Jenna Lanzaro
An Interview with Raven Leilani
Raven Leilani is everywhere—as she should be. Her debut novel Luster (Farrar, Straus & Giroux) literally gleams on a billboard in New York’s Times Square, populates social media feeds and bestseller lists. Just six days before this interview, which took place in December 2020, Leilani was awarded the 2020 Kirkus Prize in fiction; at thirty, she is the youngest recipient in the prize’s history.
Raven Leilani and Luster are rightfully everywhere because joy and strife and sex and power politics are everywhere. Our protagonist Edie’s story is, as Leilani puts it, “a candid account of a Black woman trying to lay claim to the right to make art,” and it’s told in rollicking, poet-y prose, with a wit that both amplifies the chaos of the everyday and makes it palatable. I had the sincere joy of speaking with Raven over the phone about spectacle, community, and why this all feels so relevant in a strange, loud year.
WASHINGTON SQUARE: First and foremost, congrats on your very recent Kirkus Prize win.
RAVEN LEILANI: Thank you!
WASHINGTON SQUARE: How are you celebrating in these weird times?
LEILANI: Well because we are still in a pandemic, my celebration has been contained to my apartment. When the pandemic started, I got a projector to try and manufacture some joy inside. So I had a drink and watched a movie. But it’s been really, really so wonderful. I’m thankful for this kind of recognition. I mean, it’s really what you hope for when you write a book, that people will come to it and come to it with generosity.
WASHINGTON SQUARE: One of my favorite things about Luster is the interaction between the banal and the carnivalesque. Edie’s first date with Eric, for example, takes place at a faux saloon at Six Flags; it has so many recognizable elements of the awkward first date in late-capitalist America (“[The waitress] tells us the specials in such a way that we know our sole responsibility as patrons in her section is to just go right ahead and fuck ourselves”) combined with elements of the absurd (“a man at the bar is quietly crying next to a giant teddy bear”). And yet it’s a plausible absurdity, which feels hyper-relevant to our current times. What do you see as the role of the carnivalesque in Luster? Is life sometimes just this ridiculous?
LEILANI: Absolutely I think life is sometimes that ridiculous. I will say that you mentioned the awkwardness of a first date, and on a craft level I think that this was one way of depicting that, right? Setting a first date where two people who have not met each other in the flesh up until this moment now have to reconcile that digital version with the actual version, at a site where there’s almost this kind of compulsive merriment. It feels absurd, the friction between all of those things. I think, too, when I think carnivalesque, I think of the spectacle. And I think Edie as a character is constantly navigating this expectation of spectacle. Not even just expectation but a spectacle that she at times invites. She wants to be looked at. She wants to be looked at while, at the same time, she is furiously curating herself. I also think when you look closely enough at desire it becomes grotesque, it becomes carnivalesque. As I wrote, that is what I was writing to- wards, the idea of the way that that manifests: when it manifests honestly, it’s ugly to look at. I think even this moment that we’re in . . . many have remarked that if this moment were engineered by actual writers, if you brought those writers to a workshop, we would ask them to rein it in. And so I do think life is that absurd. Especially if you are a person like Edie, who is tasked with managing both your reality and the reality of the people who perceive you. I think that that friction is inherently absurd.
WASHINGTON SQUARE: The judges of the Kirkus Prize praise Edie as an “unapologetically bold, badass young Black woman . . . whose agency is as seductive as the urgency with which her unusual story unfolds.” Do you see Edie’s story as unusual?
LEILANI: I see her story as a candid account of a Black woman trying to lay claim to the right to make art. I think what is unusual is that you as a reader (because it’s told in first person) are granted access to what a lot of Black women carefully have to keep out of frame in order to survive. Her unvarnished consciousness. You’re privy to the sublimated parts, and you see that up against her external performance. We were talking about absurdity earlier. There is an absurdity to that. But that absurdity is common, the two selves that exist right alongside each other. But I wanted her to have the freedom to indulge her id. And because she exists in this sort of rarefied air that I as an actual Black woman in the world perhaps don’t enjoy, her story is allowed to accommodate these narrative turns that are unusual, I guess. So I do think that the story of a Black woman who is trying to carve out space to make work that is meaningful to her, the story of the war that you fight on all fronts when you are trying to assert your personhood and your artistry, that’s a familiar story to a lot of us. But I do think that having a window into the mind of a woman who is in the middle of this lets you into the parts that are absurd.
WASHINGTON SQUARE: That absurdity is one of the ways in which Luster feels so relevant to this present moment. Did writing or publishing the book overlap with the onset of the pandemic at all?
LEILANI: It didn’t. I finished this book during my last year of my MFA at NYU [May 2019]. And so it was firmly outside of this. But it is a book that deals with extremity, and there is a parallel between the tenor of the book and the moment in which it was released.
WASHINGTON SQUARE: How much did your professors and peers engage with Luster, from beginning to end?
