Justin Torres wants to keep things messy

When I first read Justin Torres’s Blackouts, which won the 2023 National Book Award for Fiction, it broadened my sense of what literature can do. I had never before encountered a book that invited its reader so explicitly into the process of remaking: of queer history, of biography, of individual memory. 

In Blackouts, an unnamed narrator travels to a place in the desert called the Palace and reunites with Juan, a dying queer man the narrator met a decade prior. Juan works to pass on a project to the narrator, unearthing the stories of a historical study called Sex Variants: A Study in Homosexual Patterns, and its principal researcher, Jan Gay. Through personal history, oral tradition, medical texts, photographs, literary allusion, and narrative reinvention, Blackouts transcends the novelistic mode while paying deep homage to it. 

Central to Blackouts is the question of censure, of erasure: the erasure of Jan Gay from the historic Sex Variants study, the erasure poetry created from the pages of a medical text, the protagonist’s blackouts. Storytelling, particularly between Juan and the narrator, becomes the medium for combatting that erasure. Yet personal and cultural histories often remain fractured, appearing only in glimpses or vignettes. 

While visiting Texas State, Torres gave a craft talk called “Flashes of Light” on the use of vignettes in series, which make up both his novels. At the talk, which I attended along with other admiring MFA students, Torres questioned his own artistic motives. Why, he wondered, was he drawn to the vignette form and its tendency to deny the rising action of traditional narrative? Using examples from Tomás Rivera, Kathleen Collins, Stuart Dybek, Margaret Atwood, Jesus Colon, and others, Torres posited that a novel made up of vignettes in series, rather than a traditional causal plot, allows for a simultaneity of experience that is truer to life—an associative movement that reconstitutes the question, what’s going to happen next? as, what’s going to happen now?

What’s going to happen now? I wondered, flipping back through Blackouts one last time, waiting for Torres to arrive for our interview at Pie Society in San Marcos. I was nervous. Pizza trays clattered, the ice dispenser crunched. Would I fumble, make a fool of myself? Fanboy too hard? Justin Torres has been one of my literary idols for over a decade. His 2011 bestselling novel We the Animals, a coming-of-age novel written in vignettes, dazzled me with its visceral descriptions, shifting collective to individual point of view, and razor-sharp language when I read it in my late teens. Torres was a Stegner Fellow at Stanford while I was an undergraduate there, just beginning to take myself seriously as a writer, and his work melded a convention-breaking prose style and liberatory queer consciousness that I greatly admired. I’d get out the flattery before I started recording.

But how could I accurately capture our interview in a write-up? Blackouts had made me keenly aware that even the choices behind how to edit an interview were a process of remaking. We would be talking about a book that makes erasure poetry of ethnological interview write-ups, and I couldn’t help thinking that any interview transcription I put together, no matter how accurate or embellished with clarifying detail, would be an act of erasure. It wouldn’t contain the eye contact, made or averted; the shifting on metal stools; the hands pressed still on tabletops. It would not capture my rustling papers printed with too many questions, questions that, as soon as I was sitting across from Justin in a pizza joint, felt at once pretentiously academic and terribly obvious. 

Justin sat down. I did my best impression of a calm, normal person. We began.

Mark Bessen: When I read Blackouts, what I loved the most was that it sort of forces the reader to learn to read the book as they go. What drew you to such a collage-based and quilted structure? 

Justin Torres: My biggest hope was that readers would feel that the book was a collaboration. That they would think: “Wow, I’m more involved in what this book is than I normally am with other books. It’s up to me how I experience this. Do I want to pause here and look something up on the internet? Find out about Jan Gay? Jump to the back of the book to see if there are Endnotes or references that will help me make sense of it?” 

I think that one of the joys of literature that separates it from other aesthetic experiences, experiences of film or other visual arts, is that it’s such a collaborative process between the author’s soul and the reader’s. A private communication between my personal soul, my consciousness, and yours. Every narrative is an invitation to daydream, and as author, I’m trying to construct and direct those daydreams, but the meaning you’re making, and the images you’re forming in your mind, all of that is beyond my control. And I don’t know, I love that. 

When you work in a medium like collage or assemblage, that invitation to daydream, to actively make meaning out of disparate pieces, is much clearer to the reader, like, “Hey, these are puzzle pieces—be a part of this, make something of this.” There’s a lot of space in the book for interpretation, and that was important to me. I think collage gets at something about the world that linearity and progression don’t necessarily. 

Bessen: I’m especially interested in what you said about collage as opposite to something like the cinematic mode. Especially because the cinematic mode shows up so heavily in the two films that the characters narrate to each other. What attracted you to including the cinematic mode in this book, but not as a film script, as a purely narrated version of films?

