Jillian Luft: On Going Indie, Finding Beauty in the Grotesque, Writing Through and With The Pain, and Her Debut Novel ‘Scumbag Summer’

In Scumbag Summer (House of Vlad, 2024), Jillian Luft’s debut novel, Florida pushes two lovers to the edge. They rely on each other and drugs to keep the grief of past, present, and future at bay. The book is a work of autofiction following a woman grieving the loss of her mother, looking for love, and finding it in her married boss. Both her late mother and her new boyfriend deal with opioid addiction, and the narrator is caught between what she wants and what she knows about the havoc that drug use can cause. 

Scumbag Summer is an indie press collaboration in a true sense—it began when Luft connected with Brian Alan Ellis of House of Vlad on Twitter (back when it was still good). As they worked together, she had the kind of creative control that’s impossible at traditional publishers. The book is filled with Luft’s photographs of Florida: the opening diptych shows two used cigarettes in an ashtray on the left page, and on the right, a sign for the sports bar Body Talk with lettering underneath, spelling out “This is what / tyranny / looks like.” 

Whenever the content of the interview gets really dark, imagine Jillian’s gleeful, wry laughter. We agreed that sometimes, cliché as it may be, there’s nothing else to do but laugh—and write.

Devin Kate Pope: What’s the story of how the novel came into being? 

Jillian Luft: It’s been quite a journey for this book. I should say right off the bat that it is autofiction, because that’ll explain where I’m going with it. After the pivotal incident of the book happened, I would write a bit about it. Three years after it happened, I would find myself writing scenes or memories from that time. For most of my life, I didn’t share my writing with anyone else. I was always writing for myself. Then I turned forty, which dovetailed nicely with the pandemic. I decided, well, maybe I should use this time to get my writing out there. How could it hurt? 

I looked back at some of the scenes I had written and fleshed those out as excerpts for a novel. Those were published in the summer of 2020 and more in 2021, and I thought, okay, now I have an idea of how to outline this book. It came together in a rather organic way, really. Once I had that all together, House of Vlad became my dream press. I noted that Brian [Alan Ellis] said on his website that he never accepted unsolicited submissions, so I didn’t know how to get there. 

But the Twitterverse or X or social media in general provides some rather magical coincidences. Brian started liking those excerpts I was posting, and I thought, oh, this could be something. Organically, we became friendly on the internet, and he said, “If you ever have anything, please send it to me.” Later, he began to pester me more, asking, “When are you ever going to be done with this book?” I kicked my ass in gear and holed myself up in a hotel room over that New Year’s Eve weekend of 2024. I told myself, “I have to finish this book.” I did so in forty-eight hours and sent it off to him. That’s the story. It’s been a long journey, from 2007 till now.

DKP: You mentioned autofiction. What are your feelings about that genre or label? 

JL: For the longest time, I had no feelings. I was pretty neutral on the subject, and I thought, okay, people need a term, but isn’t all writing personal in some way, even if it’s not necessarily about the self? But then it became a buzzword that became pejorative, and still is in certain circles. I now take pride in saying that it’s autofiction because, and I think this appears especially in my book, everything is kind of hyperbole or fictionalized about our lives.The stories that we tell ourselves are often fictions or narratives that have been repeated or internalized through literature that we try to act out, such as in Scumbag Summer. It doesn’t make it a lesser work because you’re writing from the self. In fact, it can make it more powerful and more intimate. It’s how you do it. As with any writing, how you tell the story is what matters. And that’s where I’ve landed with autofiction. For a long time I would not know how to answer because it’s such a loaded question, but I think I’ve arrived at a place.

DKP: It has always seemed strange that autofiction became looked down on by some. No book is an island; as you said, the personal is everywhere.

JL: And it’s not navel-gazing necessarily, because every book is craft. It’s not as if we’re writing a blog. And if you are writing in the blog genre, maybe that’s a little bit of navel-gazing, but who am I to say? Autofiction is a spectrum like any other genre. To generalize it or put it all under one umbrella is doing it a disservice as it would be to any art or any genre.

DKP: I’ve been a fan of House of Vlad since reading Body High by Jon Lindsey—it was recommended to me by Joshua Mohr, who recently had a book come out from House of Vlad, Farsickness. It’s a super small writing world. I was on their website yesterday, and there was a banner that said “Welcome to the Literary Shit Show,” which made me laugh. Was it actually a shit show?

JL: Working with Brian—he probably doesn’t want me to destroy his bad reputation—was the antithesis of a shit show. I recommend working with him as an editor and as a creative collaborator. As an editor, he is so meticulous. He went through my book four times, and there wasn’t much to change regarding copy edits, but he was so incisive in terms of proofing. I was mystified because he did it in such a short amount of time. In terms of the cover art and the shape of the book, I had complete creative control. All the photos are mine, including the cover. It was his idea to include my photography within the book, which I thought was lovely. He really believes that it should be a collaborative process throughout, and yes, he can call it a shit show, and maybe it’s chaotic on his end—I mean, I don’t know what goes on over there—but it’s definitely controlled chaos. 

