February 15, 2022 • 37 mins
Crime novelist S.A. Cosby on tragic masculinity, growing up poor, and what he wants people to understand about the South. Plus, Roxane talks about the important escapist pleasures of genre fiction.
Mentions:
● Razorblade Tears, by S.A. Cosby https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250252708
● Abbott Elementary: https://abc.com/shows/abbott-elementary
● The Clan of the Cave Bear, by Jean M. Auel. https://bookshop.org/books/the-clan-of-the-cave-bear-9780609610978/9780609610978
● Angel Eyes, by Eric van Lustbader https://www.ericvanlustbader.com/thrillers/angel-eyes/
● The Town (movie): https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0840361/
● Requiem for a Glass Heart, by David Lindsey
Credits: Curtis Fox is the producer. Yessenia Moreno is the intern. Production help from Kaitlyn Adams. Theme music by Taka Yasuzawa and Alex Sugiura.
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:01):
Hey would it do Baby Booth, which I think about
this low film here distracting makes our jobs harder, but
exciting were about to be on TV because they are
covering undefunded, poorly managed public schools in America. I can't
say that I watch much network television these days. It's
just not nearly as interesting as what's happening on cable
(00:21):
and on streaming networks. However, that has changed with Abbott
Elementary on ABC. It's an office style foe documentary about
a group of teachers in an urban, mostly black elementary school.
It is incredibly heartwarming and earnest and sharp and funny.
(00:42):
And the creator and start of this wonderful show is
Quinta Branson. I'm Janine Tags and teaching here at Abbit
Elementary for a year now. The stamp here is incredible
family films happenings. It's just a really funny show and
the humor is smart. It never punches down, and it
(01:03):
really highlights the challenges of teaching, especially in a country
where education is not always prioritized. So I appreciate both
that aspect and the cast of characters. The sublime share
Ree Ralph is in the show. There's a woman who
plays the principle who is just absolutely terrible at her job.
There's a love interest. It's all just a really wonderful combination.
(01:27):
It is the one TV show other than Grand Crew,
which is also on network television, that I am tuning
into every week from Luminary. This is the Roxanne Gay Agenda,
the Bad Feminist Podcast of your Dreams. I am Roxanda Gay,
your favorite bad feminist. On this week's agenda. Genre fiction,
(01:50):
as in you know, romance, spies, novels, mysteries, horror thrillers.
I love genre fiction. I am extremely well versed in
the works of Tom Clancy and Clive Cussler, at least
their works from the eighties and nineties when they wrote
them themselves. I love a John Sandford thriller. John Scalz
has written some of my favorite space offers. Neddia cora
(02:12):
For's imagination is beguiling and magnificent, and we just read
her novel Nor in my book club. There is just
something so pleasurable about stories that transport you into another life,
another place, another universe. The first genre book I read
ever was The Clan of the Cave Bear by Jean All.
My parents didn't really monitor my reading. If it wasn't
(02:33):
a book, it was totally fine, and so I was,
as you might imagine, reading well beyond my years. Clan
of the Cave Bear is this absolutely epic, part romance novel,
parts sweeping family story, part action adventure, but set in
prehistoric times. So there's this orphan girl who's chro magnet
and taken in by a clan of Neanderthals, and the
(02:53):
novel follows her over the course of her young life.
It was how I first learned about sex, which at
the time I assumed only happened on luxuriously soft bear hides,
which happens in the novel. The series ended up being
six novels and all, and yes, I read all of
them as soon as they were released, and as is
the case with both series, the quality began to diminish
(03:15):
after the third novel or so, but still the books
were engrossing, as were all of the other books I
was reading in those days. There was a lot of Heinlein.
Eric Louspotter wrote this incredible spy novel called Angel Eyes,
with the most ridiculously convoluted plot that I can barely explain,
and still the payoff was absolutely worth it. And then
(03:36):
there was this other spy novel, equally dark and twisty,
called Requiem for a Glass Heart by David Lindsay. I
can't tell you how many times I have read and
reread these novels. I loved Requiem for a Glass Heart
so much I would eventually write a short story by
the same name. A completely different story, mind you, but
still a homage. Nonetheless, Back when I was reading these books,
(03:57):
and certainly still today, I was reading to escape, and
I was reading to escape in ways that literary fiction
would not accommodate. Now I love literary fiction, I read it,
I write it, but it isn't necessarily escapist to read
many of the topics these novels tackle, however, brilliantly. When
I want to just lose myself, when I want to
(04:17):
forget about this world, genre fiction offers that respite, and now,
more than ever, I am needing a lot of respite.
I think we all are. Recently, after so many years,
Justice Brier decided to retire from the Supreme Court, and
now people are holding Biden to one of his campaign
promises that he would put a black woman on the
Supreme Court, as he should it's about time. It makes
(04:40):
no sense that it is only today that's such a
thing as possible. And of course, as you might imagine,
an absolutely predictable, utterly disappointing discourse has arisen where people
from all political stripes are showing how they really feel
about black women who enter echelons they don't think we
belong in. It's here that they don't value our intellectual
(05:02):
capabilities or our judgment. And so we're talking about affirmative
action again, and it's being conjured as if the current
composition of the Supreme Court is not ample evidence of
affirmative action working so very well for white people, or
even Catholics, of which there are six presently on the bench.
What's even more disappointing is that people are expressing these
(05:25):
doubts and concerns and displaying this bigotry without apology and
without any kind of self awareness, you know, and sometimes
it's your own allies. Of course, I want to escape
all of this, and thankfully reading remains clutch. It was
a beautiful day for a funeral. Snow white clouds rolled
(05:48):
across an azure sky. Despite it being the first week
of April, the air was still crisp and cool. Of course,
since this was Virginia, it could be inning buckets in
the next ten minutes, then hot as the Devil's backside
an hour later. Mm hmmm, that was sexy. You are
listening to the audio book of Razor Blade Tears by s. A.
(06:12):
Cosby read by Adam Laser White. That novel came out
in July, and I've read it three or four times now.
It was my favorite book last year and frankly in
recent memory. And that's saying something because I've actually read
a lot of really great books. So Razor Blade Tears
is what I would call, I think a revenge thriller.
(06:35):
Here's the premise. There are two dads, one black and
one white, and their sons were murdered their sons. Of course,
we're in a relationship together. These fathers were never accepting
of their children when they were alive. They just somehow
couldn't wrap their minds or their hearts around the queerness.
But when the children die, they take up murder investigations
after the official investigation goes quiet and it's clear that
(06:58):
no one's really interested in solving their murders. The writing
is so strong and the storytelling is even stronger. And
what I really love is that Cosby creates a space
for these fathers to redeem themselves without absolving them of
the ways they failed their sons. His novels are thrilling,
insightful testimonies about Southern life and the pitfalls of toxic masculinity.
(07:22):
These novels examined the intersections between race and class and
gender and so much more. The author of Razor Blade Tears,
Essay Cosby is my guest this week. Sean, thank you
so much for coming on the Roxanne Gay Agenda. How
are you. I'm well, and thank you so much for
having me. I am honored to be here. I've been
a huge, huge fan of you for a long time,
(07:44):
and so the fact that you read the book and
not only read it but enjoyed it is so incredibly
gratifying and also incredibly surreal to me as a writer.
So I totally appreciate that incredibly, man, I loved this book.
As soon as I finished it, I was like, I
want the rights to option this and of us they
were already taken as they should be. Um, I would
(08:07):
love to know where did this story come from? How
did you come to this place because it was a
premise I really had never seen before. Yeah, So there
were two uh inspirations for the story, one sort of comical,
one very serious. The comical inspiration was I was talking
to a friend of mine who's a writer. We were
talking about being men of certain ages. It started out
(08:30):
as we were just kind of commiserating about things we
could do back in our twenties that we can't do now,
or things that we did in our twenties that we
wouldn't do now, and and so I started thinking about
regret and redemption and what does that look like when
you're middle age and when you have maybe more yesterday's
and tomorrows. And so we kind of laughed it off,
(08:50):
but but that idea stayed in the back of my head.
