It is a really big curse that I am right
Book Talk with Venita Blackburn: Comic-Con, digital worlds, Dead in Long Beach, California
Venita Blackburn can distill an entire relationship into 1,000 words. She says she likes to take “a huge concept and then boil it down to its oiliest nature.” Though she often writes flash fiction—she’s the author of two short story collections, How to Wrestle a Girl and Black Jesus and Other Superheroes—with her debut novel, Dead in Long Beach, California, Blackburn uses her ability to zero in on the intricacies of a minute moment and explode that attention outward, creating an inventive, arresting investigation of how a person can stall and spin out in grief.
The novel tells the story of Coral, a writer who finds her brother Jay dead in his apartment one day. Coral takes Jay’s cell phone and, over the course of the following week, sends text messages to various people in his life, impersonating him online and even creating social media accounts using his identity. In wildly original form—employing various narrators, a novel within a novel, and found text like Buzzfeed articles and fan fiction—this polyphonic book looks at the horrors that arise when grief renders life illegible to oneself.
The book is now out in paperback, and I’m re-sharing this interview, which originally appeared in Shondaland, on the novel, queer literature, horror, and the fissures that grief opens in a life and in one’s relationships.
This novel is so original, so I’d love to start by talking about your influences. Who was in mind as you got to work?
I’ve got all the juggernauts, the big ones I call them, like Toni Morrison, James Baldwin, my literary heroes that exist in my psyche. They have these powerful voices that I cannot emulate. I will never be able to be Toni Morrison, and that’s the point, right? But that’s not it. I grew up watching a ton of cartoons. I am very much an X-Men fan, a Trekkie—I love wide world-building, epic fantasy, and sci-fi stories. And I grew up in the Southern Baptist church. I was a Sunday school teacher when I was 21 years old, so even the Bible I view as a really powerful piece of literature.
You carry all that story, all those powerful narratives about humanity in these different contexts, and you get this: Dead in Long Beach, California, this wacky, cross-temporal epic story about a single kind of relationship that is coming undone. We don’t have any ways to predict this [loss], and then you’re suddenly in the tear of that relationship. It’s in that tumultuous, shaky range of grief. What happens to the brain during that time? What happens to the body? How do you navigate ordinary living in this extraordinary state?
There’s a lot I want to ask about the grief narrative. I’m curious too about the action that initiates the story: Coral takes Jay’s phone. The book explores the lies we tell and who we can become online. Is that creating positive or negative potential in Coral’s life?
That’s a question we can ask ourselves, right? This investment into these digital worlds, is it creating a positive or negative result in our own lives? I’m leaning to the latter, and not because the systems themselves are corrupt—that’s an argument in itself—but it’s the way we use them. We haven’t gotten a grasp on the tool. If you abuse it, if you don’t find a way to take control of it, you will be subjected to all kinds of corrupt intentions from whatever malicious actors that exist. We exist as different people in these different spaces, and we have become a little bit schizophrenic in that regard and conditioned to accept that as normal. What is the cost of that? How are relationships torn because of that new condition? I think it’s fascinating, so I’m always telling my students to figure out how technology is integrating into our lives and to try to write it. That’s the story that other generations cannot write.
But for this novel, I want to start with how my brain works. I’m one of those weirdos that thinks she’s always right, and it’s a curse. It is also a really big curse that I am right a lot about all kinds of things, from big to small, but I am cursed because nobody believes me, and nobody does what I say they should do. I think taking the phone was me saying, “If I could live this life, it could be better” (and also as a caveat, I’m not always right). But ultimately, sometimes you just can’t, and the outcome is going to be the same, and you’re actually creating or perpetuating suffering. You’re delaying healing because you’re prolonging this false sense of direction.
Through the various clinics, like the Clinic for Telling Lies to Avoid Pending Death, the book ruminates on cognitive dissonance. Coral has no option but to keep living in the face of impending death and doom. Does that knowledge become a mechanism for survival, or is it a method to avoid confronting some other truth?
Thank you for asking that question. I was thinking about the duty and existence of women, and also childhood and little girls too, and the way we are often conditioned to be manipulative not just to thrive in the world but as the bare minimum: survival. To keep someone else from doing us harm, we learn their expectations, which are not our own expectations, so essentially we’re lying. You have to develop a sense of deception. I think little girls are especially gifted with it because, broadly speaking, we’re not conditioned to do things with our physical selves. There’s that conditioning to be slight, to be demure, so where do you get your power? You get it from language, and what is the power of language? It can be in inspiration, it can be in deception, it can be all those things. Lying is a powerful concept within language itself, and that is something that is unique to the small girl, the small feminine existence.