DKP: What advice would you give writers about working with independent presses? 

JL: It was something that I gave a lot of thought to. I had a lot of supportive friends and family who may be a bit idealistic or delusional, saying, “Hold out for the big four,” or big five, or wherever we’re at. And that never appealed to me. It could be because I came into writing only writing for myself. This will sound idealistic, but I’d rather the work be supported with integrity and my vision fully realized. Especially after Body High came out, I said I must go with House of Vlad, because that was such a well-written book, and it was so thoughtful and provocative. I recommend reading books from independent presses, seeing which ones resonate with you, and making friends with other writers and learning about their experiences with independent presses. I hate this recommendation, but get on social media. I’m sorry, but a lot of my connections in this world have arisen because of social media. I find that unfortunate because I completely eschewed social media until I was forty. Now I’m realizing that there are benefits even though there are drawbacks. 

To sum it up, read from writers that you think you might be interested in at independent presses, and find out where those writers are getting published, and you have a chance of getting published by an independent press. The world of mainstream publishing is too unwieldy for me. I wouldn’t know how to navigate it, and maybe I will at some point, but I like the intimacy and control I have in the independent press world.

DKP: You’re right about social media; it’s a cesspool, and it’s where I’ve found writer friends. Both are true! But the friends are worth it because you get to do fun things like this: I saw Cath Spino, a brilliant writer, post about Scumbag Summer, and I asked her to give me a question to ask you. (I’m ripping off David Naimon’s thing from the Between the Covers podcast, which I love too much.) From Cath: “My question is along the lines of writing about painful moments from the past, specifically heartbreak. What advice would you give about painful storytelling, and how to stay in it when it becomes emotional? How do you continue when it becomes emotional or as you discover new emotional shades of the situation?” 

JL: Oh, excellent question, thanks Cath! My advice is always to lean into it, and I will provide caveats. Whatever is the scariest or feels overwhelming when I’m beginning to write is probably one of the story’s most important or richest parts. I am really comfortable with leaning into the traumatic and the dark, and I don’t know if that’s necessarily healthy. I might thrive in that chaos because it feels familiar. But I will say that we all know ourselves, and we know when we’re reaching a point where the writing is not being serviced by those feelings, or we’re not servicing ourselves—whichever happens first. What I do then is I cry. Sometimes I take a walk. I listen to music to not necessarily dissociate—I listen to music aligned with the book’s themes so that I can detach myself somewhat and come at it as if I’m writing a scene. I do that a lot in my writing. I like to use vivid and image-laden scenes as if I was directing. I have a cinematic view and I think in a way that affords me a certain emotional distance in those moments. That would be another suggestion. If you don’t want a full break from what you’re doing and want to persist through those feelings, find a way to detach, because it may bring a new perspective. 

DKP: Songs and bands are mentioned throughout your book. Can you tell me more about the music you wrote about? And were there additional media influences you held onto while writing, even if they didn’t make it into the text? 

JL: I always knew I would name specific songs within the book. One, because they were actually a part of those memories. And two, because when I think about writing about Florida and this specific story, it’s so much about how we escape. Florida is a place where people go to escape, but the people who live there are trying to escape their lives because they realize we’ve been fed a lie about paradise. What are we going to do now to escape? I always looked to movies and music when I was stuck in strip mall hell. While writing, I would remember the exact songs that were playing. I have a very vivid memory of all those moments. I made a playlist with all those songs, and then added some I was inspired by or that felt adjacent. 

In terms of other influences, and they’re not necessarily thematically the same as Scumbag Summer, the work of Sean Baker, like The Florida Project and Red Rocket, which is his latest movie with Simon Rex as a total dirtbag who has a relationship with a younger girl. His work speaks to me because it looks at these marginalized lives, or lives that aren’t often shown. Going back to mainstream presses, when we look at women and narratives about women owning their desire, and how desire can be dangerous or as inspiring to them as to male writers, we often see it as a woman having an affair with her finance boss in New York City, where she has a cushy internship and lives in a great apartment and goes to Balthazar and all the restaurants that I can’t afford in New York City. Obviously that was not my experience. I feel connected to Sean Baker’s work because he always looks at the lives that are often invisible or not given enough credence or respect. And then my favorite movie of all time is Paris, Texas. You may not see the commonalities between Paris, Texas and Scumbag Summer right away. Still, there is that feeling of alienation and that yearning for connection, Americana, neon signs, etc. 

