Cari Luna’s revolution of a writing life
Cari Luna. It’s a name you remember because it makes you think of something unique, fresh, rich, and whimsical. There is an essence of something, there is something that says let this name float in your head a while and play on your tongue. After reading The Revolution of Every Day not only could I not forget the book, but I would never forget the name so as to continue to follow her author-ly path. This novel wasn’t a first for Luna, but it was definitely quite the debut. It harkened back to the specialness of her name, the poetic quality of it all translated from one point of punctuation to the next until the end. But now, I must see who else she can create, what lives can she reveal, and where will she take us next physically and emotionally.
Below, Cari Luna answers Busking at the Seams’ questions about her debut, what the process was like, and some hints for what adventure is coming next.
Q. What was it about this era of New York City that provoked you to write about it?
A. This is the era of New York City that I’m most deeply nostalgic for. This was the era of my early twenties, and when I think of my hometown, and what I’ve loved about it, and what I miss about it, it’s always that time (the mid-nineties) and place (the Lower East Side) that I go back to. The book is a love letter—and a Dear John letter—to the city where I was born.
I write primarily to answer questions for myself, and when I first sat down to write this novel in October 2005, I was trying to understand how and why New York had changed, how it could be that my home no longer felt like home. The answer was gentrification, and that pointed me toward setting it in the Lower East Side squats.
Q. The characters live a kind of life that is foreign to the majority of us. It is a choice that a lot of us wouldn’t be brave enough to make, or unselfish enough. What helped you in finding the understanding of what these character’s day-to-day lives are like on a realistic level?
A. I drew on my memories of the neighborhood at the time, and turned to a few excellent books for research: Glass House by Margaret Morton, which is comprised of gorgeous black and white photos of residents of a nineties squat called Glass House, and the oral histories of those residents; War in the Neighborhood, by Seth Tobocman, which is a graphic novel that tells not-very-fictionalized stories about the squats; and Resistance: A Radical Social and Political History of the Lower East Side, edited by Clayton Patterson, in particular an interview with activist squatter Frank Morales, and an essay by a squatter named Fly. (These are all excellent reads if you want to know more about the actual history of the LES squats. My book is inspired by the history of the Ea. Thirteenth Street squats, but it is truly fiction. I took tremendous liberties and most of it is wholly invented.)
Which brings me to my main method of understanding my characters’ day-to-day lives: I imagined myself into their heads and made it up. It’s a temptation with historical fiction to lean heavily on the research, but ultimately you have to let go of it and remember you’re writing FICTION. Absorb the research for a background understanding and then set it aside and MAKE SHIT UP. It is your job, as a novelist, to make shit up.
Q. There’s something about these characters that makes them understandable, relatable, and likable even if they are so utterly complicated and removed from the life that most of us know. What was the writing process like while toeing the character line of having them do terrible things, have mixed and not so innocent motivations, and knowing that destruction was on the horizon, and yet still have the reader root for each of them?
A. I think the key to writing characters who aren’t always nice to themselves or others and still have the reader connect with them is to make them realistically complex. They need to demonstrate a range of both flaws and virtues, and their motivations and logic have to be clear. It can be faulty logic, but it has to be evident. And in order to do that, you have to go deep with the characters. You have to really dig into them emotionally and get your hands dirty. This is the scary part of writing—at least for me. This is where it hurts the most and where I feel most naked on the page—because in some ways once I dig all the way down into a character it’s always me there at the bottom. But it’s so necessary. If you don’t make yourself vulnerable in the writing like that, the characters won’t feel real and vulnerable on the page. A character doesn’t have to be likeable, but they do need to be relatable. I suppose there are many ways of getting there, but the only one I’ve found that works for me is to just get brutally honest with the emotions and motivations.
Q. Reading The Revolution of Every Day it is amazing to me that this is your debut novel. When did you know that this was the book that would be your introduction, and essentially in nutshell form, what was the process like going from writing it to the pub date?
A. It’s my debut novel, but it isn’t the first one I wrote. (Many authors I know didn’t publish the first novel they wrote. Dirty little publishing secret. For example, my MFA mentor, Michael Cunningham, debuted with the third novel he wrote. And you know…things worked out okay for him.) My first novel, which I wrote as my MFA thesis at Brooklyn College, earned me a top-shelf agent and a residency at an artist colony but never found a publisher. My agent shopped it around for two years without success. It was heartbreaking at the time, but now I’m truly grateful that it was never published. It was my thinly veiled autobiographical first novel; it was me learning how to write a novel. It was a good, necessary process, and a decent book, but I’m so glad it’s not out in the world.
