“As Long as People Continue to Be Insensitive, Fiction Writers Will Never Go out of Business”

Dr. Amina Gautier’s short story collection, The Best That You Can Do, refuses to be fixed in place, dancing across shores and between decades as a luminous chorus of speakers breaks into singular voices that carry readers from New England to Puerto Rico, Chicago and beyond, searching for answers to questions of race, identity, and belonging.

The stories are compact and muscular, arranged like music, and brimming with voices that shift and quake on the page, coalescing into a group of child siblings, dissolving into family members scattered across diaspora, and colliding with each other at academic conferences and hotel elevators. Gautier breaks the collection into five sections spanning a range of themes, each story populated by characters that are hungry for connection, safety, comfort, and a sense of home.

Dr. Gautier’s publicist suggested we meet at Ann Sather, a popular Chicago eatery that I recognized from its appearance in the collection. After warmly encouraging me to order the cinnamon buns, Dr. Gautier spoke to me about writing her fourth short story collection, binge writing, and looking back at the white gaze.

Stephen Patrick Bell: Do you not feel that the city makes a demand of you to just be less of a person so that you can fit in the subway cars, walk down the streets?

Amina Gautier: I feel like everyone is being less of a person and it has very little to do with cities. I feel like I’ve been writing about that for four books and it has become more and more necessary. People are not talking to each other or looking at each other. They’re just talking past each other or waiting for someone to say something so they can jump in with their soundbite. It means I’ll always have a job. I tell people all the time, as long as people continue to not listen to each other and be insensitive, fiction writers will never go out of business. It would be great if we did go out of business because people stopped doing that. But you know, there’s always going to be material. People always ask “where do you get your stories”…

SPB: The first section, Quarter Rican, feels especially grounded in New York. The characters travel to Puerto Rico but even those scenes felt like they were tethered to the city. Seeing the characters move between spaces that play on different aspects of their identity and watching them search for clues or indicators in popular culture that might help them define themselves, I wonder if identity was a central theme you sought to address when starting this project.

AG: With the second collection, Now, We Will Be Happy, I have a lot of Puerto Rican and Afro Puerto Rican characters. So, I’ve been writing around that for some time. But on a larger scale, you’re writing around the tension, or the complexities of defining yourself when other people are defining it differently— the way those definitions are not just based on birth. Emotions can help you. Emotions can direct you to one sort of identity or push you away from another one. So, in the collection, it’s not just, “were you born in Puerto Rico” or “were you born in New York,” but it’s more, “what was your relationship with those Spanish-speaking parents?” There’s not just, “oh, did you speak Spanish in the house?” You can learn Spanish in the house and have a very tense relationship with one of your parents and say, “okay, now I don’t like that.” It’s not just what you learn in school or where you are, but there’s a sort of psychological or emotional weight to how you define yourself, who you want to model yourself after, or who you want to avoid. The collection starts in Brooklyn, but it’s circles around, and it ends back up in that same neighborhood, with explorations in the middle.

SPB: Do you think about a specific audience when you’re writing your stories? I think a lot about the little white man on your shoulder whispering “this isn’t relatable.” I was curious if that’s something that enters your work at this point in your career.

AG: I wouldn’t say that I deliberately go out of my way to create an insider space, I’ve always been interested in and concerned with pushing back on assumptions. Some of the first stories that I was exposed to by white writers like John Cheever’s The Swimmer. All these stories that he’s taking the train back and forth from New York to Connecticut, you’ve got this New England experience that people are referring to—sailing and boats and things like that. And there are no footnotes. You open up the Norton Anthology.

When I was in college, I opened up the Norton Anthology and looked up James Baldwin, Sonny’s Blues, I found footnotes explaining what certain things were in the ’50s. You know, since he’s Black, these things have to be explained. And there are no footnotes in Faulkner’s Barn Burning and no footnotes in Cheever, right? There’s just an assumption that you know their world, and it doesn’t have to be explained. I thought, “Okay, then I’m going to presume that my reader knows my world. And if you don’t know it, and you feel like you’re on the outside looking in, then it just sucks to be you.”

But, I do also have a reader in mind when I’m not thinking about inside and outside spaces. I do presume that my reader is literate, and well-read and has a historical knowledge of literature. So there are plenty of inside references and allusions to other literary works for that reader by so like you mentioned, Breathe, so there’s a little references to Hamlet.

SPB: How does all that influence your process?

AG: I wouldn’t say I have a strange process because it’s mine, but it’s not for everybody. I talk to other writers and hear their processes and I’m like, yeah, that would never work for me. I’ve meet so many people who have a page limit, they’ll get up early and if they get this number of pages in a day, they’re good, or they’ll have a time limit, get up early and do two hours. And I’m realizing, first of all, I can’t stop once I start. And secondly, who is trying to get up early? I don’t even know why we’re doing that.

SPB: I blame everything on capitalism.

AG: The term I apply to myself is binge writing. I like to write for as long as I can. It’s unlikely that I will write on a day that I have other appointments, because the chances are high that I’ll miss them.

