Raven Leilani, a Flâneur Who Is Going Places (original) (raw)
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Raven Leilani in Brooklyn. For the protagonist of her book, “Luster,” she said, “I didn’t want her to be a pristine, neatly moral character.”Credit...Miranda Barnes for The New York Times
The novelist’s debut, “Luster,” is winning accolades for its unfiltered depiction of sex, failure and a Black woman adrift in work and life.
Raven Leilani in Brooklyn. For the protagonist of her book, “Luster,” she said, “I didn’t want her to be a pristine, neatly moral character.”Credit...Miranda Barnes for The New York Times
- Published July 31, 2020Updated Aug. 4, 2020
Raven Leilani has one of this summer’s most anticipated fiction debuts, but in some ways, she is already anticipating the day the buzz dies down.
That is when she plans to take some time to grieve the loss of her father, Warren, who died from Covid-19 in April. “There’s an aspect of this moment — because of the enormity of it, you see the number of people who have died — it feels abstract,” she said in an interview. “But it’s not abstract at all. Every single number was a person, and one of those was my dad.”
Because of their complicated relationship, her parents’ separation when Leilani was in college and the forced isolation of the coronavirus pandemic, she has had to process the loss alone. That kind of solitude is not what she is used to, having grown up first in the Bronx, then a suburb of Albany, N.Y., in a family of West Indian artists who encouraged her creativity.
For years, she juggled jobs and art, doing her writing at night or during work shifts. “The going was slow and the going was private,” Leilani said. “There was a frenzy to that grind.”
It’s a frenzy she captures in her novel, “Luster,” out on Tuesday. It follows Edie, a Black woman in her 20s scraping by on a publishing salary while trying to self-actualize as an artist. When Edie meets Eric, an older, married white man whose wife has agreed to an open marriage, Edie becomes entangled with them and their daughter — an adopted Black 12-year-old named Akila — in unexpected ways.
[ _Read_ Parul Sehgal’s review of “Luster.” ]
“I wanted to write a story about a Black woman who fails a lot and is sort of grasping for human connection and making mistakes,” Leilani, now 29, said. “I didn’t want her to be a pristine, neatly moral character.”
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