Tanaïs’s new book, Stellar Smoke, is available now from Dutton, so we asked them a few questions about writing practice, interviews, favorite non-literary media, and more.
*
Who do you most wish would read your book? (your boss, your childhood bully, etc.)
The people I still hold dear but have fallen out of contact with in recent years—those I’ve ghosted or who’ve ghosted me, and those I’ve hurt or who have hurt me. I’ve lived through breakups on both sides. I picture us as planets gliding along separate orbits, needing space to exist and to grow. There’s a fierce immediacy in queer femme friendships, and sometimes the closeness becomes almost more than we can bear.
The experience has taught me that when a relationship ends, there’s a push to reclaim energy and redirect it into ourselves, into our art, into our work. Is it worthwhile? I’m not sure, but that energy is often what sparks a book into being. The ache of lost loves, followed by years of relief and regret, shame and silence, all threads that wind through this novel. Writing can feel relentlessly demanding, perhaps the hardest task there is, yet a single phone call, or sitting with someone face to face, crying or simply being upset, can be far more painful to endure.
What time of day do you write?
I write from nine-to-five, with stretches that bleed into the evening. I need to write during the moments when the veil feels thin, when the world is asleep and interruptions are few. Candlelight suits me, and I prefer my computer at a dusk-like brightness; I often write by hand, without my glasses, so my face literally touches the pages of my notebook. It feels the most real, a direct contact with my own impaired sight, and somehow liberating to hold the words up so close. The book’s earliest drafting is done by hand, after which I transcribe the messy scrawl into legible text. I once asked my mother what time I slept as an infant, and apparently I’ve always operated this way. Yet as revisions approach the final stages, I shift toward daylight hours. In daylight, there’s a clear line between work and play that proves helpful during revision.
Who is the person, or what is the place or practice that had the most significant impact on your writing education?
Kiese Laymon, with whom I’ll launch Stellar Smoke at The Center for Fiction. When I was at Vassar, he saw a play I wrote and directed about four South Asian femme friends processing the aftermath of a suicide. Afterward, he approached me, astonished that I was still only a sophomore. Even back then, I’d spent years advising survivors of domestic violence in Family Court, I was a survivor myself, and I understood that writing and performance would transform my life. He was the remarkable young instructor on campus, and everyone talked about his writing class.
And he’s the one who truly helped me believe in myself as a writer. Let the sentences breathe. Let the characters be. Revision, revision, revision will set you free. He remains among the warmest, most generous, most radically loving writers to this day. His commitment to Black love, freedom, and art is humbling to witness. It’s wild to think we were in our twenties back then. It feels almost fated that we crossed paths in this lifetime. And here we are, still doing what we love.
What do you always want to talk about in interviews but never get to?
My current novel, Stellar Smoke, centers on a living musician who confronts her estranged, recently deceased mother, who exists as a machine consciousness. The origin of the book isn’t simply a fervent cyborg-feminist retort against a tech oligarchy that insists human minds will be erased by artificial intelligence. (I still believe that immersing ourselves in real life—with others, in nature, and through human books and art—can save us.) The idea for this book stretches back to the 1980s, when my mother, in postpartum mood, would seat four-year-old me in front of a television with tomato and mayo on white bread and an ice-cold Coca-Cola.
I spent countless hours in solitude watching the era’s iconic cartoons—My Little Pony, She-Ra: Princess of Power, and, most influential, Jem and the Holograms. The premise follows Jerrica, who becomes Jem, a rock star, through Synergy, a sophisticated purple-tinted artificial intelligence modeled on Jerrica’s late mother. Synergy exists to assist Jem and her friends, yet deeper questions—how we never fully know our mothers, and how the boundary between human and machine becomes fuzzy when emotion creates dependence—are not explored. I picture little me seeking my mother’s attention, which had shifted toward my younger sister, and finding refuge in that cartoon, a seed that later grew into Stellar Smoke.
Which non-literary piece of culture—film, tv show, painting, song—could you not imagine your life without?
David Lynch’s Mulholland Drive, which I recently revisited at The Metrograph in 35mm. While studying abroad in Nairobi in 2003, just a couple of years after its release, I found a bootleg DVD and watched it dozens of times. It stands as a queer femme masterpiece, and the chemistry between Naomi Watts and Laura Harring is electric, devastating. Lynch’s work often treads into psychedelic surrealism, but this film contains everything I crave in art—mystery, desire, power struggles at their most covert and terrifying, and a beauty that is both lush and stark.
_______________________________
Stellar Smoke by Tanaïs is available from Dutton, an imprint of Penguin Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House, LLC.