DKP: You call yourself a Florida apologist on your website. What does it mean to you to love a place that’s generally considered scummy, and to write about it? 
JL: I always fervently believe that there is beauty in the grotesque. There’s beauty in the mundane, there’s beauty in the sleazy, there’s beauty in the sordid. Florida has that in spades, let me tell you—it’s such a strange place. There’s a seedy underbelly to it. And yet it’s promising to be the “most magical place on earth,” which I talk about in the book. There’s the fantasy and there’s the very harsh and gross reality, and they live side by side, and everyone that lives here has to navigate or straddle those two sides at all times. Which leads to a lot of existential crises and drug addictions and all sorts of things. 

I think I’ve talked about this before, but I’m trying to reclaim the word “scumbag.” What does it mean to be a scumbag? What does it mean to make decisions in the moment that may not serve you, but that feel good, teach you about yourself, and illuminate the world around you? Isn’t there something that’s a gift in that—to lead yourself by animal impulse as if you were another exotic creature in Florida, and really stake your claim momentarily? Isn’t that all that we can do? 

DKP: Many of the characters in your book are dealing with varying degrees of alcohol and drug addiction or dependency. It’s something I read about a lot. Often the inclination is to tie things up with the bow of sobriety, which you don’t do. How did you approach writing about substance issues?

JL: I wanted to, as much as possible, present them matter-of-factly. I didn’t want to overdramatize it. There were certain scenes that I omitted for fear of that. It’s a personal preference when I’m reading books about drug and alcohol addiction, and there are many of them, especially in the independent press world. I didn’t want to glamorize or romanticize in any way. I wanted to present it as it happened. No sobriety was in sight for any of the characters, so there was no bow at the end. That came naturally. I had to write it as it was. But I hope that by presenting it as it was, people will understand it is an issue. It was not fun. It was taxing on the narrator and the male love interest. It was something I really thought about a lot—if I should present more or insert more about the opioid epidemic itself, and make more reference to that. But I decided to make it as personal as possible, and leave that out. There were a lot more drug stories I could have told. The business actually closed down a year after I left due to rampant cocaine use in the office.

DKP: Is there anything about Scumbag Summer that you want to talk about that I haven’t asked about yet? 

JL: You know, something that not many people have asked me about is the book’s grief and family trauma aspect. I think it gets lost in all the references to the fuck fest or the erotic elements of it. There’s the mirroring of the dad character, who is very much in the same position as his daughter. He had an affair while he was married, and now his daughter’s having an affair with a married man who has two children. The deceased mother of the narrator was addicted to opioids because she had a terminal illness, and now the narrator is caretaking for her boyfriend, who is addicted to opioids. I think it’s interesting to think about how we internalize family patterns and act those out within our relationships, how they fuel them, and what we can learn from them. Heartbreak and grief are similar in so many ways, because instead of escaping, we are forced to confront things about ourselves and about each other, and about our flaws and our wants and our most animal desires. In my experience, grief made me become an animal, and desire makes me a different kind of animal. I wanted to underscore that because it’s an important part of the story.

DKP: One of the most powerful scenes in the story is when the narrator is driving with her dad to dinner and having this conversation, but she can’t look at him because if she makes him notice that he’s opening up in this way, he’ll stop. It’s hard for people to connect in general, but then throwing in grief and addiction and guilt or shame around the past makes it more difficult.

JL: Yeah, lots of guilt and shame. This is the last thing I’ll say about that—my father actually read my book in front of me for two hours while I sat on the couch. And a similar thing happened as in the story, where he then got up and moseyed on over to the kitchen counter and started speaking about incidents in the book and why he thought they happened. He said, “I never realized the impact that divorce could have had on my children, and how it would manifest in their relationships. And this book made it very clear to me.” That was very interesting.

DKP: I read on your website that you’re working on a memoir about caring for your terminally ill mother. Could you tell me more about that project, and how it connects to or differs from the novel?

JL: They’re related, but I’ll be taking a less fictional approach. The hope is to write it within the horror genre, because it felt so horrific. There was a bed down the hall with a bedridden woman in it ringing the bell—and it was my childhood. There’s something that felt surreal about it. I want to highlight those aspects. I have a tentative title, but I won’t say it now. I’m superstitious about that. There will be pieces of it that were mentioned within the novel, such as my dad leaving my mom for her nurse on my thirteenth birthday. That’ll be the inciting incident. And then I took care of my mom and my ten-year-old brother as a thirteen-year-old for almost a year alone. I don’t think that’s legal, but I learned a lot. This will be for you if you want a horrific tale of caretaking and illness.  

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Jillian Luft is a writer and Florida apologist living in Gainesville. Her first book, Scumbag Summer, is available now via House of Vlad Press. She is currently at work on a memoir exploring the death and life of her terminally ill mother, the solitary art of caregiving, and childhood grief.