Torres: Have you ever read Kiss of the Spider Woman [by Manuel Puig]?

Bessen: I haven’t.

Torres: Blackouts is a deathbed vigil; two people alone together in a room, one of them dying. Kiss of the Spider Woman is two people who are in prison, one of them for being a Marxist revolutionary and the other for being queer. They are stuck in the cell together and they tell each other stories. The queer character, Molina, tells these elaborate film scripts, kind of this pastiche of various noir films, a lot of really cheesy films as well, and the other character is constantly interrupting and interjecting and asking questions. It’s really lovely. I realized as I was writing Blackouts, I started writing scenes in which Juan and the narrator tell each other movie plots and I was like, “Oh my god, this is Kiss of the Spider Woman.” Then I very intentionally reworked the material to be much more of a direct homage to Kiss of the Spider Woman. So that’s how so much movie-script-like writing found its way into the book. 

I think the other way to answer your question is that the cinematic experience is very passive. You’re not in control of pace, you’re not in control of anything. You literally just sit back and absorb. Later on you can think and process and regurgitate, but while it’s happening you’re just captive to the way the narrative is unfolding, the wash of images, the pace at which the narrative is unfolding. 

In the book, when they’re creating these narratives, there’s this kind of constant interruption. The characters are in a dialogue, they’re creating these scripts together, even though one is more in charge of the film script, the other is suggesting scenes that should be there, or asking questions, or teasing the cheesiness of having a flashback at a moment of sexual climax, for instance, or whatever it is. And, again, I think that the book is constantly pointing to the ways in which narrative is a collaborative process with the reader. The two of them are creating this fictional narrative, about a kind of queer history they can’t really access. 

They can’t tell Jan’s story, they can only imagine Jan’s story, so they’re doing it together.

Bessen: These two characters, the narrator and Juan meet in a psych ward. Juan has been diagnosed, at least initially, with Puerto Rican Syndrome, and the narrator has been institutionalized for his queerness, rejected by his family. But it’s really interesting in Blackouts how Puerto Rican Syndrome is pathologized within the colonial ideology in Puerto Rico in the same way that queerness is pathologized. I’m curious if you can talk more about how the systematizing and medicalizing of otherness came together in your mind and in these characters.

Torres: Yeah, I mean, it’s interesting, I feel like the book is very ambiguous about diagnosis and why they both found themselves in the mental hospital. You might read it as they were institutionalized for these specific racist or homophobic reasons, or you might read it as they were made to feel, for various reasons, as if the world did not have space for them. The narrator is kind of forced against his will into an institution, but it’s not so clear how it all came about. Nor is it clear what exactly is going on with Juan. 

On the one hand, the ways queerness or Puerto Ricanness has been pathologized in medical history, the literalness of it, seems laughable—and yet, when you experience these old medical texts, it just shocks you. When you see something like Puerto Rican Syndrome, it’s so bonkers, it has this effect on you, like, how did this come about? And some of us know how crazy-making it is to live in a society that despises you or others you or can’t see you or accept you. The literal pathologizing of otherness drives people mad, it creates the conditions it wants to see. So it’s not like there wasn’t anything wrong—the narrator’s having these blackouts. And it’s not like Juan isn’t depressed.

The question that I think the book is hovering around is not just to laugh at medical history and say, “Oh my god, look at these barbarians who used to throw around these diagnoses, what fools they were,” but to really think about how it is that stigma affects the way that we live our interior lives, and what is crazy-making in the world, and how it feels to live in a world that can take you there. But yeah, I think I’m making this a purposefully messy answer because in the formulation of your question, it’s very neat—

Bessen: Too neat.

Torres: It’s not that I disagree with it, I want to be like, “Yes, but.” I’m always just like, “but it’s also a mess.” You know what I mean? But it’s also a mess.

Bessen: That is a really interesting point. And I think also something I loved about the book was that it muddied everything. It made the characters’ circumstances a lot more difficult to evaluate.

Juan, especially, was an intriguing character, because in biographical terms he has suffered this string of dehumanizations, and yet tonally he is very positive throughout almost the whole novel. 

Torres: Yeah.

Bessen: And so I wondered what motivated the way that you wrote how he spoke in a largely amused, cheery way, whether it was his rootedness in his queer ancestry, how much of it was drawn from other literary texts, or something else. 

