Before my debut novel, All-Night Pharmacy , was even a twinkle in my eye, I was a poet. Sometimes I wrote short stories, rarely longer than 2,500 words. I approached everything I wrote like I was robbing a bank. Get in and get out. Who doesn’t love a tight little banger? , I assured myself. The shorter the poem, the closer to god! I couldn’t imagine writing a novel. Sixty- to one-hundred-thousand words? In service of a cohesive plot? Couldn’t be me. The closest I could get was writing a couple of stories a year and copy-pasting them into a Word doc. In 2019, an agent read some of those stories online and asked whether I had a novel. Wanting to keep the conversation going, I sent them five years’ worth of pieces and called it a “novel-in-stories.” It was sixteen-thousand words, basically the length of one long story. It was… not sellable. The stories circled similar themes—toxic sisterhood and queer coming-of-age; urban loneliness and the opioid epidemic; the gentrification of Los Angeles as seen through the eyes of a menagerie of fuckups at a skeezy dive bar—but they weren’t more than the sum of their parts. At forty-eight double-spaced pages, there was barely a sum at all. A good novel is more than a stack of bangers in a trench coat. When the agent suggested I rework the collection as a novel, I doubted I could pull it off. But I wanted to keep talking, so I agreed to give it a try (albeit with the same enthusiasm with which I tried my post-Soviet grandmother’s “American” dishes—pasta with prunes, soy sauce, and mozzarella cheese…a godless combination). I tried to convince myself that I could draft a novel the same way I drafted poems: one word at a time, with no outline, in pursuit of beauty. I re-read my favorite voice-driven fiction. Rachel Kushner’s The Flamethrowers , Bryan Washington’s Lot, Kimberly King Parsons’ Black Light , Ottessa Moshfegh’s Homesick for Another World. “I smoke on my way to the bus stop, past the spoiled Arby’s and Mr. Beezer’s dry […]
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