In the 12 years since UCLA Professor Justin Torres’ We the Animals was published (to rave reviews and a movie adaptation), he’s been doing research for his latest novel Blackouts, which is a National Book Award finalist.
“One of the things that happened with We the Animals is that I got so lucky with that book. I was invited to all kinds of places to talk about Latinx literature, queer literature, all different kinds of literary traditions. And a couple of months before … nobody had ever heard of me. Then there was this instantaneous expectation that I would be able to expound and have some kind of expertise … and I wanted to grow into that role. But it was going to take time,” says Torres.
Blackouts shares the same narrator as Torres’ first novel, but years later. “These two characters have very similar backgrounds and backstories and family dynamics. And, of course, it's a persona that overlaps with my own personal biography,” he says, nodding to autobiographical elements that cover both novels, like institutionalization and shame.
“So many of us just walk around dealing with so much stigma and so much shame and not understanding. One of the things that the book is interested in is this difference between stigma and shame: That which is put upon you and that which you internalize.”
Torres’ jacket copy lists the many jobs he had over the years, before We the Animals fame, giving equal weight to his Stanford fellowship along with being a farmhand and a bookseller. “I think it's important to not pretend that it's been easy,” he says.
Not listed, but certainly a part of his novels, is his time doing sex work. “It is a form of work, and I'm not going to be any more ashamed about that than other horrible things I did in order to survive in a capitalist society,” he states. “A lot of things can be demeaning in different ways, and also rewarding at times. … It's not something I'm willing to do: Live a bifurcated life where I pretend that I only got fellowships to Harvard or whatever. My life has been very, very, varied.”
The “blackouts” that appear in the book are wide-ranging: The blacking out of the curtains in the room his protagonists inhabit for the majority of the book; the narrator’s lapses in memory due to trauma; the literal blackouts of text from Sex Variants: A Study of Homosexual Patterns, a 1941 pseudo medical text that omits one of its chief researchers, Jan Gay.
“The book is a lot about: What do we do when we encounter that kind of erasure? And do we write into the gaps or do you emphasize? One of the things I landed on was that it's also important to emphasize erasure, not just pretend it didn't happen.”