The more serious inspiration I have a close relative who
um came out when he was about forty one, and
we're about the same age, and so it's one of
the situations when we were kids, we all knew he
was gay, and most of us kids, most of our cousins,
(09:10):
we didn't care because he had a car so he
could drive us places. So it was like whatever, man,
it wasn't an issue. The calculations of children, like what
can he do for me? All Right, we're good, right,
It's like you're going to tasty freeze. Okay, that's your boyfriend.
That's fine. You know. It's like if we get milkshakes,
it's gonna be all right. So when he finally came
out his parents did, it didn't go well, and uh,
(09:34):
he and I ended up hanging out later on that night,
and I took him out for a beer and we
were talking over the beer and he said to me,
and it just and this was like I said several
eight years ago, but it stuck. It burned itself in
my head, he said to me. He said, maybe I
should have just kept it to myself, and something about
just the the defeat in his voice. It it hurt me.
(09:58):
I couldn't imagine what it was like to not be
loved unconditionally by people who are supposed to love you unconditionally.
And so this relative who just wanted to be himself,
he was tired of lyne. He was tired of coming
home from Atlanta with his boyfriend and saying, oh, this
is my roommate. You know, they've been roommates for twenty years.
(10:21):
We all know what's going on, and yet he felt
like he had to hide himself, and it just it
just made me so sad. And so when I started
to write my second book, I decided I was going
to confront those things. And the only way I knew
how to do it through the writing that I find
most comfortable with his crime fiction. That empathy, that sense
(10:43):
of recognizing that everyone deserves unconditional love and that sometimes
they don't get it, really comes through in the novel,
especially as we see these fathers come to terms with
their failures and then try to at least find justice
for their children. And so I was really intrigued by
(11:04):
telling a really emotional story through the lens of crime fiction.
And so, how did you balance the demands of the
genre of crime fiction, you know, action packed, fast paced
twists and turns, and then the emotional component which never
really went away, not only in terms of these fathers
(11:24):
and their sons, but in terms of Ike and his
marriage and his grandchild and not his grandchild, and the
way that there were a lot of different relationships that
had to be negotiated navigated while this thriller is also happening. Yeah,
it's a great question for me. I feel like all
fiction is crime fiction to a certain next day. And
(11:46):
I love literary fiction, but every novel, every novel of fiction,
has the possibility of being crime fiction, because every novel
has the possibility of someone breaking either man's law or
moral um. One one of my favorite books is A
Thousand Acres by James Smiley. Oh my god, it's so good.
I love that book. It's reimagining King Lear. But there's
(12:08):
crimes that happened in that book. There's sexual assault, there's
a planned murder that almost takes place. And so I
think crime fiction for me has always been the lens
through which I kind of want to examine things, and
it's the way I think it's probably has to do
with my upbringing, but I think that the idea of
(12:30):
crime and how we come to that place, you know,
to me, every crime is a confession of pain, and
so how we come to that place is so interesting
to me. And so when we talk about Ike and
Buddy Lee, I wanted to examine it in a way
that was, like you said, exciting and twisty and action pack,
but also in a way that allowed readers to go
(12:50):
in deside these characters minds. I mean nobody wants a
three sermon. You add a little honey to make the
medicine go down, to quote Mary Poppins, And so I
wanted I wanted to add that honey. Um. But a
couple about ten years ago, I went to a lecture
that Walter Mosley Gate. It was a lecture on how
(13:11):
to write a novel in a year, and he gave
one of the best piece of the advice I've ever
heard as far as writing genre fictional crime fiction. He said,
if you got a detective, he said, you damn seel
better come up with stuff for him to do or
here to do when they're not detecting. He said, you
got to flesh out their life outside of the case.
(13:32):
And so when I started to stay and right raised
bay tears, I thought about that. I was like, well,
what is Buddy Lee doing when he's not on this
mission of revenge? What is Ike doing when he's not
on this mission of revenge? What do they find in
their lives as comforting for them? And how is that
going to intersect with this revenge mission that they're on.
And so for me, building that background, I don't wanna
(13:55):
call it a noise, but building that background chatter, so
to speak, helps make a more complete picture, and it
still allows me to talk about the things I want
to talk about. You know, that's an interesting question of
what are they doing when they're not doing the primary
and thing that they do in a novel? Finding answers
to that question through the pros. Really, I thought worked
(14:15):
very well here, and I was also struck by the
ways in which this novel engages with masculinity. You know,
we hear a lot about toxic, macular masculinity, but you
favor the phrase tragic masculinity. You say that all of
your work aims to explore tragic masculinity. I would love
for you to just elaborate on that. What do you
(14:35):
mean when you say tragic masculinity. I definitely think there
is toxic masculinity, and toxic masculinity and incorporates misogyny, patriarchal sensibility,
and so and so forth. But for me, the idea
of tragic masculinity is when your idea of masculinity hurts you.
It injures you on an emotional on a psychological level,
(14:59):
um not just a physical level. And I grew up
I grew up in an environment that was hyper masculine
that was hyper charged with that idea. You know, I
grew up behind a bar. I grew up behind what
we call it had shot outs. So I grew up
so when I was like thirteen and fourteen, I was
sneaking into as a bar, you know, sneaking through a fence,
seeing people play pools, seeing people drink beer, seeing how
(15:21):
these men that I knew expressed themselves on the weekend
after a week of working, you know, construction jobs, or
a week of working on a on a fishing boat,
and you're in town and you've got some money in
your pocket. And as black men, this idea that I
have to re establish my masculinity, I have to re
establish my identity. And so this is I think idea,
(15:45):
especially in the South among black men, that you have
to double, triple, quadruple your manliness because society at large
sometimes it makes you feel less than. And so growing
up I saw that expressed violently many times. And so
for me, that was the idea of tragic masculinity, that
it hurts you. It hurts you on a psychic level.
(16:07):
You know, it makes you feel like you have to
fight every single day just to prove you're a man,
you have to defend your idea of masculinity against somebody
else's attack. And what I learned growing up as an adult,
after a lot of like soul searching, was that my
idea or my definition of what is masculinity is not
(16:27):
affected by someone else's that that's my individual path I
have to walk. And I think when you don't come
to that realization, it becomes tragic. I've seen so many,
so many family members, so many friends that fall into
that trap, that make very poor decisions and aren't able
to express this idea or articulated that they're hurting, that
(16:49):
they're scared, that they you know, they feel denigrated. You know,
it doesn't matter. How like, for instance, where I live
in Virginia, one of the big employers is the Nave Shipyard.
It's a good job, it's a sixty hour week job.
You can make good money. But as a black man
or a black woman, you're still black when you go
to that job, you're still fighting to get recognized, you're
(17:11):
still fighting to get a promotion. And so I used
to see again the men that I knew, you know,
when they got denied that promotion, when they got dressed
down for something they didn't do, and how they expressed
it was violence, you know, you know, And and so
I became determined when I decided I want to be
a writer, and I finally figured out what kind of
(17:31):
right I wanted to be. I wanted to talk about that.
I wanted to tell the stories. I wanted to articulate
the idea of tragic masculinity without absolving men of the
guilt and the responsibility that comes with that. How did
you get to this place where you have this perspective
unmasculinity and where you understand that your lived masculinity doesn't
(17:56):
take away from anyone else's and the way others lived
through their masculinity doesn't diminish yours. It has a lot
of to do. My mom, my mom, My mom raised me.
Her and my dad separated. I have older brother, Um,
and they separated when he was sixteen and I was
like seven. And my mother was a very very intelligent person.