The voice [of the clinics] is deeply fascinated with all of humanity, but it’s also very close to what Coral has had to do: the splitting of the self in order to satisfy the expectations of other people. How much of the true self is left in the midst of that, and how much has been gained in terms of empowerment, the ability to navigate these very white, masculine worlds that she’s in? She’s suddenly losing the tether to this previous life, the people that could see her more genuinely than anyone else. There’s a celebration of this thing, this curse-slash-gift that she’s been given within language. The different clinics say, “Okay, now let’s study this way you’ve been taught, and let’s perform it,” which is essentially the performance of oneself, and in a way that we’re told it’s beautiful, and it’s a celebration, but it’s also destructive, and it’s also giving up a lot of freedom in the same process.
You realize that you had a life in your mind planned out in these long trajectories of time that you thought were there, and then suddenly it’s not even a clean cut—it’s shattered all around you, and this becomes your everyday reality.
It’s also amplified because Coral is a public figure. She has attained success, goes to Comic-Con, and interacts with fans.
And also, the queer experience is the same thing of figuring out how to perform oneself for different audiences: for your family when you’re young, for your friends once you find a little bit of liberation in yourself. But even then, the queer community has expectations for how you should present yourself, how you should speak, and then there’s all these different layers of conforming. That creates a sense of deception.
In queer literature, there can be this interplay between seduction and destruction. You write: “Destruction is the purest form of existence, the grand finale to all other elements of life for the species.” How were you thinking about connection and intimacy in Coral’s life?
She’s bad at it, and she’s having a hard time. Even before [Jay’s death], she was not good in these varying relationships, but she was making solid efforts. It was normal to go through these potentially hopeful situations that have futures, and of course they collapse in on themselves for all the normal reasons. The book is at the stage where she’s trying to continue this other kind of life, and it speeds up. She’s cycling through people in a short amount of time very, very quickly. It’s that state of potential future but destroyed—the impossibility of it—that I wanted to keep having her butt up against every time she tries to enter into a new relationship.
Also, she chooses to go to brunch after she finds out that her brother’s committed suicide: What a crazy b-word, you know, and I love it. I love that she would do this. I’m not writing myself into these things. I don’t think I would be that person, but I love that. This is a safe place for her, or she believed it was, and I love when stories upset the safety of the ordinary. That’s when it’s terrifying to me. This is technically a horror story for me. I watched a lot of horror movies as a very young child because my mom was into that, so I was sitting around watching Species and Chucky in the ’80s when I was five, six years old, so I’m very desensitized to traditional horror. I think it’s just hilarious. It’s like watching a sitcom. But real horrors to me are these other things. It’s when I take my comfortable situations, my people that I’m expecting to be my source of warmth, and somehow that dims. That’s terrifying. This is where she finds herself in those interactions.
That blunting of the potential feels so connected to the grief narrative of the book, where she encounters this sudden loss of any future potential with her brother.
I lost my mom when I was about 25 years old. We were best friends, so that was my first close-up encounter with sudden grief and loss. You realize that you had a life in your mind planned out in these long trajectories of time that you thought were there, and then suddenly it’s not even a clean cut—it’s shattered all around you, and this becomes your everyday reality.
Even years later, you feel like you’ve gotten to a safe place of acceptance, and then something happens that was connected to that other life, and you remember what you can’t do anymore. You remember what’s not possible. You remember that phone call that you can’t make anymore, and it’s just devastating. Previous expectations suddenly become impossible. There’s no way to prepare for that. All I can do is try to apply some language to it and say this is how we are under these pressures, and isn’t it amazing? Isn’t it marvelous? Isn’t it horrifying, all at once, to be in those states? And that’s it—that’s all I’ve got for people. This is not a book about solutions. It’s about what happens when we’re here.
The book pulls numerous themes into the braid of this narration, like cognitive dissonance, or desire and destruction. The narrators also discuss this idea of accumulation and “more.” Why put “more” into contact with this grief narrative?
My favorite kinds of nonfiction work are ones that narrow down on a single idea—a book about salt, a book about land, one little aspect of our lives—and explode it to show how empires are born and die around this one little thing. For me, I was thinking about that with the idea of more, or later, or before. When did that manifest in our consciousness? The sudden idea that what is here right now is not enough, the idea of just not enough, and building an entire civilization and economic structure around it is incredible. How does that look when it’s not just money, but when it’s time, love, appreciation, validation, mercy? We didn’t think of it that way before. Just what was around was enough, just like the faith of my family, it was enough. But nope. Now we have this other thing that’s filtering into our judgments about life. That fascinates me.
This interview was lightly edited for length and clarity. Originally featured on Shondaland.com.
Order Dead in Long Beach, California and read more of Venita’s work here.
Reference Section
In other gay news, I got to write about Brown University’s queer pulp novel collection for Rhode Island Monthly. The lede was so fun to write (and publish) and I really enjoyed working on this story. The collection there is truly remarkable.
For Columbia Magazine, I reviewed Jemimah Wei’s gorgeous debut, The Original Daughter. Check it out here.
I also got to ramble about hotels for movie lovers for Orlando Style, with shout-outs for Sofia Coppola and David Lynch heads as well as a story on Marlene Dietrich’s famous gams.
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