Raven Leilani is the author of Luster, a kinetic, award-winning debut novel whose fans include Barack Obama. Now published in paperback, it tells the story of Edie, a young black woman trying to find her way as a painter in New York City. After getting fired from an entry-level publishing job and ground down by the gig economy, Edie moves in with her middle-aged white lover, his white wife, and their (adopted) black daughter in the suburbs. Cue a plethora of razor-sharp, caustically funny insights into the politics of race, gender and desire. Leilani, 31, spoke from her home in Brooklyn.
What inspired Luster?
I wrote it when I was in NYU’s MFA [creative writing] programme, which I’d come to with an entirely different novel. When my teachers asked me whether I had any real intention behind my project and I couldn’t articulate an answer, I started Luster. I wanted to write something that felt honest and urgent. Because I was trying to scrabble together pages, I wrote in a panic and edited myself emotionally less, so the work came from a more vulnerable place. And some of the most vulnerable subjects for me, I guess, are art and intimacy and failure.
How much did you plot in advance?
I was flying by the seat of my pants. I knew I was going to write about painting and I absolutely knew that I was going to write about Edie’s experience in the middle of this open relationship, but the book kept changing as I was writing. It still feels crazy to admit this, but Edie was supposed to die.
I’m so glad she didn’t! She is such a unique force. Were there any other literary characters who helped you glimpse who she might be?
She came from an intensely personal place, but there existed in the ether these threads that introduce women who were allowed to fail and be fallible, to be sexual and make mistakes and even be complicit in their own subjugation. Toni Morrison’s Sula is a crucial text in rendering the interior lives of complicated, contradictory black women. Brit Bennett’sThe Mothers is a more contemporary example of a woman’s ambivalence and fallibility. Candice Carty-Williams’sQueenie made me feel able to write candidly about sex and yearning.
There’s a moment when Edie fantasises about being hit and then lets her older white boyfriend do just that. How have readers responded to this?
It comes up a lot. It’s one of those things where I think, in 20 years, will I look back and have qualms? But currently I’m happy I was able to represent her pleasure on the page without judgment. It’s a deeply tricky thing to write about a black woman who is inviting this kind of violence. I wanted her to be a character who has the freedom to find pleasure where she finds it, but it is, too, still quite intertwined with the fact that because she is a black woman, she experiences these loud and soft violences in her public life, and choosing it in her private life is a way to exert that control that she doesn’t have elsewhere.
Sex scenes can be tough to write. What guided you?
I wrote them in a way that was sensitive to the private logistics and the trial and error of longing, and of developing – especially as a young woman – an informed idea of what your pleasure looks like, and how to ask for it.
Authentic desire can feel so fraught as a woman, right?
Yes, extremely. You have to undo a lifetime’s worth of conditioning. The moment I turned 30, my algorithm began showing me Botox. No shaming – what makes you feel beautiful makes you feel beautiful – but that programming is so deeply insidious that the work of saying simply “this is what feels good” is still extremely radical.
Luster captures so acutely the grind of keeping body and soul together while trying to make it in a city like New York.
That was one of a handful of missions I had going into the book – not to represent the starving artist, the exhaustion, as a romance. It was important to me to talk about the roaches and the mice as opposed to the mythic end of the journey where you have the apartment in the sky.
You worked for five years in between finishing college and starting your MFA. What kept you going creatively?
I was mostly concerned with how to pay my student debt and how to pay my rent. I would come home after work and write. I remember the first time I started submitting poems – I got nothing but rejections. But I love writing so much, I was happy to be living in those worlds that I’d made.
Has it always been that way for you?
Yes. I was a solitary kid and when I started writing around eight or nine, that was how I’d create my own fun. It still is.
Tell me about your own connection to painting.
My brother was a painter, and I inherited my love of that medium from him, but I felt I couldn’t be good enough as fast as I wanted, and so for a while I didn’t paint at all. During the pandemic, I started again, and I remembered why it was my first love.
Are your paintings abstract or figurative?
Always figurative. I am obsessed with the body – with the parts that are pleasure and the parts that are pain and dysfunction. If you can draw a hand, it’s a superpower.
Do you have a writing routine?
My brain doesn’t turn completely on until the sun goes down, so I write at night, in bed – where I am right now – and to music.
What was on your playlist for Luster?
A ton of disco. I had my Diana Ross, my Sister Sledge, but I also listened to Metallica. I crave that abrasive wall of sound – it really centres me both in life and on the page.
You’ve worked in publishing. Would you say the industry’s finally getting to grips with its representation problem?
I’d say that we’re making strides but there’s still a lot of work to be done. I am optimistic, partly because we have so many writers from marginalised groups working who are incredibly brilliant, incredibly fresh and incredibly hungry.
If I asked you to name a black female writer who deserves more recognition, who would you choose?
Asali Solomon, whose book The Days of Afrekete came out recently. I don’t know that she’s underrated but I feel like she is an absolute genius. I love what she does formally and what she manages to emotionally pack into very few pages.
What books are currently on your bedside table?
Sometimes I Trip on How Happy We Could Be by Nichole Perkins, The School for Good Mothers by Jessamine Chan, How Music Worksby David Byrne, and Sheila Heti’s new novel, Pure Colour. If ever I’m stuck, I’ll pick up a book that will give me fuel. Heti’s How Should a Person Be? is a text I refer to a lot.
What did you read as a child?
The kind of books that you read when your parents just see you reading and they don’t realise what you’re reading. So Anne Rice, Laurell K Hamilton, the really sexy gothic vampire fiction – I loved those.
What writers working today do you most admire?
I would say both Zadie Smith and Katie Kitamura. I’ve been lucky that they are heroes and I’ve also got to learn from them as teachers.
Luster is published in paperback on 6 January by Pan Macmillan (£9.99). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply
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