BookLife Talks with Leonce Gaiter

BookLife described Gaiter’s latest work, A Memory of Fictions: (or) Just Tiddy-Boom, which received an Editor’s Pick, as “an uncompromising, incisive story of the will to create, told with rich and urgent prose.” The book follows Jessie Grandier III, “a nuanced character,” our review said, “whose life is made complex by race, sexuality, familial expectations, and personal ambitions.”

 

 

This is the only book that has any direct correlation to my life, but I think you can put just as much of yourself into a distant world as you can one you’re intimate with. The main difference here is that what’s more subtle in other books is now more overt. My sometimes-unhealthy relationships with memory and time are both the subjects and the tools here. I wanted to create a nonlinear narrative with the drive and sense of inevitability you get from a good piece of music. The Borges quote that opens the book speaks of life as a “vague memory or dim reflection, doubtless false and fragmented, of an irrevocable process.”

I wanted to express both the excitement and the dread of that.

 

 

That was easy. I’m old-school. In The Crying of Lot 49, Pynchon asks, “Shall I project a world?” I don’t write the real world. I write the worlds that the characters project. I write their worlds. Most of my books have somewhat otherworldly or magical realism airs about them for that reason. My characters tend to be extreme and to seek the extraordinary. Thus, their worlds become distorted projections of their visions, yearnings, and ambitions. I used my history as the basis for A Memory of Fictions (or) Just Tiddy-Boom, so the historical context I most wanted to get right was the sense of Southern gothic Grand-Guignol that misted my younger years and the jump-cut tragicomedies that mark the later years depicted.

 

 

My process is “whatever it takes.” A Memory of Fictions was percolating around for 20 years. Its structure is decidedly musical, and fitting it together was much like I’d imagine composing a score to be—disparate elements brought together to assemble an inevitable whole. Of course, essays are nothing like that, and the process changes accordingly. That work is more akin to the writing of my historical novel, I Dreamt I Was in Heaven—The Rampage of the Rufus Buck Gang, which was tied to a specific historical event that I used as scaffolding, much like you build on the thesis of an essay.

 

 

That’s hard. This book was turned down by scores of agents and publishers. It’s now a BookLife Editor’s Pick and has gotten accolades from every reviewer who’s seen it. I know the approach here is different. It’s a book about a Black character who does not focus on his racial identity. It’s a book about a gay character who does not focus on his sexuality. It’s a nonlinear narrative that’s expansive in scope yet intimate in feel, using everything from doodles to lyrics to jarring transitions to explore the emotional and intellectual life of its protagonist. I would give the book to anyone who loves to read and who seeks not a reflection of his or her own life but a sweeping journey into one that might be very different.

 

 

Sort of, kinda maybe. I read a potentially apocryphal tale of the Reconstruction era that just screamed at me. I have been doing research on the era but have yet to isolate the period, locale, and specific historical events that would best surround this episode. I’m half sure I’m in the “overthinking it” stage of the process, but with luck and stubbornness, I’ll get there.