Dead in Long Beach, Californiais out from MCD x FSG on January 23.
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Whenever anyone suggested he break the news, he would deflect and evade.
His way of handling the death shattered his sister.
But it also fascinated her.
For Blackburn, loss is a pet subject.
For me, she thinks.
And sometimes it gets to be about me, okay.
I am a person.
Im not some kind gay nun with a credit card.
Which is wrong, of course.
So heres my fantasy of what it would look like if I did.
Blackburn grew up in Compton, the youngest of three.
A merciless self-editor, she whittled her M.F.A.
thesis from a 300-plus-page novel to four pages.
Ive never been precious about my writing, she says.
I can always make another sentence later.
The day after she defended that thesis, her mother died.
Suddenly Blackburn, the golden child, was the family linchpin.
Her divorced brother and widowed father moved in with her in Arizona.
Four years later, he died.
Again, she was the kind gay nun with a credit card left with the cleanup.
Around the same time, she started teaching full time at ASU and committed herself to the short story.
She used to think she had to write like Toni Morrison to kill the goofball within.
Her already economical prose densified under a new command.
She cleaved through exposition and other background noise; what details remained were reserved for character and voice.
The novel, for her, reads as one slow good-bye.
In a way, what Coral does to her niece by impersonating Jay is a gift.
But its not wrong.
Its a completely legitimate way to process your horror.
Youre just right there in the crack of a catastrophe.
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