Almost every teacher I had told me, “If you want to do this for real, you need to make sure you have a job on the side that you don't care about so much, so that you have energy to write.” And I took that as gospel. $13 at Amazon Was the assumption that these two versions of yourself-Raven Leilani and 9-to-5 Raven-would always remain separate? Luckily, Luster is succeeding with all of its darkness and sharp corners intact, an unflinching chronicle of a young woman’s attempt to make sense of the cards she’s been dealt.
“There was some anxiety about writing the kind of story that might be suitable for the market, because I've looked at the data, and I saw what's being published, and what room it's being made for,” she says. Like Edie, one of Leilani’s many day jobs over the years was in publishing. But watching New York City tentatively emerge from the throes of a pandemic adds another layer of peculiarity to the whole thing, too. She’s referring to the surreal sensation of watching the book she worked on for years on nights and weekends-a razor-sharp coming-of-age story that sends Edie, its Black twenty-something narrator, careening into an older white couple’s open marriage-generate rave reviews and stamps of approval from critics and literary peers alike. “A part of me feels like this experience is one big trip.” “I once heard about a person who did acid for the first time and ended up in a closet with an orange, but thought they’d been in there for a year with a friend,” she says over the phone while strolling through her local park.
Amid all the fanfare surrounding the release of Luster, Raven Leilani’s debut novel, the Brooklyn-based author is wondering if perhaps it’s all the result of one long fever dream.
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