SPB: One of the shifts I felt as I moved through the book dealt with racial and ethnic identity. In the Black Lives Matter section the characters are firmly grounded in and centered on their Blackness and brownness. And like, it’s not just their Blackness, it’s the terror of being Black/Brown in America, which is a separate thing. That contrasted nicely with the characters in the first section, who might appear most of white America as ostensibly Black despite their connections to cultures that don’t neatly fit within their idea of Blackness. For me, identity is often a tool that people use to kind of figure out how they’re going to deal with a person, but it’s not necessarily something that a person uses to relate to themself. There’s a fun tension your characters are exploring, when Blackness is something that you could move in and out of, versus something in which they’re firmly situated.

How did you navigate the differences between the constructions of racial identity in the U.S. as opposed to other cultures? 

AG: One thing that’s interesting to me, or that I play with in my work, is just constantly reminding people that Black people are not only the object of the gaze, that we are looking back. [There’s an assumption] that Blackness is fixed, it’s finite, and everybody else gets to move around and do a bunch of different things. I play with that, pushing back, showing the ways in which people can swim in and out of different aspects of their identity. Can you pass not necessarily for white? In the story, Elevator, she passes for Latino just to try to get away from the bad guys. I’m examining ways in which we can exercise and adopt that flexibility for safety, for strategic reasons.

SPB: I feel like lit world social media can take on a Stepford quality. It is wild how some writers are just online. It is very cool to be able to connect with your favorite writers and just say, “I liked your book.” But an element of it feels unsettling and dangerous, because it does make the world feel very, very uniform. And it kind of makes a new writer feel like “I have to be writing this way for people to see me.” I don’t take any of it too seriously, but I do see other people who I respect and whose opinions I value saying things like, “well, you know, the market says that you have to be writing this kind of thing right now” or “you can’t sell a short story collection.”

AG: Do you know how many times people have told me that?

SPB: Look at Deesha Philyaw—The Secret Lives of Church Ladies, her little impossible to sell short story collection from a small university press is such a celebrated text.

AG: Or look at me. The Best You Can Do, that’s number four. So they say you can’t sell a short story collection. I don’t know any other African American woman with four [short story collections].

SPB: And the PEN/Malamud award.

AG: I was really happy about Edwidge [Danticat] winning. So, now that there’s another Black person with a PEN/Malamud because I’m the first Black woman to win it. Woman. Edward Jones won it first and I guess I should say received it because you don’t apply for it. They just give it to you. When I received it in 2018, I was the first African American woman, first Black woman. And  Edwidge just received it in December. So now there are two of us.

But the point of that was not to brag on me, but to say, when people give you all that “advice,” fuck them —yeah, that’s an F bomb I meant—because, they want you to be unique and the same at the same time. Like, “Oh, we love this book, because it’s so unique” and then it’s like, “But whose work is it like so we can sell it”

SPB:ne of the themes I noticed was that the women in these stories are often paired with men who are not worthy of their attention. 

AG: One of the things that I’m playing with, or just sort of interested in, is the way culture infantilizes men, and investing in this sort of infantilization. I see all these commercials, and they’re just annoying. The guys are just bumbling. You know, they’re like, “where’s my shirt?” Is that what you really think that these intelligent men who go to work and somehow come home and cannot function. It makes me really angry. But it seems like this cultural moment that people are participating in. I hear women complain about having to do everything, but in a way that makes it sound like they like it: “Oh, my husband can’t do anything without me.”

I don’t know what it means, but specifically when I’m thinking about Black hetero-relationships, wondering what the connection is when we acknowledge the level of violence and scrutiny that Black men are unfairly subjected to, and then we ask what the solution is, and instead of challenging whatever external forces there are that are applying those pressures and those tensions, we just make things easier for them socially. Is that actually helpful?

SPB: that’s a good question to ask, and I wish I had an answer

AG: That’s what I’m playing with in the stories, because I’m still thinking of people in my generation, dating Gen X guys, or thinking of Chris Rock’s stand-up specials and things like that. But what does it mean when we start telling women that they should be grateful for that? What does it mean when tell women and women of color, that they should just be glad that somebody is interested in them? In the story, “Why Not?,” there’s all this sort of censure about a woman wanting more than just one basic date turning into a relationship. That’s what I’m seeing.

SPB: “Why Not?” made me very anxious when the main character’s desires and ambitions beyond settling were met with a Greek chorus of unsupportive voices. it felt like there’s this social contract in place where if you show a man attention, of any kind, even if you’re just being polite, then you now owe him an entire relationship. That is more trouble than its worth. That any man would feel entitled to that relationship based on a cursory courtesy feels deeply weird. Like, we should be allowed to be friends with each other, or at least decent human beings to each other without it becoming a contract for marriage or a long term relationship.

AG: Yeah, and how much does that false social contract have to do with our current moment of social anxiety and social isolation? These past 10 or 15 years of wanting to meet people online and have all the work done before you actually go out. You had a period where people are like, “Oh my gosh, it’s dangerous. You should never be anybody online.” And now it’s, “this is the thing to do.” And people are like, meeting online and telling people all their business and their whole life story before they decided to actually meet and go out. I thought that was what a first date was for.