She was an intellectually curious in a way that is
(18:19):
not harmful, like saying Joe rogan Um. She she she
was legitimately intellectually curious. She you know, she used to
make us read Greek mythology, and yeah, and if we
wanted to have like money to go to the store,
we had to like quote a Greek mythology story, so
I had to talk about her Festus or Aphrodite or
(18:41):
something like that. And she was determined that we were
gonna have this more broad intellectual background than she had um.
And so I learned from her that there are certain
things that men do that they think they can get
away with, that that the world is hard for black people,
(19:01):
but it's hardness for black women, and that as a
black man, you have to grow up and understand that
not only are you going to get advantages sometimes over
the black women that you surround yourself with, but that
there are things that you're gonna do that you don't
think hurt them, that are hurting them. My mom was
adamant about that. She really handled at home. But I
(19:21):
wasn't a perfect child, and you know, my teenage years
and my young adult years, I really didn't get it
until I had a relationship with someone in my twenties
and she was someone who was struggling with mental health issues.
And I realized, after four years of this relationship, everything
that I was doing, everything that I thought the man
was supposed to do was hurting her. I was trying
(19:45):
to take charge of the situation. I was trying to
fix this situation. And we broke up, and I remember
she said to me, She's like, I love you, but
you can't fix me because there's nothing wrong with me.
You think there's something wrong with me. And so as
a man, as a twenty five your man, that was
a wake up call for me. It really was. I
was like, wow, I I can't judge you by this
(20:08):
arbitrary masculine ideal that I have. And so that was
kind of this beginner's path where I was like, I
gotta learn how to fix this, because if I want
to move forward in relationship with somebody, I can't keep
doing this. I have to be self aware of this.
I started reading uh different books, um you know. I
started reading like philosophy, uh different Eastern philosophy books. I read,
(20:31):
uh you know, uh Michael Eric Dyson's books. I'm a
huge fan of his. Um. So I started reading about
stuff like that and just talking to different people. And
so it finally got to a point where I figured
out for me what I thought was the appropriate way
to handle my own masculinity. But it's still something I
think I have a problem when I fight every day
(20:54):
to not uh, for instance, with my wife, I fight
every day to not solve her problems, to just listen
to her problem. Let me tell you something. And I
had that same fight with my wife, just like, all right,
you know what, She's not asking me to fix this,
She's just sharing some issues that she's having because my
(21:16):
natural instinct, for whatever reason, is Okay, here are three solutions,
which one are we going to implement? And she's just like,
I'm not looking to you to solve this. And I
take that lesson humbly. Yeah. It's like my wife. She
told me one time she was she runs her own business,
and so she was telling me about some problems she
was having with her business, and she runs the funeral home.
(21:38):
She was telling me about some problems she was having
with a funeral home, and I just went instantly the
first time she ever told me we weren't married, were
just dating, and I just went to like, I don't
know if you ever seen the movie The Town with
Ben Affleck and Jamie Renner, but there's a scene in
that movie where Ben Athlete comes to Jeremy Renner and
I'm not gonna try to do the Boston accent. But
he says, you know, I need your help. We're gonna
(21:59):
hurt some people and we can't never talk about again.
And Jamy Reno's character is like, well, who are we
gonna take? That was my mentality for so long, like, oh,
somebody bothering you? Where are they point me in that direction?
You know, I'm a hammer. I need a nail. And
so even after all that work, I thought I had
done all that, reading all that and trying to better
(22:20):
myself in that respect because I love her and I
cared about it and somebody heard her feelings. I reverted
back to that. I reverted back to, Okay, well I'm
gonna go and feed him his teeth at something like,
you know, you can't. You can't do that. As much
as you would like to, as much as some people
probably deserve it, you can't do that. And so that's
a lesson. I still continually try to learn, and so
(22:42):
am I writing. I understand I think with fiction, and
I see this discourse a lot. I understand people like
Buddy Lee and I that doesn't mean I sympathize with them.
And I think some people don't understand that distance that
as a writer, you can empathize, you can understand a
character or where they're coming from, that does not mean
(23:04):
that you're absolving them of guilt. That does not mean
you're endorsing what they're doing. And so for me, my
writing is a way for me to continually exercise these
ghosts of past toxic and tragic masculinity. You know, I
think that's such an important distinction that you can empathize
and understand without justifying behaviors and without suggesting that it's okay.
(23:27):
And and that comes through I must say throughout Razor
Blade Tears, I can buddy, we're clear on the kinds
of men they are. And I actually enjoyed that, and
I really appreciated who they were and and I think
I can particular was a work in progress and understood
he was a work in progress, but was like, you
know what, I'm a revert until I handle this. And
(23:49):
his wife is even like you go ahead and revert
back to who you used to be and then come
back to the normal. You know. I think a lot
also when I'm thinking about fiction about place, and you
are from the South and you set your novels in
the South. What do you wish people understood or knew
(24:11):
about the South that isn't part of the cultural narrative.
The main thing I wish people knew is that the
South is not the sole providence of neo Confederate apologies,
That there are black people that live here, That there
are black people who's generally who can trace their their
families back generations. You know, a lot of times you'll
see discourse on social media when a Southern state does
(24:33):
something politically politically stupid, and you'll see a lot of
discourse like, ah, well, don't go to Tennessee or don't
go to Virginia. They got what they deserve this, And
it's like, that's not the only people that live here.
You know, those people are in power right now, but
there are millions of people who don't think that way.
(24:54):
And for whatever reason, these people are running the show
right now. But that doesn't mean that we all think
that way. They were all this homogeneous monolith. We're not.
You know, I always tell people in interviews that I'm
a son of the South, you know, and I don't
I'm not ashamed of that. Virginia is my heart and
my home. But to quote or, to paraphrase James Baldwin,
because I love the South, I reserve the right to
(25:17):
criticize her, you know, because I know what it can be.
You know, I've seen the best of what it can be,
and I've seen the worst. I've seen the beauty and
the grotesque, nous. And so when I talk about the South,
I want people to understand that this is not a
place that we are here under duress. You know. I
got into an argument with a writer one time who
(25:38):
was from Chicago, and this writer basically said, y'all, people
down in the South, I don't know how y'all live
down there. Y'all y'all let them do anything and do
all that, and you know, it's just I couldn't be me,
couldn't be me, And there's this city mouse country mouse
mentality sometimes. And I told that person, I said, you know,
you grew up in the area in Chicago. Yeah, there's
violence in this crime and this racism everywhere. I said,
(25:59):
but you grew up in a place that in many
ways was a black utopia. You went to all black school,
you had a black alderman, you saw black cops, you
saw a black barber. But with the majority of the
people in your life were black. I grew up in
a place where all the sheriff deputies are white, all
the county representatives of white. We didn't get into a
Plumberts seventeen because the building inspector was white and there
(26:22):
was a certain environmental test that you had to pass
before you could dig a well that my family couldn't afford.
We couldn't afford the money to pay for the test. Now,
on the other hand, that inspector would sometimes give a
white family a pass. Well, you just pay it when
you can. And so we've experienced that. And I told
this writer, I said, you know, I think you have
this misunderstanding. They were all down here and build overalls,
(26:44):
sucking on Hassey's and that's couldn't be further from the truth.
