The author’s latest novel dives into the hidden backwaters of queer history. He talks about losing inhibitions and finding his voice
t is morning in Manhattan, and the 43-year-old novelist Justin Torres is lying in bed, head propped up on one hand. He uprooted to the west coast of America a decade ago to teach English at UCLA, but was out late last night partying with friends from his old New York days. “I’m not even dressed yet,” he says in a sleepy croak.
This patchwork narrative is starkly dissimilar from Torres’s autobiographical 2011 debut, We the Animals, which concerned the feral upbringing of three boys born to a white mother and Puerto Rican father in upstate New York. That first novel, though fragmented, had a rhapsodic energy coursing through it whereas Blackouts is continually being interrupted by archive photographs, illustrations from children’s books and assorted ephemera.
The people who spoke to Jan Gay volunteered all this information about their sex lives – it was then turned into evidence of disease He traced the problem back to immature ideas about how a writer should sound: he was adopting his novelist voice, the way other people put on a telephone voice. As Blackouts developed, the book absorbed material from his unfinished second novel, Yesterday Is Here, a tale of two hustlers in different eras, and the character of Juan evolved into a device by which Torres could critique his younger, greener self.
That debut ends with a fictionalised version of a traumatic incident: his parents’ discovery, when he was 17, of his private journal, which catalogued his fantasies and desires. Torres had long known he was queer. Though he struggled with his sexuality in his teens, his future was far from hopeless: he had won a fellowship to NYU. He has conceded, though, that anyone who came across his journal back then “would think this was a troubled mind. And that’s exactly what happened.
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