Justin Torres, Author of the National Book Award winning novel Blackouts.
The Author:
Justin Torres, who won the 2023 National Book Award for his novel, Blackouts, is a writer, novelist and associate professor at UCLA. He rose to prominence after the breakout success of his award-winning first novel, We The Animals, published in 2011. He appeared
at the Faulkner for All! Festival shortly after release of the novel. Since then, that novel has been translated into 14 languages and made into a critically acclaimed film. He has published short fiction in the New Yorker, Harper’s, Granta, Tin House, the Washington Post, Glimmer Train, Flaunt, and other publications, as well as nonfiction pieces in publications like the Guardian and the Advocate. A graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, he was a Wallace Stegner Fellow at Stanford University, and a fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard. The National Book Foundation named him one of 2012’s 5 Under 35. He has been the recipient of a Rolón Fellowship in Literature from United States Artists, and the VCU Cabell First Novelist Award. Prior to moving to California, he lived in Brooklyn, NY and taught at Columbia University and the Writers’ Foundry MFA Program at St. Joseph’s College.
The Book:
In his new book, Justin Torres plays with fact and fiction, and calls into question whose story gets told and how. Blackouts uses historical documents including the 1941 report Sex Variants: A Study of Homosexual Patterns by the Committee for the Study of Sex Variants in addition to historical photographs and illustrations to supplement the narrative. The real life Sex Variants study was based on the research of journalist Helen Reitman (who was also known as Jan Gay), who conducted hundreds of interviews with gay and lesbian people in Europe and New York City in the 1920s and 30s. Eighty of these interviews and case histories were eventually included in the 1941 Sex Variants study, published by Dr. George W. Henry, which concluded that homosexuality is a pathological condition. Excerpts from these first-hand accounts, in redacted form (redacted by Torres for literary effect), are interspersed throughout the book.
An historical novel, the narrative revolves around Juan Gay, an old man who is living in an isolated institution known as The Palace and is visited by the unnamed narrator dubbed by Gay affectionately as “Nene,” who has come to interview Juan Gay about his life. They knew each other ten years in the past, when they were inmates at a mental hospital. And now Nene, suffering from gaps in his memory due to mental fugues, seeks the advice of Juan, whom he feels he can confide in. Years before, Gay discovered a copy of the 1941 medical book Sex Variants: A Study of Homosexual Patterns and is distraught that the work of Jan Gay, the journalist who conducted the interviews featured in the book, has been co-opted by medical professionals who describe homosexuality in a derisive way. Jan Gay aspired to change public attitudes towards queerness early in the 20th century, and as detailed in the book, eventually had her research co-opted and turned against her. Juan, who is nearing death, implores Nene to complete the work of Jan Gay as well as his own work and formulate a new narrative of queer identity and history to pass onto future generations.
Reviews:
Justin Torres’ Blackouts strikes me as a traditional novel wearing the costume of “experimental fiction.” I say that because even though Blackouts is festooned in dizzying layers of tales-within-tales, photographs, film scripts, scholarly-sounding end notes and fictionalized accounts of real-life figures, at its core is a classic conceit, one that’s been dramatized by the likes of Tolstoy, Willa Cather, Marilynne Robinson and many others: I’m talking about the deathbed scene. Here, that scene consists of a conversation between two friends about the distortions and erasures of queer history. And, what a sweeping, ingenious conversation it is. Over a decade has passed since Torres made his mark with his semi-autobiographical debut novel called We the Animals, which was hailed as an instant “queer classic” and made into a film. Blackouts justifies the wait.
—Maureen Corrigan, Fresh Air, NPR
For the rest of Ms. Corrigan’s exceptional review of a complicated novel, visit:
https://www.npr.org/2023/10/16/1205721246/justin-torres-blackouts-review
A dreamy novel that unfurls among mixed media and Socratic dialogues, moving freely between fact and fiction as it proposes and complicates questions about how history is made.
—Joshua Barone, The New York Times
The supreme pleasure of the book is its slow obliteration of any firm idea of reality — a perfect metaphor for the delirious disorientation that comes with learning queer history as an adult.
—Hugh Ryan, Historian, The New York Times, who commended Torres for his ability to metaphorically depict how queer identity has been suppressed from the records throughout history.
In some ways it’s more like collage, an ingenious assemblage of research, vignette, image and conceit. Its ‘Blinkered Endnotes,’ ‘Postface’ and picture credits point to a thousand avenues of further interest.
—Charles Arrowsmith, The Washington Post