You know, Zoro Neil Hurston come from the South, Alice
Walker comes from the South, and it's Jay Gaines come
from the South. To finish up the conversation we had,
I said, look, I've been called the N words seven
times in my life to my face, and I WoT
they asked all seven times. That's what it takes to
live in the South. That's what it means to live here,
(27:07):
you know, we fight for this land. Every scrap of
land that some boy in a Confederate flag had walks upon,
somebody that looks like me, has bled, died, and worked on,
and I'd be damned if I'm gonna see one inch
to them. And so that's the thing I try to
express in both ways overt and subtle to people when
they read my books, that the South belongs to a
multitude of people. It's not just the Dukes of Hazzard
(27:31):
that really comes through. And I think it's important because
a lot of times people assume that if we're not
talking about urban centers, that black people are sort of
still being held hostage, and no, in fact, black people
are everywhere, and to erase the stories of black people
who aren't in Chicago or Atlanta, which is of course
(27:55):
the South, but is a black center or a d
C or l A I inc. Really does a disservice
to what you as you know, the multitudes as you
mentioned of blackness. And so I think it's really interesting
that you're exploring those multitudes and saying like this land
belongs to both Ike and Buddy and people between the
(28:15):
two of them. Now two of your models I think
we're Flannery O'Connor and William Faulkner who were um passionate
racists but also incredible writers. And how do you negotiate
those realities? Because I'm a fan of Flannery O'Connor as well.
I think her short stories are just phenomenal and I
(28:38):
never forget who she is when I'm reading. And so
how do you managed to hold multiple truths about these
authors when you're thinking about their work. I think for
me personally, it is the suspension of disbelief to a
certain extent, Like Flannery o'conno, for us, I have to separate,
you know, the virulent racism in her private letters from
(29:00):
the very raisor sharp insights into white racism and white
races in a like, say, a story like Revelations, And
it's hard, it's hard to reconcile that the person who
wrote Revelations, who is so adroitly addressing the hypocrisy of
the white Christian Southerner to the point where this woman
(29:22):
sees a revelation in the pig style and still in Heaven,
is segregated the revelation in her mind, it's epiphany she's having,
it's still a segregated heaven, that person who can make
that observation but also can write a letter or like
I wish he's black. So just shut up about this,
over right. It's hard. It's difficult, Um, I tried to.
(29:42):
I think it's it's the idea that I I have
to separate the art from the artists to talk about
William Faulkner. I grew up reading Faulkner when I was
like thirteen and fourteen, you know, I read Light in
August and Absalom Absalom, and that's how a bunch of
a nerd I was. Nobody made me read those. They
weren't like school assignments. I was like, I'm gonna read
(30:02):
these very difficult books with this experimental language. I'm gonna
try it. And it was, you know, I was, I
was mesmerized. Um. But at the same time, you know,
you have to realize that he was a man of
the South who who accepted to a certain extent the
way that his Southern experience was, and he thought that
was the way it should be for everybody else. When
(30:24):
you read these novels as a black person, it's hard,
But at the same time, there are truths within that
that you have I wanna say, have to, but that
you can identify. There's a certain mentality that is unique
to the South that I think it comes through in
Playnery Econnor's work and William Falcon works and writers like
William Gay or Harry Crews or Charles Willaford or Ernest
(30:47):
Jay Gaines or Alice Walker. That is germane is specific
to where I come from. You know, when you read
uh about Joe Christmas in Light in August, you know,
and spoil alert, Joe Christmas is a mixed race child
passing from white. That idea is not foreign to me.
That idea is not something that like shocks me. I
(31:09):
have relatives on my mom's side that I know are
passing to this day. I understand that idea. At the
same time, you know, again, like you said, you have
to be realistic about who these people were in their
private lives, and it's hard, you know. It's like, I
love The Usual Suspects. That's one of my favorite movies.
(31:32):
It's one of my favorite scripts. But god Lee, you know,
Brian Singer directed in Kevin Spaces and and there's just
a lot of it there. But when it when it
comes on TNT. I watch it because I have a
specific engagement and specific interaction and nostalgia with that movie
(31:54):
that they're horrible, disgusting activities can't take away. And I
think that's the same thing with and O'Connor. When I
read A good Man, it's hard to find and I've
read that story a hundred times. I have an interaction
in a connection with that story that can't be sulliyed
by what she thought privately, because in that moment, I
(32:15):
am in that situation. I'm on the side of the
road with that family. I see the misfit, I see
the grandmother that won't shut up. You know. It's like
it's like when you go see a movie a bunch
of black folks and people are talking to the screen.
It's because, yeah, I want to tell her and that
that story stop talking. He's going to shoot you. Shut up.
(32:37):
So you're in that moment. And then like when you
close the cover of the book and I you know,
I realized that flaner connor like this. It was not
a very nice person. Those two things are separate. It's
it's difficult. I think it's more difficult for a person
of color than it is to somebody else. I agree.
I think that marginalized people really have to do a
(32:59):
heavier lift when it comes to separating the art from
the artist or keeping it all in context, as I
find that I can't really separate, but I can just
contextualize and and try to make sense of it that
way and still appreciate what someone like a Flannery O'Connor
has to say. And that's a lift that you know,
(33:20):
people white people in general are not going to have
to make, and quite frankly, it's a lift that they
don't make. But when it comes to race, sexuality, gender identity,
I think a lot of us can't set those parts
of ourselves aside, and so we have to bring them
with us and find ways of appreciating something despite the
(33:40):
flaws of its creator, which you know exactly. So, how
are you sitting in this moment where you've written basically
two novels and two years and published two novels in
two years and your books are doing very well? Um,
Blacktop Waste Land is being adapted for film, Razor Blade
(34:02):
Tears is being adapted for film. I know that movies
inform a lot of how you think about your novels.
How is this moment for you and are you also
just tangentially are you involved in the films. I think
it's interesting. The moment itself is wonderful, you know, it's
but you know it's funny. It's also can be stressful
(34:23):
because I think, growing up poor, I have this tendency
to want to make all the hay I can while
the sun is shining, you know, and I have to
remind myself to step back and enjoy the moment, enjoy
the fruits of this labor, instead of taking on project here,
a project there. I have. When we sold Blacktout Wasteline,
(34:46):
my agent was like, well, do you want me to
look for other opportunities things that you When I said, yeah, everything,
bring it all, I'll do it because I just I
couldn't believe that this was happening, and I was just
so ready for the other shoe to drop. So my
mindset was like, I gotta but I gotta make all
this money. I gotta make this money now, so I
will write this, you know, I will work with this
person to do a kid's novel, or I'll do this
(35:07):
thing here, I'll I'll write this whatever project you want
me to do. I'm gonna do it because I gotta
make all this money. I gotta work really hard, because
I've worked hard on my life. You know, before I
became a writer, I worked sixty hours a week as
a hardware associate at a manager of a hardware store.
And so it's like, I just have this. It's funny.
People call it work ethic, but it's just fear. It's
just fear. I don't want to be I don't want
(35:29):
to be hungry. I don't like it. I don't want
to I don't I don't want to have to choose
between gas and the light bill and so. And even
though my wife runs a business and you know, we're
you know, even before the books took off, we were
doing okay, I just had that deep seated fear. And
so right now I'm learning to enjoy the moment. I'm
learning to kind of sit back and look at it
(35:49):
and say, hey, this is cool, this is fun. Um.
And as far as being involved with the movies, I
am not. Like I knew my limitations, so I know
what I can do and what I can't do. UM.
But the people that are working on that are have
been very complimentary and have been very open and giving
to me. I've read the script form Black Tip Waste
(36:12):
Land and it's wonderful. Um, and they're working on the
script for Razorblade. Now. They asked me questions, you know,
which they don't have to. You know, they paid me
the money, so they could just tell me shut up.
But they do involved me in the process. But no,
there was a there was a point where somebody asked
that I want to write the screenplay, and I was like,
I've never written a screenplay. And you know, this is
Jared Bruckhammer Films. There's a lot of money. I don't
(36:33):
want to mess it up, So y'all go ahead with that.
So we can't write my book. But um, that being said,
I did a project. I can't talk about it yet,
but I did a project. It was very similar to
a screenplay, and so now I've kind of got an
idea that maybe I may try to write a screenplay,
an original one later on down the road. I say, Cosby,
(36:54):
thank you so much for joining me. I could talk
to you for hours. You are endlessly interest thing and
you also have a great voice. Um. You can keep
up with me and the podcast on social media on
Twitter at our g a Y and Instagram at Roxanne
Gay seven four. Our email is Roxanne Gay Agenda at
(37:16):
gmail dot com. Please feel free to reach out and
share what you're thinking about the show from Luminary. The
Roxanne Gay Podcast is produced by Curtis Fox. Our intern
is yeseniel Moreno production support is provided by Caitlin Adams.