I began writing Revolution as that first novel was going out on submission to editors, and I was sure it would be picked up quickly. (Because of my huge MFA ego, which has since been beaten down to a healthier size.) And then the rejections came in. And more rejections. And my agent and I worked on a revision. And it went back out. And more rejections. Seventeen total. The book came close a few times, but no one wanted to commit. I heard a lot of “I like it, but it’s too dark” and “I love it but I don’t know how to market it.” Extremely discouraging. Having fully thrown myself into the new novel at that point made it easier to swallow those rejections, though. My agent and I agreed to put that first novel in the drawer and move on to the next project, The Revolution of Every Day.
I finished the first draft of Revolution, revised it twice, and sent the third draft to my agent. We went through three more rounds of revisions together, but she wasn’t connecting with the material, and wasn’t understanding what I was trying to do with it. Ultimately we parted ways very amicably. She remains wonderfully supportive.
I spent some time looking for another agent, but ended up deciding to submit the manuscript on my own to independent presses, as I felt strongly that an indie press was the right home for the book anyway. Tin House said yes, obviously, and it couldn’t have possibly worked out better. Tin House is exactly the right home for this book, and my wonderful editor, Meg Storey, was exactly the right editor for it. It was a hell of a journey to get there, though. Almost exactly three years passed between my former agent and I parting ways and Tin House making an offer.
Q. What are you working on now?
A. I’m working on a novel set in contemporary Portland. It’s about online vs real life identity and sexual obsession. I’m having a hell of a good time with it. It’s involved some highly entertaining Twitter-based research. (No, I won’t reveal my secret Twitter handle. Not yet, anyway. That would spoil all the fun.)
Q. New York was such a character in The Revolution of Every Day. You had an understanding of the city that only someone who has spent a good amount of time there can appreciate. For your next novel, are you just as influenced by setting as your first one?
A. The Revolution of Every Day is about New York, so it was important that the city itself be a presence. This new one is written in first person, limited to one character’s point of view, and is a confession. It’s much more internal in that way, leaning less heavily on a sense of physical place. The internet as a place and a force plays a big part, so maybe I’d call that the setting. And there is a good deal of the general feel of Portland, since that’s the landscape the characters move through. The rain, the sound of the trains down by the river at night, the industrial stretches of Southeast Portland…
Q. The Revolution of Every Day had such a steady paced build to the end, or as I like to call the finale for this one. Did you know while writing it that it would all conclude the way it did? Or was the destruction placed differently in earlier drafts? And how did this help in adding hope to the vast amount of sadness in this novel?
A. One of the benefits of my method for writing first drafts—which is that I write blind, completely without an outline—is that I didn’t know exactly what my characters were headed for. I knew I was aiming for a big eviction based on an actual eviction that happened on Ea. Thirteenth Street on May 30, 1995, but I didn’t know how far I would take it, or how it would play out, or who—if anyone—would be hurt. And that was an obvious target to aim for: you set a novel in a squatted building and you know there’s an eviction coming at some point. It’s like Chekov’s proverbial gun. The way it all plays out in the finished book is exactly how it came out in first draft. I changed very little about the end in revisions. One of the things that did change was that sense of hope you mention. In first draft there was none. And I very much wanted there to be some, so that had to be layered in later.
Q. What changes are you making with your thoughts towards writing a novel, character, plot, while writing your next one? Or more likely, what do you know now, that you wished you knew then?
A. Hmm… I’m feeling more pressure with this new one than I felt with my first two. My first novel, the one that lives forever in my former agent’s drawer, was written with blind, eager hubris. I was too naive to be scared by the process. I wrote Revolution after that first novel failed to sell, and so as I wrote it I was no longer sure that it would be published. And when my agent and I parted ways, I continued to revise Revolution with the near-certainty that it never would be published. I kept working because I’m compelled to do the work, but I was pretty sure it was never going to happen for me.
Now that “it” has happened for me and I get to change the title on my nametag from “Writer” to “Author” (a nearly meaningless distinction we all put so much weight on!), I’m writing this new book with an entirely different pressure. It’s not a matter of “I wonder if this will be published!”; it’s: “This will probably be published.” So now as I work I feel somewhat intimidated by the knowledge that the book will be read and people will have opinions about it—both good and bad—that will be outside of my control. The struggle is to set that aside and still write as purely and honestly as I can—to still let go and write as if no one is watching.
