Raven Leilani: On Balancing Art and Work, Self-Awareness and Performance and Her Debut Novel, "Luster"
Just a week after Raven Leilani’s stunning debut novel, Luster, was released its already on the New York Times Bestsellers List and longlisted for the First Novel Prize. With sharp humor and searing prose, Luster follows twenty-something-year-old Edie, as she stumbled her way through admin jobs, her crappy Bushwich apartment, inappropriate sexual encounters, and a unique relationship with her lover’s wife. Searching for intimacy and validation in a removed, lonely world, Edie struggles to pursue her art and find connection. Infused with the “examination of the intersection of Blackness, class, sexuality and power,” Luster is a magnetic novel that I couldn’t put down.
I spoke to Raven about self-awareness in your twenties, performance in personal and professional spheres, rage, the balance of work and art-making, and her debut, acclaimed novel, Luster.
Kailey Brennan: First of all, congratulations on being longlisted for the First Novel Prize. That’s amazing.
Raven Leilani: Thank you. It was wild finding that out. I was on a live panel when the news was coming in. (Laughs) It’s good news. Really, really wonderful.
KB: I'd love to know what, what kind of the idea that sparked this novel for you?
RL: When I started writing this, the primary idea I wanted to write about was the journey of an artist and I wanted to depict it in a way that felt honest to me and perhaps even to my own life — that trajectory is often messy and a linear. In the book, you see the character balancing work and art-making and I think for a lot of people, that’s the case.
And the second thing that came in later as I was writing —even though l try to imbue everything I write with honesty—I wanted to write a young black woman who does not have it altogether. I wanted to write a black woman who is not particularly pristine or moral, but who is human. To make space for that was really important.
KB: That ties into my second question for you because I felt like you really grasped the intricacies of being in your twenties so well. So often the things that women deal with in their work environment, like the judgment or the double standards, and then even just getting in their own way as a person, like sleeping with the wrong people and things like that...I loved how flawed Edie was and but also how self-possessed her narration was. I think even when you are in your twenties and are a mess in some ways, you have this confidence behind it. I just was wondering if you could speak more about writing Edie's voice and why you wanted to explore this age bracket?
RL: There are a couple parts of that self-possession. One is you're in your twenties and you understand your capability — and maybe you don’t completely. You are still trying to figure out what you want– and I think for a lot of women, you're looking outward for affirmation for that seriousness, that seriousness that you understand that you have. It’s often kind of an internal knowledge that is maybe not externally rewarded.
I’m 29 and there are elements of this professional and personal dynamic that I absolutely drew from my own life— from my own personal revelations that are within that full decade of being in your 20s. It is still deeply formative. You're learning lessons every day. I feel lucky that I got to give [Edie] even more self-awareness than what I had when I was 23 or 24 or 25. It feels good to kind of speak to that revelation in a way where it's almost a wish fulfillment, right?
I wish that I had been as self-aware as Edie is, but at the same time, you know, she is still making plenty of mistakes. And her self awareness is a function of knowing her capability and the function of me, as the author. But also she's a black woman and it’s kind of crucial to her survival to be as studious as she is. That she understands her environment and understands how to perform. I think a lot of this is about performance —performance that she does in her professional spheres and her personal spheres. So in tracking that voice, I think rage is sort of the animating factor. The rage of understanding that you have so much to give and offer and knowing that your environment still doesn't really see you. There's rage in that and having to balance different performances depending on the room you're in. All of this was a factor in creating Edie’s voice.
KB: I felt a real connection to Edie in her sense of loneliness and her search for intimacy. She is searching for meaningful relationships but also doesn’t really even know if they exist. Loneliness feels like it’s an epidemic in our society— everyone seems to be feeling it or has felt different levels of it. I was wondering if you could talk about if you have experienced this in your own life and this concept of searching for intimacy in our society today?
RL: I'm a severely introverted person. I have to lay my cards on the table. There's an element of solitude that I really thrive on. But I do think we're social animals and we need other people. We need that human contact because I think that humanizes us. To experience loneliness is to be stripped of that human component that we're naturally wired for. And I think with Edie, the loneliness is compounded by the fact that much of her life is spent in this curation of managing people who have some power over her life and managing their perception of her. Even though we can see in her interior that she has complaints. (Laughs) And I also want to speak to the loneliness of an artistic journey because it isn't just a linear. It's also a deeply lonely one because I think that when it comes to making anything you're making, paintings or a novel, the sort of primary force is you. In some ways the primary barrier is you.
I think in order to get over that hurdle, which requires a real act of faith, is a sort of the space you inhabit alone. The art making process for a lot of people is mostly a private one. Like for this book, it's very weird and very cool, but also very weird that my living room is full of books— I get to hold them now. But everything I've written was made in a state of solitude. I know so many writers who talked about writing as I have to imagine no one will see it to write anything good. And there's an element, I think, to making art that is sort of inextricable from that loneliness and solitude.
But at the same time, [Edie] is 23 and like you said, she's looking for human connection and intimacy, like we all are, but because of who she is, a black woman, her interactions, her attempts to stoke any kind of connection, her race and her gender has had a great bearing on that. Especially when it comes to showing her real face, which is the only way you can really connect.
KB: In this search for acceptance, she seems to search for it most among men. But there was this one line that I just loved, towards the end of the books when she said something about how she realizes that Eric is really just a disappointment.