I am Roxanne Gay, your favorite bad feminist. Thank you
(37:38):
for listening, and Happy birthday, Caitlin
Hey would it do Baby Booth, which I think about
this low film here distracting makes our jobs harder, but
exciting were about to be on TV because they are
covering undefunded, poorly managed public schools in America. I can't
say that I watch much network television these days. It's
just not nearly as interesting as what's happening on cable
(00:21):
and on streaming networks. However, that has changed with Abbott
Elementary on ABC. It's an office style foe documentary about
a group of teachers in an urban, mostly black elementary school.
It is incredibly heartwarming and earnest and sharp and funny.
(00:42):
And the creator and start of this wonderful show is
Quinta Branson. I'm Janine Tags and teaching here at Abbit
Elementary for a year now. The stamp here is incredible
family films happenings. It's just a really funny show and
the humor is smart. It never punches down, and it
(01:03):
really highlights the challenges of teaching, especially in a country
where education is not always prioritized. So I appreciate both
that aspect and the cast of characters. The sublime share
Ree Ralph is in the show. There's a woman who
plays the principle who is just absolutely terrible at her job.
There's a love interest. It's all just a really wonderful combination.
(01:27):
It is the one TV show other than Grand Crew,
which is also on network television, that I am tuning
into every week from Luminary. This is the Roxanne Gay Agenda,
the Bad Feminist Podcast of your Dreams. I am Roxanda Gay,
your favorite bad feminist. On this week's agenda. Genre fiction,
(01:50):
as in you know, romance, spies, novels, mysteries, horror thrillers.
I love genre fiction. I am extremely well versed in
the works of Tom Clancy and Clive Cussler, at least
their works from the eighties and nineties when they wrote
them themselves. I love a John Sandford thriller. John Scalz
has written some of my favorite space offers. Neddia cora
(02:12):
For's imagination is beguiling and magnificent, and we just read
her novel Nor in my book club. There is just
something so pleasurable about stories that transport you into another life,
another place, another universe. The first genre book I read
ever was The Clan of the Cave Bear by Jean All.
My parents didn't really monitor my reading. If it wasn't
(02:33):
a book, it was totally fine, and so I was,
as you might imagine, reading well beyond my years. Clan
of the Cave Bear is this absolutely epic, part romance novel,
parts sweeping family story, part action adventure, but set in
prehistoric times. So there's this orphan girl who's chro magnet
and taken in by a clan of Neanderthals, and the
(02:53):
novel follows her over the course of her young life.
It was how I first learned about sex, which at
the time I assumed only happened on luxuriously soft bear hides,
which happens in the novel. The series ended up being
six novels and all, and yes, I read all of
them as soon as they were released, and as is
the case with both series, the quality began to diminish
(03:15):
after the third novel or so, but still the books
were engrossing, as were all of the other books I
was reading in those days. There was a lot of Heinlein.
Eric Louspotter wrote this incredible spy novel called Angel Eyes,
with the most ridiculously convoluted plot that I can barely explain,
and still the payoff was absolutely worth it. And then
(03:36):
there was this other spy novel, equally dark and twisty,
called Requiem for a Glass Heart by David Lindsay. I
can't tell you how many times I have read and
reread these novels. I loved Requiem for a Glass Heart
so much I would eventually write a short story by
the same name. A completely different story, mind you, but
still a homage. Nonetheless, Back when I was reading these books,
(03:57):
and certainly still today, I was reading to escape, and
I was reading to escape in ways that literary fiction
would not accommodate. Now I love literary fiction, I read it,
I write it, but it isn't necessarily escapist to read
many of the topics these novels tackle, however, brilliantly. When
I want to just lose myself, when I want to
(04:17):
forget about this world, genre fiction offers that respite, and now,
more than ever, I am needing a lot of respite.
I think we all are. Recently, after so many years,
Justice Brier decided to retire from the Supreme Court, and
now people are holding Biden to one of his campaign
promises that he would put a black woman on the
Supreme Court, as he should it's about time. It makes
(04:40):
no sense that it is only today that's such a
thing as possible. And of course, as you might imagine,
an absolutely predictable, utterly disappointing discourse has arisen where people
from all political stripes are showing how they really feel
about black women who enter echelons they don't think we
belong in. It's here that they don't value our intellectual
(05:02):
capabilities or our judgment. And so we're talking about affirmative
action again, and it's being conjured as if the current
composition of the Supreme Court is not ample evidence of
affirmative action working so very well for white people, or
even Catholics, of which there are six presently on the bench.
What's even more disappointing is that people are expressing these
(05:25):
doubts and concerns and displaying this bigotry without apology and
without any kind of self awareness, you know, and sometimes
it's your own allies. Of course, I want to escape
all of this, and thankfully reading remains clutch. It was
a beautiful day for a funeral. Snow white clouds rolled
(05:48):
across an azure sky. Despite it being the first week
of April, the air was still crisp and cool. Of course,
since this was Virginia, it could be inning buckets in
the next ten minutes, then hot as the Devil's backside
an hour later. Mm hmmm, that was sexy. You are
listening to the audio book of Razor Blade Tears by s. A.
(06:12):
Cosby read by Adam Laser White. That novel came out
in July, and I've read it three or four times now.
It was my favorite book last year and frankly in
recent memory. And that's saying something because I've actually read
a lot of really great books. So Razor Blade Tears
is what I would call, I think a revenge thriller.
(06:35):
Here's the premise. There are two dads, one black and
one white, and their sons were murdered their sons. Of course,
we're in a relationship together. These fathers were never accepting
of their children when they were alive. They just somehow
couldn't wrap their minds or their hearts around the queerness.
But when the children die, they take up murder investigations
after the official investigation goes quiet and it's clear that
(06:58):
no one's really interested in solving their murders. The writing
is so strong and the storytelling is even stronger. And
what I really love is that Cosby creates a space
for these fathers to redeem themselves without absolving them of
the ways they failed their sons. His novels are thrilling,
insightful testimonies about Southern life and the pitfalls of toxic masculinity.
(07:22):
These novels examined the intersections between race and class and
gender and so much more. The author of Razor Blade Tears,
Essay Cosby is my guest this week. Sean, thank you
so much for coming on the Roxanne Gay Agenda. How
are you. I'm well, and thank you so much for
having me. I am honored to be here. I've been
a huge, huge fan of you for a long time,
(07:44):
and so the fact that you read the book and
not only read it but enjoyed it is so incredibly
gratifying and also incredibly surreal to me as a writer.
So I totally appreciate that incredibly, man, I loved this book.
As soon as I finished it, I was like, I
want the rights to option this and of us they
were already taken as they should be. Um, I would
(08:07):
love to know where did this story come from? How
did you come to this place because it was a
premise I really had never seen before. Yeah, So there
were two uh inspirations for the story, one sort of comical,
one very serious. The comical inspiration was I was talking
to a friend of mine who's a writer. We were
talking about being men of certain ages. It started out
(08:30):
as we were just kind of commiserating about things we
could do back in our twenties that we can't do now,
or things that we did in our twenties that we
wouldn't do now, and and so I started thinking about
regret and redemption and what does that look like when
you're middle age and when you have maybe more yesterday's
and tomorrows. And so we kind of laughed it off,
(08:50):
but but that idea stayed in the back of my head.
The more serious inspiration I have a close relative who
um came out when he was about forty one, and
we're about the same age, and so it's one of
the situations when we were kids, we all knew he
was gay, and most of us kids, most of our cousins,
(09:10):
we didn't care because he had a car so he
could drive us places. So it was like whatever, man,
it wasn't an issue. The calculations of children, like what
can he do for me? All Right, we're good, right,
It's like you're going to tasty freeze. Okay, that's your boyfriend.
