Hello watchers and observers, critics and critiquers, and insider/outsiders!
What does it really mean to consider your own social responsibility as a fiction writer? Guest Naomi Kanakia confronted that very question as she considered her modeling as a trans author writing YA books for teens. What if hers was the first book a genderqueer or trans kid ever read? What did she owe her reader? These are some of the questions at the heart of this week’s episode, but we also look under the hood of the publishing industry a bit, too, from the perspective of an author who’s “inside/outside,” who’s writing across many genres, from sci-fi to lit fic, and who has a certain kind of privilege but still lives on the margins. A truly interesting episode with a guest who’s not afraid to speak truth to power.
Socially responsible novels we love:
Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy
The Jungle by Upton Sinclair
Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood
The Power by Naomi Adler
Americanah by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
Chain-gang All-stars by Nana Adjei-Brenyah
Nevada by Imogen Binnie
Close to the Knives by David Wojanarowitz
Citizen: An American Lyric by Claudia Rankine
Partial transcript from the show
Brooke: I’m Brooke Warner, here as always week in and week out with my write-minded cohost Grant Faulkner. And we’re taking on the topic of social responsibility in fiction. Grant, I love that this juxtaposes in a lot of ways our recent episode about light-hearted fiction because we get to cover on this show all the different reasons people come to fiction. Some writers write to make a point, to champion a cause, and others write to escape, to have fun. So there’s room in this writing tent for everyone. But I want to delve into this question of where and when social responsibility starts to weigh on authors, and that’s in part what we’ll talk about with today’s guest, Naomi Kanakia. Naomi is a trans author whose latest book, Default World, centers a character named Jhanvi, who’s hatched a plan to marry a friend she’s known since college in order to get on his health plan so she can get gender-confirming surgery—and yet she sort of despises this person for his values and how he lives, and she definitely hates his housemates. It’s a book about class and privilege, and it’s a critique of a certain brand of San Francisco elitism, where people are all about helping the underprivileged while judging them harshly. There’s a lot of discomfort in this book, but my underlying feeling as I read it was that Naomi is telling it like it is from her lived experience. The social responsibility thing that Naomi brings to the fore, Grant, is from a quote I read from her when she was working on her previous book, in which she said:
“To me, the idea of social responsibility in fiction is the same as lying. The world itself has very little clarity over how to behave. If you write a book that has moral clarity, then you’re either writing an unambitious book or you’re distorting the truth. But in working on my third young adult novel, Just Happy To Be Here, I started to feel this nagging sense of social responsibility.”
So the point being that she changed her mind, in part due to the fact of who she is, living in the world she lives in, and writing novels that center trans experiences. I’d love to hear your reaction to her statement, and her change of perspective.
Grant: It’s a really interesting quote, and it’s interesting because of the ways writers have dealt with it–whether embracing it or ignoring it. One thing I want to say is that one of the beauties of fiction is that it offers a number of ways to define what social responsibility is. I remember in our interview with Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah that he defined activism as starting with love, which I thought was interesting—to look at our messy lives through love, so a character can hold contradictions and faults, but still be rendered compassionately. I think there’s been a resistance to social responsibility in the literary world because of the fear that writing with a lens of social responsibility might make the story didactic or preachy, and that can certainly be a danger. But social responsibility also means representation, and centering the trans experience in a novel makes it a novel of social responsibility no matter what. One common bit of advice given to writers is to write for the questions, not the answers, but it sounds like Naomi perhaps writes with the answers in mind as well.
Brooke: That’s great, Grant, and we’re going to pose that exact question to Naomi in the interview. You know, she’s written across so many different genres—SciFi, YA, and also about the world of publishing. It’s clear she’s a brilliant human being who’s also in the margins, just by the very nature of being a trans writer. And I think it’s important to listen to the experience of writers like her because being in the margins allows you to speak truth to power in ways that not everyone can, or maybe not everyone has the bravery. I was struck by how much of Naomi’s newest novel, Default World, addresses challenges trans people face, as well as internalized transphobia. She really got to the heart of what it feels like to be in the body of a trans person, how it’s both authentic and really hard. I want to read novels like this because it just feels real to me. It’s hard to be in any body, especially a marginalized body, and especially in our culture right now, where there’s a lot of transphobia, a lot of violence, a lot of legislation against trans bodies. And then Jhanvi herself is a complicated character. She’s judging the people that she’s trying to take advantage of, and yet she’s taking advantage of them to balance the uneven power structure at play that gives these so called friends so many more advantages that Jhanvi has—from access to medical care and benefits to simple straight privilege. It’s frankly an upsetting book in a lot of ways, but I also kept turning the page because I was invested in finding out what happened to Jhanvi. You want her to get her surgery, and you also want her to be a little less entitled.
Grant: That’s really interesting, Brooke. Naomi’s book is a cultural critique—about Millennials, and also tech culture, and big money, and who gets what and why. The money at some of these jobs right now in Silicon Valley is just so beyond the scale of what normal people make, and that kind of thing seems ripe for a novelist to take on. I think back in literary history when authors like Ibsen or Emile Zola who wrote in a literary naturalist style meant to shock the bourgeoisie, to provoke and outrage it, to prod it out of that passive and self-contented state. I’m not sure if that’s still possible today, or it’s not in the same way, but I think there will always be novelists out there with an eye and an understanding for what’s really happening who can call it like it is, consequences be damned. And there’s a lot to critique in modern culture. There’s a lot wrong that demands our attention, and fiction does provide a forum for these kinds of thoughts and conversations that’s less confrontational and that can often provide people a window into something they know but don't know how to articulate.
