The Life and Literature of Justin Torres
At first glance, it seems like an impossible literary project – how does anyone write a book about erasures? About absences? About blackouts? If a text is a record of ideas, events, and people that are present, how do you shape a narrative around the things that aren’t there?
As I do with many books and films, I read about Blackouts before I read Blackouts itself. Reviews had described it as a book about historical omissions, erasures of queer history. Maybe it’s the fact that I like ghost stories, but I had a sort of instinctual feeling about the text – maybe not love at first sight, per se – but maybe something akin to infatuation at first synopsis. Erasures and omissions? Yes, please! Haunt me with revelations of what’s been deliberately forgotten! I love reconstructed archives. I love remediated histories. I love seemingly impossible writing projects. Truly, they’re the best kind.
And Blackouts, of course, delivers. True to its theme, the form of the text is deeply fractured. There’s a narrative through-line, sure – the text could be described as a series of exchanges between two men as one of them approaches his death. But Blackouts also spirals well beyond the constraints of traditional form. It’s a montage – of memories, of excerpts of other texts, of photographs – both personal and archival, altered and unaltered. It’s a resuscitation of that which has been struck from the archive – a considered nod to 20th century queer researchers whose work was given short shrift by established academics. It is also an acknowledgement of the anonymous interviewees whose voices were recorded in research projects – but not heard. Blackouts collects these items into a framework that is at once fragmented and cohesive. At one point, a character in the book finds a cardboard box filled with discards – throwaway objects and a pair of blacked out texts: copies of Sex Variants, an actual collection, published in 1941, of case studies of queer subjects. The moment is rendered humorously – Torres writes that someone has written on the flap of the box not the words “free” or “take me,” but rather, “I’m yours now.” The delight with which this detail is rendered is, in itself, telling – Blackouts is in some ways itself that cardboard box, a collection of marked-up texts finding their way into a pair of more considerate hands that handle the individual threads of the narrative wryly, but also with attentive care.
It makes sense that a book about erasures wouldn’t adhere to a clean, athletic narrative line. The disruption of traditional narrative is, in many ways, the point. The draw of Blackouts is, in fact, its mosaic quality – its constellation of vignettes, rich and intense as petit-fours. But the book isn’t just desserts. It delights in irreverence, yes, as when Juan, a main character in the book, calls for the narrator to entertain him with “one of [his] whore stories.” But even in that phrase, the provocation is… play. It’s levity, a stab at oxygen in what could otherwise be an inhospitable story. Still, the real muscle of the book is its exploration of intimacy. The text is a lengthy conversation – personal, intellectual, unwieldy and digressive, as good conversations often are – between two men as one assists the other in his death. They tell stories to each other about love and loved ones, family and found family, partners, relationships, and their attempts, both earnest and misguided, to create (and at times to elude) deep human connection.
If I wanted to be flippant, I might tell you that Blackouts is a sexy hospice book. And that’s an oxymoron, yes, a phrase designed to provoke. Still, it speaks, I think, to the book’s unique ability to toggle seamlessly between intimacy and grief, without getting lost in the quagmire of sadness. It isn’t easy to write a book about erasures, especially when those erasures are, in fact, very real. And it isn’t easy to write a book in which one man shepherds a friend tenderly toward death. Yet there are so many good lines in here – by turns profound and remarkable and sad and funny – as when Juan says, describing his blacked-out found copy of Sex Variants, “Flip through to any page and there is a sketch of a life, ever unfolding, rising up out of the past, each a single testimony of how that person did or did not get over.” I could say the same, truly, in describing Blackouts.
I’d also like to mention that I had happened upon his slim work of autofiction, We the Animals, nearly a decade ago. I no longer remember my first encounter with that text – how I found it or how it found me. What I do recall, however, is the fact that it was so roundly embraced by every student who read it. Every few years or so, as a teacher, I seem to have the good fortune of finding a text that is wholly loved by students, semester after semester, class after class. We the Animals is one of those texts – and that’s a small and very special selection of books. Regardless of what major my students were enrolled in – regardless of whether they were readers or non-readers, writers or non-writers – they routinely fell in love with the book, unapologetically and
whole-heartedly.
Some of the magic of Justin’s work is definitely in his sentences, as lush and well-crafted as they are. But he also has a gift for writing deeply human characters. His characters are flawed. They love fiercely. They make mistakes. They are vulnerable. In so many ways, they read like mirrors of our own messy and authentic human experience. It’s fitting, then, that Justin closes Blackouts with the narrator acting as a mirror for Juan before he passes. “Be my face,” Juan says, pulling him close. And then he follows with, “Me and my face…. How much we have been through together.” It is a perfect sort of closure, a moment of connection, of deep acceptance and visibility.
What a beautiful book.
—Tracey Watts
Tracey Watts, Ph.D, is the current chair of Loyola University’s English Department. As a Loyola alum, she is delighted to be in the role of leading the department which was so instrumental in her development as a creative and critical thinker. Tracey has had the good fortune of teaching many things to many people, including yoga, ballroom dance, bookbinding, and writing. A long-time Loyola professor, she regularly discusses the virtues and shortcomings of various literary texts as well. She completed her M.A. at the University of Montana in Missoula and her Ph.D. at the University of Texas at Austin, where she specialized in Ethnic and Third World Literatures. Her dissertation was an investigation into how New Orleans has been imagined in American culture over the course of the late 19th and 20th centuries. Tracey leads a study abroad program for Loyola students in Prague, Czech Republic, and she is currently developing additional study abroad programs for Loyola students in Iceland.