That's fine. You know. It's like if we get milkshakes,
it's gonna be all right. So when he finally came
out his parents did, it didn't go well, and uh,
(09:34):
he and I ended up hanging out later on that night,
and I took him out for a beer and we
were talking over the beer and he said to me,
and it just and this was like I said several
eight years ago, but it stuck. It burned itself in
my head, he said to me. He said, maybe I
should have just kept it to myself, and something about
just the the defeat in his voice. It it hurt me.
(09:58):
I couldn't imagine what it was like to not be
loved unconditionally by people who are supposed to love you unconditionally.
And so this relative who just wanted to be himself,
he was tired of lyne. He was tired of coming
home from Atlanta with his boyfriend and saying, oh, this
is my roommate. You know, they've been roommates for twenty years.
(10:21):
We all know what's going on, and yet he felt
like he had to hide himself, and it just it
just made me so sad. And so when I started
to write my second book, I decided I was going
to confront those things. And the only way I knew
how to do it through the writing that I find
most comfortable with his crime fiction. That empathy, that sense
(10:43):
of recognizing that everyone deserves unconditional love and that sometimes
they don't get it, really comes through in the novel,
especially as we see these fathers come to terms with
their failures and then try to at least find justice
for their children. And so I was really intrigued by
(11:04):
telling a really emotional story through the lens of crime fiction.
And so, how did you balance the demands of the
genre of crime fiction, you know, action packed, fast paced
twists and turns, and then the emotional component which never
really went away, not only in terms of these fathers
(11:24):
and their sons, but in terms of Ike and his
marriage and his grandchild and not his grandchild, and the
way that there were a lot of different relationships that
had to be negotiated navigated while this thriller is also happening. Yeah,
it's a great question for me. I feel like all
fiction is crime fiction to a certain next day. And
(11:46):
I love literary fiction, but every novel, every novel of fiction,
has the possibility of being crime fiction, because every novel
has the possibility of someone breaking either man's law or
moral um. One one of my favorite books is A
Thousand Acres by James Smiley. Oh my god, it's so good.
I love that book. It's reimagining King Lear. But there's
(12:08):
crimes that happened in that book. There's sexual assault, there's
a planned murder that almost takes place. And so I
think crime fiction for me has always been the lens
through which I kind of want to examine things, and
it's the way I think it's probably has to do
with my upbringing, but I think that the idea of
(12:30):
crime and how we come to that place, you know,
to me, every crime is a confession of pain, and
so how we come to that place is so interesting
to me. And so when we talk about Ike and
Buddy Lee, I wanted to examine it in a way
that was, like you said, exciting and twisty and action pack,
but also in a way that allowed readers to go
(12:50):
in deside these characters minds. I mean nobody wants a
three sermon. You add a little honey to make the
medicine go down, to quote Mary Poppins, And so I
wanted I wanted to add that honey. Um. But a
couple about ten years ago, I went to a lecture
that Walter Mosley Gate. It was a lecture on how
(13:11):
to write a novel in a year, and he gave
one of the best piece of the advice I've ever
heard as far as writing genre fictional crime fiction. He said,
if you got a detective, he said, you damn seel
better come up with stuff for him to do or
here to do when they're not detecting. He said, you
got to flesh out their life outside of the case.
(13:32):
And so when I started to stay and right raised
bay tears, I thought about that. I was like, well,
what is Buddy Lee doing when he's not on this
mission of revenge? What is Ike doing when he's not
on this mission of revenge? What do they find in
their lives as comforting for them? And how is that
going to intersect with this revenge mission that they're on.
And so for me, building that background, I don't wanna
(13:55):
call it a noise, but building that background chatter, so
to speak, helps make a more complete picture, and it
still allows me to talk about the things I want
to talk about. You know, that's an interesting question of
what are they doing when they're not doing the primary
and thing that they do in a novel? Finding answers
to that question through the pros. Really, I thought worked
(14:15):
very well here, and I was also struck by the
ways in which this novel engages with masculinity. You know,
we hear a lot about toxic, macular masculinity, but you
favor the phrase tragic masculinity. You say that all of
your work aims to explore tragic masculinity. I would love
for you to just elaborate on that. What do you
(14:35):
mean when you say tragic masculinity. I definitely think there
is toxic masculinity, and toxic masculinity and incorporates misogyny, patriarchal sensibility,
and so and so forth. But for me, the idea
of tragic masculinity is when your idea of masculinity hurts you.
It injures you on an emotional on a psychological level,
(14:59):
um not just a physical level. And I grew up
I grew up in an environment that was hyper masculine
that was hyper charged with that idea. You know, I
grew up behind a bar. I grew up behind what
we call it had shot outs. So I grew up
so when I was like thirteen and fourteen, I was
sneaking into as a bar, you know, sneaking through a fence,
seeing people play pools, seeing people drink beer, seeing how
(15:21):
these men that I knew expressed themselves on the weekend
after a week of working, you know, construction jobs, or
a week of working on a on a fishing boat,
and you're in town and you've got some money in
your pocket. And as black men, this idea that I
have to re establish my masculinity, I have to re
establish my identity. And so this is I think idea,
(15:45):
especially in the South among black men, that you have
to double, triple, quadruple your manliness because society at large
sometimes it makes you feel less than. And so growing
up I saw that expressed violently many times. And so
for me, that was the idea of tragic masculinity, that
it hurts you. It hurts you on a psychic level.
(16:07):
You know, it makes you feel like you have to
fight every single day just to prove you're a man,
you have to defend your idea of masculinity against somebody
else's attack. And what I learned growing up as an adult,
after a lot of like soul searching, was that my
idea or my definition of what is masculinity is not
(16:27):
affected by someone else's that that's my individual path I
have to walk. And I think when you don't come
to that realization, it becomes tragic. I've seen so many,
so many family members, so many friends that fall into
that trap, that make very poor decisions and aren't able
to express this idea or articulated that they're hurting, that
(16:49):
they're scared, that they you know, they feel denigrated. You know,
it doesn't matter. How like, for instance, where I live
in Virginia, one of the big employers is the Nave Shipyard.
It's a good job, it's a sixty hour week job.
You can make good money. But as a black man
or a black woman, you're still black when you go
to that job, you're still fighting to get recognized, you're
(17:11):
still fighting to get a promotion. And so I used
to see again the men that I knew, you know,
when they got denied that promotion, when they got dressed
down for something they didn't do, and how they expressed
it was violence, you know, you know, And and so
I became determined when I decided I want to be
a writer, and I finally figured out what kind of
(17:31):
right I wanted to be. I wanted to talk about that.
I wanted to tell the stories. I wanted to articulate
the idea of tragic masculinity without absolving men of the
guilt and the responsibility that comes with that. How did
you get to this place where you have this perspective
unmasculinity and where you understand that your lived masculinity doesn't
(17:56):
take away from anyone else's and the way others lived
through their masculinity doesn't diminish yours. It has a lot
of to do. My mom, my mom, My mom raised me.
Her and my dad separated. I have older brother, Um,
and they separated when he was sixteen and I was
like seven. And my mother was a very very intelligent person.
She was an intellectually curious in a way that is
(18:19):
not harmful, like saying Joe rogan Um. She she she
was legitimately intellectually curious. She you know, she used to
make us read Greek mythology, and yeah, and if we
wanted to have like money to go to the store,
we had to like quote a Greek mythology story, so
I had to talk about her Festus or Aphrodite or
(18:41):
something like that. And she was determined that we were
gonna have this more broad intellectual background than she had um.