LEILANI: I feel like I owe my book to how critically and generously my cohort and the mentors that I found there (my professors) engaged with it. It fully was a book that I wrote in workshop. I was in Katie Kitamura’s workshop while I was writing the first beginning chapters, and I finished writing the book, I think, in Jeff Eugenides’s workshop. And I feel like I just had a really good group, a really talented and sensitive and sharp group of writers, who asked me necessary questions, the overarching questions that you need to ask before you write anything: “Why do you want this to be in the world? Does this need to be in the world?” Those two questions started the writing of this book. I had to write toward my joy and I had to write with freedom, but I also felt that I had to write something that felt (to me) urgent and necessary, something that I really felt I wanted to share with readers. Because, I will say, I wrote this book with the intent that it would be read. I think writing a book in workshop reoriented me in that way where I became more sensitive to the sort of the tics I had that made my writing more opaque, as opposed to having clarity on the page. I think the MFA program really hammered into me the idea that clarity is the heart of good prose. I mean, the language itself can be dense, and you can write to your bliss, but you really want to be saying something, you really want to be communicating something. And that’s sort of how I changed in the program, and how those workshops enabled me to change.
WASHINGTON SQUARE: I appreciate that phrase “write to your bliss” because, as a poet reading the book, I Ioved what was happening at the level of the line. It’s very zippy and energetic and almost feels like poetry expanded into the size and shape of a novel.
LEILANI: I really appreciate that.
WASHINGTON SQUARE: Do you read and write poetry?
LEILANI: I do. I really, really love Danez Smith, I love Terrance Hayes, I love Morgan Parker, I love Frank O’Hara. It is something that I turn to in order to give me a jolt of energy when I’m feeling a little bit adrift. And poetry was the first thing I ever got published. I started in poetry and then kind of started to move on to longer forms. And so it is also like painting, my first love.
WASHINGTON SQUARE: Is there a relationship between visual art and your writing process?
LEILANI: I would say that for me it’s actually two separate modes. I would say that, because I paint, I’m able to write about painting in a way that I think is more rooted in the logistics of the act, so that the work itself is maybe more palpable on the page and there’s a little more texture, and perhaps my own history with painting has informed a lot of my writing in terms of how I write about what it means to paint, what it feels like to fail at painting. But one of the things that they both have in common is that writing and painting should both ideally be a real act of close observation, an act of trying to replicate your reality as accurately as possible. And when I say accurately I don’t necessarily mean photorealism. I mean the way that Monet accurately represented those haystacks. I just think what reality looks like to you, replicating that in a way that other people can see is a tricky and beautiful thing and involves that core tenant of science which is close observation and data collection. So I think where they intersect is just that both have trained me to look closely.
WASHINGTON SQUARE: That authenticity so energizes the book and the reading experience. Did you have fun writing it?
LEILANI: It was one hundred percent fun. I said all that about how text is meant to be communicative, but the starting point always for me has to be, I’m excited by this. And so it was a lot of fun. I almost feel like I couldn’t have written it if it wasn’t ultimately something I felt excited about or something that I felt really truly invested in. Because I do think (and some sections of the book are more obvious in this way than others) there are points that I was one hundred percent writing towards. You know, I had it in my outline, and could not wait until I got to render the scene. I need to be excited about what I’m writing toward. And so it really is a huge compliment that you compare it to poetry because I do look to the mediums that are serious about language in order to give me fuel.
WASHINGTON SQUARE: We touched on this a bit before . . . you said youwrote Luster with the intent that it be read. Did you have an idea of who, specifically, you wanted to read Luster?
LEILANI: No. I mean, I want everybody to read it. But I will say I wrote this for Black women. I’m a Black woman, and it’s very much about how a Black woman lives in defiance of that mandate of containment, and occasionally how she defers to it. And so for me it was a real act of release to write this book, and, in a way, I feel like I was hoping that other Black women would come to that
and feel that release too and hopefully feel recognition in the text. But in general, everyone who comes to the book, I appreciate. I’m writing to a lot of my loves: I’m writing to Black women, I’m writing to artists—and obviously a lot of these categories are not mutually exclusive—I’m writing to nerds, I’m writing to anyone who is trying to eat while trying to create meaningful work, I’m writing to young people who are trying to make what they can of the instability they’ve inherited. I just kind of wrote what was in my heart to write, and I hoped that when it became a book, it was honest enough and crafted deliberately enough that people would want to engage with it.
WASHINGTON SQUARE: I want to avoid asking, What’s next? So I’ll ask instead, What now? Where are you creatively now that Luster has made its way into the world?
LEILANI: You know, I honestly just feel really affirmed by the response to the book. I feel relieved and encouraged. A little freaked out, too, that there is something in the world that I am writing against. Because I started trying to write seriously when I was 23, and I’m 30 now, and most of the journey was rejection, you know? Most of it was trying to see what stuck, and trying to figure out how to rework the things that didn’t, and so having this book be public now, and engaged with in a critical way, feels like a real recognition of the care that I put into this book.
WASHINGTON SQUARE: You mentioned returning to the page. Have you been writing lately?
LEILANI: Not so much, honestly. I’m working on some short stories. That seems to be kind of a cycle I go through . . . I write short stories, then a novel, then short stories. I need variety. So I’m working on a few things, though I will say I am perhaps that precious writer who, when I’m working on something novel-length, meaning it’ll take a year or two years in order to get to the end, that time in between while it’s in-progress feels so delicate and tenuous that I have trouble talking about it. But right now, honestly, I’m not doing a ton of writing. I’m painting a ton. That side of my brain feels like it’s on fire, so I’m just riding it out.