RL: (Laughs) It was so much fun to be able to write that. I think a lot of us come to that revelation too late sometimes. You know, she seeks affirmation of her seriousness, of her personhood, of her artistry, all in men. The very first sort of prototype is the man in the office that she has a brief affair with. It's an affair and it's messy, but it has a component to it that makes her feel affirmed in her art until she realizes what it is. And to a certain extent, she does the same with Eric and both are disappointments. So when I started writing Rebecca, that was one of the aspects of the book where I was wanting to talk more about the role of women in being the ones who can actually truly affirm that and introduce real rigor into the work. Because overwhelmingly in my own life, it has been women who've lifted me up and clarified my vision and made me feel valid as an artist.
KB: Can you talk a little bit about your own writing journey? I see you have been published in several publications and that you also write poetry. Did you always want to write? When did it start for you?
RL: I wrote fanfiction for a long time, so how I first connected with writing was through fandom. And I think it's really earnest and an act of wanting the story to go on. It really hooked me in. Being able to sort of play with these characters and feel like I was doing something that people could see, since there is a forum where you post and people comment. For my formal writing, I started in poetry. That too was one of the first forms I was really enamored with, because it has everything that I love about prose, which is that it has rhythm, it has music, it has a real intention because of the economy of space. It has a real deliberation. One of the poems that I was obsessed with in college, as an undergrad, which is not super original, is Alan Ginsburg’s “Howl.” I remember trying to replicate that energy. At the time I was taking a bunch of medical classes because I wanted to potentially use my psychology degree, which I was working towards to work in psychiatry. And so I was taking these classes on biology and physiology and I found myself in the back of the class, writing poetry. It wasn't even about the content, it was a feeling– a feeling of words that are having something that's animating them that feels really energetic and earnest. With Ginsburg’s “Howl”, I mean, it is like an Epic, it really builds to a crescendo. So for me it was really about the music and the beauty of the thing.
One of the very first big breaks I got was getting one of my poems published in Granta. That poem was about something I also write a lot about, about faith, specifically about me leaving the Seventh Day Adventist church. Then I wanted to do something more long form. I started with short fiction, which I thought would be a nice kind of step. I didn't immediately go to novels. I spent like 4 or 5 years trying to get published with the traditional route, with my short fiction. I think anyone who's gone through it can tell you, it is really like you take two steps forward four steps back. It's very much like you submit your work into the void and maybe you hear back in eight months and often it's a rejection. So those four years where I was writing short fiction, although I was lucky enough to get published, a good amount of the time I was getting rejected and sort of retooling my work based on how many times one story was rejected. I kept an Excel sheet full of those rejections. And that hardened me in a way I think is really necessary to keep kind of just heading along in this field.
Then around 2014, 2015, I sort of dipped my toe into the novel writing thing. I actually wrote a couple of books. One was like a smutty science fiction. (Laughs) And the other was a meditation on fandom and music. And I truly am not deprecating here — they were bad. I think that that's a feature of just trying something out for the first time.
Then I got to the MFA and I was coming in with that second book I had written and I had some really meaningful conversations with mentors that I've made. That motivated me to start Luster, which I started writing in my time at the MFA. I finished a couple months before I graduated. I finished and my agent Ellen sold it. I was actually in Zadie Smith's class when I got the text from my agent that there was an offer and it happened to be Jenna Johnson, my amazing editor who saw what I was trying to do. And it’s kind of has been history from there.
KB: Did you keep a kind of specific writing routine or just wrote whenever you could?
RL: 100%. It had to be a sort of disciplined routine because I also had a full-time job at the time and that's what I mean when I was pulling from my own life in terms of balancing art work. Most of my writing was done after the nine to five. I'd come home, I'd make my dinner, and dive into the book and go as long as I could until it was time to go to sleep and do the next day again. So it wasn’t even that I was partially disciplined, it was that those were the only windows I had.
KB: I think that that is discipline though because a nine to five can just kind of stuck you dry as a person.
RL: 100%. It was hard. I think that's in the text too. You could feel my anxiety, I think, bleeding into Luster. You are trying to kind of feed yourself and also feed yourself in a way that you're making something that you want. It was definitely a struggle. I was very tired. By the time I finished my MFA, I was very, very low on battery, but in general it was nice that the book came out through that and that I can kind of rest a second.
KB: Definitely. Are you working on anything new right now?
RL: I'm not. I definitely have a handful of books still in me for sure. But most of my time right now is put toward the launch of the book. And I think because I'm going through this for the first time, I almost can't say what my life, even in five months is gonna look like. The month before the book comes out is very, very, very hectic and I'm just kind of learning as I go. But it's still a dream because this is my work now which is really, really wonderful.
KB: During this time of self-isolation and quarantine, were you reading anything or listening to anything that you would recommend?
RL: Oh, yeah. I loved Megha Majumdar’s A Burning. I think she's so brilliant. I loved Laura van den Berg’s I Hold a Wolf by the Ears. Tyrese Coleman’s How To Sit, which is a collection of stories in memoir. She's truly, truly wonderful. I also love Kelly Jo Ford's Crooked Hallelujah. My friend who actually went through the MFA with me, the same timing and everything, and is also going to be published on the same day, Alisson Wood’s Being Lolita, which is a memoir that's coming out. We were in the program together and I'm so proud of her and the book is really brilliant. We have the same book birthday, so it's very special.
For music, I really love Tame Impala’s Lonerism. I really, truly dig that and I write to it a lot. And Donna Summer. (Laughs) Her albums are great. The one that's like the four seasons is really great. So that's sort of what I'm listening to all the time.
Raven Leilani’s work has been published in Granta, The Yale Review, McSweeney’s Quarterly Concern,
Conjunctions, The Cut, and New England Review, among other publications. Leilani received her MFA from
NYU and was an Axinn Foundation Writer-in-Residence. Luster is her first novel.
