concerning the arts, but surprisingly little about class. Some of this is because it’s less visually conspicuous an identity and it’s harder to pin down one’s precise status on the continuum of money, but mostly, I think it’s because there’s a lot of shame attached to the privilege that enables most artistic lives. No one wants to admit that they’re a successful writer, filmmaker, painter, or musician (or successful anything, really) in large part because they had a financially stable background. Talent and hard work certainly have something to do with where you end up, but zip code is still destiny; it’s a lot easier to spend eight years writing a first novel or take an unpaid internship when you know that you have an upper-middle-class parachute you can open in an emergency. The irony in Apartment is that the narrator is not only ashamed of his upper-middle-class provenance, but thinks it’s an artistic detriment, since he has nothing worth writing about, whereas he fetishizes Billy’s Midwestern working-class authenticity.

TM: Near the very end of Apartment, the narrator admits, “But solitude, I’ve discovered, isn’t so bad once you come to expect it.” At first, I was feeling all optimistic about his future, but, then, I stepped back and reprocessed his statement and—well, I felt like I’d been punched it the gut. It’s a sad, beautiful ending to an equally sad, beautiful novel.

TW: Thank you. I always aim for an emotionally ambivalent climax, what Robert McKee calls ironic endings. The epilogue that follows the sentence you quoted complicates that sentiment a little, in ways I won’t spoil. Like many people, I read the last page of a book slowly (I vaguely recall an Onion article making fun of this practice), wanting the emotional dam the author has been building to break in the closing sentences, and the novels I’ve loved most reward that: the tone of the final words seems to spill over into the empty space below them, the textual sign that you’ve returned back to your own life, its own pages still unwritten—hopefully changed, maybe a little less alone.