Torres: It’s a great question, “Why is Juan so sanguine at the end of his life?” He’s had quite a lonely life, and it’s clear that he’s been struggling with depression, or whatever you want to call it, for most of his life. And I think that the main answer is that he’s just a very literary person, a bit of an expert in queer literature, but he’s also just very literary across the board. He has read and read and read. There’s a moment in the book where he paraphrases Kathleen Collins, about the comfort to be found in other people’s literary articulations of their solitude. What it feels like, when you’re in the depths of your solitude, when you’re in the nadir of your solitude, to come across someone else’s poetic description of a similar loneliness—

Bessen: Oh, yes, “he never heard it put so beautifully.”

Torres: Yes! And I think that’s how he’s found such equilibrium at the end of his life. He’s someone who—both temperamentally and because of the circumstances of his life, because of all he’s been through—who is not quite cut out for robust social dynamics. He’s someone who has made the choice to retreat from the world. But he hasn’t retreated into nothingness. He has retreated into an incredibly rich literary tradition, and I think that has paid dividends at the end of his life, where he can move off into the abyss without too much clinging or too much fear.

Bessen: Okay, two last questions if you’ll oblige me. And both are Jan. Because I think Jan needs more love. 

Torres: Yeah.

Bessen: I think a dominant reading of Jan’s life is one of great tragedy. And I loved that so much of the reconstruction of her biography in Blackouts is about the love in her life and about her wife Zhenya and Jan’s nudism and her writing about nudism, and about how she was really doing cultural ethnography work that was appropriated as proto-eugenicist work and in no way was that her effort. And it’s also so interesting that she was drawn to an artist, Zhenya, who was drawing animals all the time. I loved the heavy use of animal imagery in this book was, and of course in We the Animals, and I wanted to ask about your use of animals in your own writing and what you found in excavating the archive in Jan and Zhenya’s writing. 

Torres: There’s so much to say. I didn’t know anything about Jan. I had less information about Jan when I wrote this book than I do now. There was just nothing about her, and now there’s a long Wikipedia page, which is amazing. But throughout most of the writing of this I just didn’t have a lot of information about her. And what I pieced together, it did seem tragic. At least at first. Certainly, the story of the Sex Variants study is totally tragic and the fact that she dealt with alcoholism seemed quite sad, but throughout her life she was also incredibly courageous. Where that fearlessness came from, where that sense of purpose came from, I don’t know. Reading her book on nudism it seems to have been there from a very, very young age. So for me, when I think of Jan, that’s the attribute that pops first into my mind: her fearlessness, her courage. 

The linking of the animalistic imagery—it’s interesting—I hadn’t really thought about it too consciously when putting the book together. But I guess in a way the animality links back to Jan’s fascinating life, not just as a nudist, but a historian of nudism and a pioneer of the nudist movement in the US. Again, when reading her book on nudity, I remember these vivid descriptions of her as a child, raised by Victorians, clothed in these tights and weighted down and constrained. And the moment when she was able to tear off those clothes as a young girl and feel the sun on her skin: that is the animal part of us. An interest in nudism and nudity is an interest in the animal part of our body that wants to feel the sun on our skin, that wants to be natural in the world, naked as we were born. So yeah, I think that there is a connection there between some of the primal concerns in Jan’s life and our own animality. Obviously, our sexual desires fit into that too. 

Bessen: My last question is that by the end of the novel the Palace that Juan and the narrator are in is also the Place of Observation for Jan’s studies and it’s also become very briefly a sort of bath house for the narrator, and a place of great intimacy for Juan and the narrator when they hold hands. I wondered how Jan would observe them as part of her study, like the reader is observing these two characters. If you’ll allow that thought experiment to happen.

Torres: I love that. What’s interesting about these studies, and about ethnographies of any kind, whether it’s kind of activist-based ethnography or ethnography that’s being done in order to root out social harm, or stigmatizing ethnography, is that all ethnography is about structure—imposing structure, and schematics, on what actually is human and messy and chaotic. And so everyone might be asked the same set of questions, say. It’s all about method, method, method. About treating people as experiments and trying to control the conditions, so that the observations gleaned are often predetermined by the set of conditions, or by the fact that people are aware they are being observed, etc. and so that’s what you end up actually observing, somebody’s response conditioned by your presence, and your own questions. Not the questions they are asking of themselves.  

In a way, Blackouts is so messy, so unstructured, and so resistant to structure, right? It’s all about fragmentation, and putting really different genres right next to each other. Photography, erasure poetry, narrative, invented film scripts… These different art forms are not just ways of representing the world, but of posing questions as well. And it’s like, what if all that questioning is only answered with more questions? What if the goal is actually not to have anything reducible, not to have any summary or analysis? If this was a study, it would be the sloppiest study ever, and that’s maybe the point.