In the summer of 2021, when we were publishing our first novel, The View Was Exhausting, the question we kept getting from readers, friends and strangers alike was: Why is it about a straight couple?
At the time, we had lots of reasons. The novel was about using a fake relationship to circumvent racism in the film industry, and when we started writing in 2016, the plot simply didn’t make sense if it was queer. Whoever heard of a woman of color using a fake lesbian relationship for good publicity? Then, too, the book’s love interest had strolled into our heads unmistakably male, pairing deep privilege with a restless streak of anxiety that had no easy outlet. We loved our buzzcut boy, and we were interested in the power dynamics of heterosexuality. We wanted to lift up the rock of straightness and examine both the worms crawling beneath and the seedlings about to bloom.
Still, the question was understandable. It was odd, to be two women married since our early twenties promoting a novel about heterosexual chemistry and romance. It led to some interesting discussions, especially with other queer readers aware of a long tradition of gay people writing about heterosexuality. The same readers responded to the campy winks on the page, from the lesbian mums to our — okay, pretty revealing — fixation on such details as our heroine’s wrist bones. But we also ran into a more accusatory line of questioning from straight readers, some who seemed annoyed we had trespassed beyond a given remit. Though straight people can (and very often do) write about gay people, the surprise that two lesbians had dared to write a heterosexual romance — that we had, perhaps, something to say about straightness — felt like a nudge to the sidelines. The sentiment seemed to be: Get back in your corner, please.
It was always the plan to someday write a lesbian love story. When our next novel materialized, the characters practically sprinted onto the page in a burst of queer defiance. Bratty, charming, sharp-toothed Angelina with her overgrown hair, oversized T-shirts and orange nail polish. Her love interest, Jagvi: tough, soft-spoken, dark-eyed, bearing a feathered mullet, a deep streak of guilt and, occasionally, a packer. We gave them the burning, sexual tension-fueled romance we most love to read, and on top of that, we put them in a horror setting. Give the butch a monster to fight; give the femme a demon to slay. And though we knew that the details, the characters, the plot of our second novel would be specifically and joyously dykey, we didn’t expect the experience of actually writing it to be all that different. We were the same two people who had written the first novel. How different could it be?
But it turned out the answer was: very.
The change first became apparent in the very early days of writing Feast While You Can, when one of us — a 30-year-old lesbian who had been out since she was 16 — found herself spiraling down an unexpected and wordy detour about our heroine’s experience of coming out. Like us, our heroine Angelina knows she is a lesbian when the novel opens. Like us, she’s out to her family (who display varying levels of acceptance). Like us, she self-identifies as a dyke, cocky and confident in her own sexuality, vaguely pitying toward the straight people in her life. A long treatise on her early adult feelings about coming out had not been part of the plan.
But the words kept coming, thick and fast, dragged up from some deep place inside where we hadn’t known they’d been waiting. If you’re comfortable in your queer adulthood, it’s strange to feel yourself almost forcibly transported back to those teenage moments. We were writing about Angelina, sure — but of course, we were also writing about ourselves, with a new kind of tender ferocity. Forcing our younger selves to cough up those anxieties and fears, the deep loneliness and deep excitement. Remembering what it’s like to be split in half, thinking, “What if a girl never looks at me like that? And shit, what if she does?” We found ourselves examining emotions and moments we had thought were long-resolved, pulling at their threads to see if we could stitch them into something new.
The idea that we would be writing a specifically, obsessively, gratuitously lesbian novel had been clear from the outset; what hadn’t been clear was how exhilarating and surprising doing so would feel. It felt so good to let loose on the page, to lean into a butch/femme love story that was at once playful and deeply sincere, to give Jagvi all the dyke swagger we so adore, to let the two of them find their own ways of dealing with the cocktail of small town bigotry that comes from being the only openly queer and brown girls for miles around, and to write the two of them binding together in the shadow of an otherworldly, monstrous foe.
Every detail was a delight. And even the sense of knowing the details was thrilling. At one point, one of our (wonderful) editors suggested deleting a line about the long vein that ran down Jagvi’s arm and through her hand. “Extraneous?” she wondered, and we got to tell her cheerfully that this was a tiny but iconic lesbian reference that could not be lost; the very definition of traneous. We wrote teenage Angelina attending her first queer party, drunk and out of her depth, both of us returning to those memories of youthful insecurity with a jolt. Later, we wrote about Angelina obsessing over the swell of Jagvi’s bicep, wishing she could shrink herself small enough to ride around on it, practically howling with delight at the image. It was like sitting down to take an unknown exam and realizing that it was the subject you knew better than any other, all of the answers an intrinsic part of your own DNA.
And it was frightening, too.
Was it cowardice that kept us, in our debut, from writing a queer novel? That was certainly the implication in some of those eyebrow-raised questions. But along with all our old and true answers about why we wrote a heterosexual romance, now we would probably add one more reason: We weren’t ready. We wrote and sold The View Was Exhausting before either of us turned 30, and we entered the publishing industry as a shy, unusual spectacle. Not one writer but two; not just two writers, but two writers who were married to one another; not just two writers who were married to one another, but two lesbian writer wives.
The View Was Exhausting allowed us a degree of distance. The heterosexuality of our central couple was like a warning sign: Don’t go looking for us in here. People did, anyway, but they mostly asked if the book was about us because its central relationship was, like us, mixed race. That was easier and felt less exposing to talk about, and it meant that we didn’t face (many) questions about the sex scenes. It meant that we were better able to protect our personal lives, especially by asking that our sexuality not be made part of the book’s publicity campaign (which would have been weird, anyway).
We won’t have that plausible deniability with Feast While You Can. In some ways, that’s a relief. It has felt simpler and more exciting to talk about the central chemistry and romance; it’s been joyous to reach out to our community and tell them we’ve written something for, by, about them. There’s no sly camp winks in Feast While You Can: it’s dyke camp turned full volume, strutting and sure of itself.
But it has also put us in a position of vulnerability. The world is homophobic, and so is publishing. We want to protect our characters, and we cannot. We want to protect ourselves. We want to sidestep the microaggressions; we don’t want to be faced with butchphobic or transphobic questioning about our love interest Jagvi’s complicated, dykey sense of gender; we’d rather not hear questions about how closely attuned the sex scenes of this novel are to our own sex life. All of that feels much more likely, or has already happened.
It feels, in a way that is funny and sad at the same time, kind of true to queerness itself. All the joy and pleasure of it, paired with the knife-edge of danger. In the same sense, it’s not a choice, but we’d choose it every time.
As a novelist, you always hope that the book you’re writing is better than your last. It’s one of the lovely and cruel facts about writing: the only way to improve is to keep doing it, word by bloody word. When it comes to our two novels, though, they are so different that it feels difficult to quantify better or worse. All we can say is that a novel appears when it is supposed to; it cannot be rushed or forced. We wrote Feast While You Can because our brains insisted on it. Because for three years Jagvi and Angelina and their small town full of rambunctious cousins and wild dogs and monsters in caves were all we could think or talk about. We wrote it because queer love stories are our favorite thing, in books and out of them. We wrote it because we were ready for it.
Feast While You Can comes out tomorrow, October 29.
perfect novel by perfect authors. we are so lucky to have both of your beautiful books!
This is so smart and I loved the book SO MUCH