And so I learned from her that there are certain
things that men do that they think they can get
away with, that that the world is hard for black people,
(19:01):
but it's hardness for black women, and that as a
black man, you have to grow up and understand that
not only are you going to get advantages sometimes over
the black women that you surround yourself with, but that
there are things that you're gonna do that you don't
think hurt them, that are hurting them. My mom was
adamant about that. She really handled at home. But I
(19:21):
wasn't a perfect child, and you know, my teenage years
and my young adult years, I really didn't get it
until I had a relationship with someone in my twenties
and she was someone who was struggling with mental health issues.
And I realized, after four years of this relationship, everything
that I was doing, everything that I thought the man
was supposed to do was hurting her. I was trying
(19:45):
to take charge of the situation. I was trying to
fix this situation. And we broke up, and I remember
she said to me, She's like, I love you, but
you can't fix me because there's nothing wrong with me.
You think there's something wrong with me. And so as
a man, as a twenty five your man, that was
a wake up call for me. It really was. I
was like, wow, I I can't judge you by this
(20:08):
arbitrary masculine ideal that I have. And so that was
kind of this beginner's path where I was like, I
gotta learn how to fix this, because if I want
to move forward in relationship with somebody, I can't keep
doing this. I have to be self aware of this.
I started reading uh different books, um you know. I
started reading like philosophy, uh different Eastern philosophy books. I read,
(20:31):
uh you know, uh Michael Eric Dyson's books. I'm a
huge fan of his. Um. So I started reading about
stuff like that and just talking to different people. And
so it finally got to a point where I figured
out for me what I thought was the appropriate way
to handle my own masculinity. But it's still something I
think I have a problem when I fight every day
(20:54):
to not uh, for instance, with my wife, I fight
every day to not solve her problems, to just listen
to her problem. Let me tell you something. And I
had that same fight with my wife, just like, all right,
you know what, She's not asking me to fix this,
She's just sharing some issues that she's having because my
(21:16):
natural instinct, for whatever reason, is Okay, here are three solutions,
which one are we going to implement? And she's just like,
I'm not looking to you to solve this. And I
take that lesson humbly. Yeah. It's like my wife. She
told me one time she was she runs her own business,
and so she was telling me about some problems she
was having with her business, and she runs the funeral home.
(21:38):
She was telling me about some problems she was having
with a funeral home, and I just went instantly the
first time she ever told me we weren't married, were
just dating, and I just went to like, I don't
know if you ever seen the movie The Town with
Ben Affleck and Jamie Renner, but there's a scene in
that movie where Ben Athlete comes to Jeremy Renner and
I'm not gonna try to do the Boston accent. But
he says, you know, I need your help. We're gonna
(21:59):
hurt some people and we can't never talk about again.
And Jamy Reno's character is like, well, who are we
gonna take? That was my mentality for so long, like, oh,
somebody bothering you? Where are they point me in that direction?
You know, I'm a hammer. I need a nail. And
so even after all that work, I thought I had
done all that, reading all that and trying to better
(22:20):
myself in that respect because I love her and I
cared about it and somebody heard her feelings. I reverted
back to that. I reverted back to, Okay, well I'm
gonna go and feed him his teeth at something like,
you know, you can't. You can't do that. As much
as you would like to, as much as some people
probably deserve it, you can't do that. And so that's
a lesson. I still continually try to learn, and so
(22:42):
am I writing. I understand I think with fiction, and
I see this discourse a lot. I understand people like
Buddy Lee and I that doesn't mean I sympathize with them.
And I think some people don't understand that distance that
as a writer, you can empathize, you can understand a
character or where they're coming from, that does not mean
(23:04):
that you're absolving them of guilt. That does not mean
you're endorsing what they're doing. And so for me, my
writing is a way for me to continually exercise these
ghosts of past toxic and tragic masculinity. You know, I
think that's such an important distinction that you can empathize
and understand without justifying behaviors and without suggesting that it's okay.
(23:27):
And and that comes through I must say throughout Razor
Blade Tears, I can buddy, we're clear on the kinds
of men they are. And I actually enjoyed that, and
I really appreciated who they were and and I think
I can particular was a work in progress and understood
he was a work in progress, but was like, you
know what, I'm a revert until I handle this. And
(23:49):
his wife is even like you go ahead and revert
back to who you used to be and then come
back to the normal. You know. I think a lot
also when I'm thinking about fiction about place, and you
are from the South and you set your novels in
the South. What do you wish people understood or knew
(24:11):
about the South that isn't part of the cultural narrative.
The main thing I wish people knew is that the
South is not the sole providence of neo Confederate apologies,
That there are black people that live here, That there
are black people who's generally who can trace their their
families back generations. You know, a lot of times you'll
see discourse on social media when a Southern state does
(24:33):
something politically politically stupid, and you'll see a lot of
discourse like, ah, well, don't go to Tennessee or don't
go to Virginia. They got what they deserve this, And
it's like, that's not the only people that live here.
You know, those people are in power right now, but
there are millions of people who don't think that way.
(24:54):
And for whatever reason, these people are running the show
right now. But that doesn't mean that we all think
that way. They were all this homogeneous monolith. We're not.
You know, I always tell people in interviews that I'm
a son of the South, you know, and I don't
I'm not ashamed of that. Virginia is my heart and
my home. But to quote or, to paraphrase James Baldwin,
because I love the South, I reserve the right to
(25:17):
criticize her, you know, because I know what it can be.
You know, I've seen the best of what it can be,
and I've seen the worst. I've seen the beauty and
the grotesque, nous. And so when I talk about the South,
I want people to understand that this is not a
place that we are here under duress. You know. I
got into an argument with a writer one time who
(25:38):
was from Chicago, and this writer basically said, y'all, people
down in the South, I don't know how y'all live
down there. Y'all y'all let them do anything and do
all that, and you know, it's just I couldn't be me,
couldn't be me, And there's this city mouse country mouse
mentality sometimes. And I told that person, I said, you know,
you grew up in the area in Chicago. Yeah, there's
violence in this crime and this racism everywhere. I said,
(25:59):
but you grew up in a place that in many
ways was a black utopia. You went to all black school,
you had a black alderman, you saw black cops, you
saw a black barber. But with the majority of the
people in your life were black. I grew up in
a place where all the sheriff deputies are white, all
the county representatives of white. We didn't get into a
Plumberts seventeen because the building inspector was white and there
(26:22):
was a certain environmental test that you had to pass
before you could dig a well that my family couldn't afford.
We couldn't afford the money to pay for the test. Now,
on the other hand, that inspector would sometimes give a
white family a pass. Well, you just pay it when
you can. And so we've experienced that. And I told
this writer, I said, you know, I think you have
this misunderstanding. They were all down here and build overalls,
(26:44):
sucking on Hassey's and that's couldn't be further from the truth.
You know, Zoro Neil Hurston come from the South, Alice
Walker comes from the South, and it's Jay Gaines come
from the South. To finish up the conversation we had,
I said, look, I've been called the N words seven
times in my life to my face, and I WoT
they asked all seven times. That's what it takes to
live in the South. That's what it means to live here,
(27:07):
you know, we fight for this land. Every scrap of
land that some boy in a Confederate flag had walks upon,
somebody that looks like me, has bled, died, and worked on,
and I'd be damned if I'm gonna see one inch
to them. And so that's the thing I try to
express in both ways overt and subtle to people when
they read my books, that the South belongs to a
multitude of people. It's not just the Dukes of Hazzard
(27:31):
that really comes through. And I think it's important because
a lot of times people assume that if we're not
talking about urban centers, that black people are sort of
still being held hostage, and no, in fact, black people
are everywhere, and to erase the stories of black people
who aren't in Chicago or Atlanta, which is of course
(27:55):
the South, but is a black center or a d
C or l A I inc. Really does a disservice
to what you as you know, the multitudes as you
mentioned of blackness. And so I think it's really interesting
that you're exploring those multitudes and saying like this land
belongs to both Ike and Buddy and people between the
(28:15):
two of them. Now two of your models I think
we're Flannery O'Connor and William Faulkner who were um passionate
racists but also incredible writers. And how do you negotiate
those realities? Because I'm a fan of Flannery O'Connor as well.