Brooke: That’s such a good reminder, Grant, and often why fiction can and does often have such deep cultural impact. I mentioned something about the shock of recognition when we interviewed Lissa Soep because when I was in grad school that was a central tenet of my social studies curriculum. This idea that when you see something presented that you understand to be true but had never thought to articulate in such a way, that’s a shock of recognition. Our best writers and thinkers and scholars give us this shock of recognition all the time and it can be very powerful. And there was a lot of that in this novel, especially because it’s a San Francisco novel and we live in the Bay Area. So, I actually know someone, a friend’s son-in-law, who works at Open AI, and I can't even tell you what his salary is because the number is so obscene. And there are these young people in tech who are making so so so much money, and it’s contrasted with marginalized communities who are their next tenuous paycheck away from being homeless, not to mention the unhoused crisis in so many cities, and San Francisco is really bad. So Jhanvi has this entitlement, but she’s right, that she would benefit from this surgery that would essentially feel free to these other people. So you’re grappling with it; the very thing that is off putting you’re also wanting for this character because the novel makes such valid points about the flow of money in our society, and the haves and the have-nots. And like you said, a certain subset of fiction has always existed to be a critique of our culture. When I think of novels that have served that purpose I think of classics like Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina, Sinclair’s The Jungle, Margaret Atwood’s Handmaid’s Tale, and more recently Naomi Adler’s The Power or Americanah by Chimamanda Adichie, or as you mentioned I think most prominently of the moment is Adjei-Brenyah’s Chain-gang All-stars. I’m curious to know what some of your favorite novels are that have struck you as particularly socially responsible.
Grant: In the trans cannon, I’m thinking of Imogen Binnie’s Nevada published in 2013 by the trans-focussed (and now defunct) Topside Press, the novel was just reissued by the prestigious publisher Farrar, Straus & Giroux. Nevada is about the groups we create in the age of the internet, and, in sixty brief chapters, it doesn’t seek “validation from cis people,” as Binnie says in a new afterword. The novel is defiant and very punk rock, and with that punk rock spirit, it reminds me of one of my favorite books about gay life and AIDS in the 80s, David Wojanarowitz’s Close to the Knives, which I’ve talked about on past shows. It’s both poetic and shocking and disturbing. And more. I also rank Claudia Rankine’s Citizen: An American Lyric highly. It’s a book-length poem about race and the imagination. She called it an attempt to “pull the lyric back into its realities,” and it achieves that. It’s a fascinating collage of a book that comments on acts of everyday racism—remarks, glances, implied judgments. It’s a poem, yet it’s part documentary, part lyric procedural, and it covers everything from J. M. W. Turner’s painting “The Slave Ship” to Zinedine Zidane’s head-butt during the 2006 World Cup final.
Brooke: This book made me think about the value of a trans protagonist who’s grappling with a lot of things—what she wants her future to be like, how her parents are not exactly supportive, but not exactly not supportive, how she feels in her body (too big, not feminine enough, doesn’t feel easy as a woman). I’ve worked with and read a lot of trans authors over the years, but always in a nonfiction capacity, so what I appreciated about this book was seeing into the heart and mind of someone really struggling with belonging, struggling to find ease in herself and in her body. She’s assured in a lot of ways, but also deeply self-conscious. And geez, aren’t so many of us that way? So I found Jhanvi a very relatable character—and that’s the power of fiction, which is supporting readers to transport themselves into the experience of another, or the other, and feel quite connected. Like you’re at home with this person, which creates compassion.
Grant: Our task in writing and reading fiction is to connect with others, to make others less other, in short. I think that unto itself is an act of social responsibility, and per your quote, Brooke, about the news for trans people getting worse in the last few years, that’s the reason we need books that center trans people. I can’t remember who said this, but the quote is “it’s hard to hate another once we know their story.” So that’s social responsibility to me: making that connection with another person through a story. We’re all more alike than different in the end. I look forward to talking more with Naomi after this short break.
This Week’s Book Trend:
The Diversity Baseline Survey, created by Lee & Low Books, was first released in 2015 and now has become an industry standard.
Even though the newly released 2023 results themselves aren’t worth celebrating, the conversation around diversity in book publishing is growing, and I hope the conversation leads to change.
Check out the results of the survey and let us know what stands out to you: https://blog.leeandlow.com/2024/02/28/2023diversitybaselinesurvey/
ABOUT NAOMI KANAKIA
Naomi Kanakia is the author of three YA novels and a nonfiction book, What’s So Great about Great Books (coming out next year from Princeton University Press). Her stories, poetry, and essays have been published in American Short Fiction, Asimov’s, Gulf Coast, and others. Her latest novel is called The Default World and it’s also forthcoming this spring, from The Feminist Press. She has an MFA from Johns Hopkins and was an Emerging LGBTQ Voices Fellow at Lambda Literary’s 2015 Writers Retreat. She lives in San Francisco with her wife and daughter.
I look forward to reading “Default World.” Thank you for introducing me to this author.