I think her short stories are just phenomenal and I
(28:38):
never forget who she is when I'm reading. And so
how do you managed to hold multiple truths about these
authors when you're thinking about their work. I think for
me personally, it is the suspension of disbelief to a
certain extent, Like Flannery o'conno, for us, I have to separate,
you know, the virulent racism in her private letters from
(29:00):
the very raisor sharp insights into white racism and white
races in a like, say, a story like Revelations, And
it's hard, it's hard to reconcile that the person who
wrote Revelations, who is so adroitly addressing the hypocrisy of
the white Christian Southerner to the point where this woman
(29:22):
sees a revelation in the pig style and still in Heaven,
is segregated the revelation in her mind, it's epiphany she's having,
it's still a segregated heaven, that person who can make
that observation but also can write a letter or like
I wish he's black. So just shut up about this,
over right. It's hard. It's difficult, Um, I tried to.
(29:42):
I think it's it's the idea that I I have
to separate the art from the artists to talk about
William Faulkner. I grew up reading Faulkner when I was
like thirteen and fourteen, you know, I read Light in
August and Absalom Absalom, and that's how a bunch of
a nerd I was. Nobody made me read those. They
weren't like school assignments. I was like, I'm gonna read
(30:02):
these very difficult books with this experimental language. I'm gonna
try it. And it was, you know, I was, I
was mesmerized. Um. But at the same time, you know,
you have to realize that he was a man of
the South who who accepted to a certain extent the
way that his Southern experience was, and he thought that
was the way it should be for everybody else. When
(30:24):
you read these novels as a black person, it's hard,
But at the same time, there are truths within that
that you have I wanna say, have to, but that
you can identify. There's a certain mentality that is unique
to the South that I think it comes through in
Playnery Econnor's work and William Falcon works and writers like
William Gay or Harry Crews or Charles Willaford or Ernest
(30:47):
Jay Gaines or Alice Walker. That is germane is specific
to where I come from. You know, when you read
uh about Joe Christmas in Light in August, you know,
and spoil alert, Joe Christmas is a mixed race child
passing from white. That idea is not foreign to me.
That idea is not something that like shocks me. I
(31:09):
have relatives on my mom's side that I know are
passing to this day. I understand that idea. At the
same time, you know, again, like you said, you have
to be realistic about who these people were in their
private lives, and it's hard, you know. It's like, I
love The Usual Suspects. That's one of my favorite movies.
(31:32):
It's one of my favorite scripts. But god Lee, you know,
Brian Singer directed in Kevin Spaces and and there's just
a lot of it there. But when it when it
comes on TNT. I watch it because I have a
specific engagement and specific interaction and nostalgia with that movie
(31:54):
that they're horrible, disgusting activities can't take away. And I
think that's the same thing with and O'Connor. When I
read A good Man, it's hard to find and I've
read that story a hundred times. I have an interaction
in a connection with that story that can't be sulliyed
by what she thought privately, because in that moment, I
(32:15):
am in that situation. I'm on the side of the
road with that family. I see the misfit, I see
the grandmother that won't shut up. You know. It's like
it's like when you go see a movie a bunch
of black folks and people are talking to the screen.
It's because, yeah, I want to tell her and that
that story stop talking. He's going to shoot you. Shut up.
(32:37):
So you're in that moment. And then like when you
close the cover of the book and I you know,
I realized that flaner connor like this. It was not
a very nice person. Those two things are separate. It's
it's difficult. I think it's more difficult for a person
of color than it is to somebody else. I agree.
I think that marginalized people really have to do a
(32:59):
heavier lift when it comes to separating the art from
the artist or keeping it all in context, as I
find that I can't really separate, but I can just
contextualize and and try to make sense of it that
way and still appreciate what someone like a Flannery O'Connor
has to say. And that's a lift that you know,
(33:20):
people white people in general are not going to have
to make, and quite frankly, it's a lift that they
don't make. But when it comes to race, sexuality, gender identity,
I think a lot of us can't set those parts
of ourselves aside, and so we have to bring them
with us and find ways of appreciating something despite the
(33:40):
flaws of its creator, which you know exactly. So, how
are you sitting in this moment where you've written basically
two novels and two years and published two novels in
two years and your books are doing very well? Um,
Blacktop Waste Land is being adapted for film, Razor Blade
(34:02):
Tears is being adapted for film. I know that movies
inform a lot of how you think about your novels.
How is this moment for you and are you also
just tangentially are you involved in the films. I think
it's interesting. The moment itself is wonderful, you know, it's
but you know it's funny. It's also can be stressful
(34:23):
because I think, growing up poor, I have this tendency
to want to make all the hay I can while
the sun is shining, you know, and I have to
remind myself to step back and enjoy the moment, enjoy
the fruits of this labor, instead of taking on project here,
a project there. I have. When we sold Blacktout Wasteline,
(34:46):
my agent was like, well, do you want me to
look for other opportunities things that you When I said, yeah, everything,
bring it all, I'll do it because I just I
couldn't believe that this was happening, and I was just
so ready for the other shoe to drop. So my
mindset was like, I gotta but I gotta make all
this money. I gotta make this money now, so I
will write this, you know, I will work with this
person to do a kid's novel, or I'll do this
(35:07):
thing here, I'll I'll write this whatever project you want
me to do. I'm gonna do it because I gotta
make all this money. I gotta work really hard, because
I've worked hard on my life. You know, before I
became a writer, I worked sixty hours a week as
a hardware associate at a manager of a hardware store.
And so it's like, I just have this. It's funny.
People call it work ethic, but it's just fear. It's
just fear. I don't want to be I don't want
(35:29):
to be hungry. I don't like it. I don't want
to I don't I don't want to have to choose
between gas and the light bill and so. And even
though my wife runs a business and you know, we're
you know, even before the books took off, we were
doing okay, I just had that deep seated fear. And
so right now I'm learning to enjoy the moment. I'm
learning to kind of sit back and look at it
(35:49):
and say, hey, this is cool, this is fun. Um.
And as far as being involved with the movies, I
am not. Like I knew my limitations, so I know
what I can do and what I can't do. UM.
But the people that are working on that are have
been very complimentary and have been very open and giving
to me. I've read the script form Black Tip Waste
(36:12):
Land and it's wonderful. Um, and they're working on the
script for Razorblade. Now. They asked me questions, you know,
which they don't have to. You know, they paid me
the money, so they could just tell me shut up.
But they do involved me in the process. But no,
there was a there was a point where somebody asked
that I want to write the screenplay, and I was like,
I've never written a screenplay. And you know, this is
Jared Bruckhammer Films. There's a lot of money. I don't
(36:33):
want to mess it up, So y'all go ahead with that.
So we can't write my book. But um, that being said,
I did a project. I can't talk about it yet,
but I did a project. It was very similar to
a screenplay, and so now I've kind of got an
idea that maybe I may try to write a screenplay,
an original one later on down the road. I say, Cosby,
(36:54):
thank you so much for joining me. I could talk
to you for hours. You are endlessly interest thing and
you also have a great voice. Um. You can keep
up with me and the podcast on social media on
Twitter at our g a Y and Instagram at Roxanne
Gay seven four. Our email is Roxanne Gay Agenda at
(37:16):
gmail dot com. Please feel free to reach out and
share what you're thinking about the show from Luminary. The
Roxanne Gay Podcast is produced by Curtis Fox. Our intern
is yeseniel Moreno production support is provided by Caitlin Adams.
I am Roxanne Gay, your favorite bad feminist. Thank you
(37:38):
for listening, and Happy birthday, Caitlin
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