Can Art Save Your Life?

Yes and no.

Jun 09, 2024

One truly wild thing about releasing a book into the world, if you are lucky, is that people teach you what you have made. I thought I knew what I had made with my debut novel and second book, Housemates which follows two young queer Philly artists from a group house out into a roadtrip, but no. Every reader who tells you how the book has landed for them, every review that wrings your words for greater juice, every interview that pings and pongs in the natural and magical way of two people getting deeper into a thing than one person could alone, every chat with a bookseller about what they are seeing and hearing as they shelve — all these are crucial sounds and insights that I’m listening to because they too are a part of an essential creative process, the process by which a book becomes itself in public.

It turns out that Housemates is about the question of “can art save your life?” This clarity began with an early review by Nic Marna over in their Substack Milking It where they described the novel as being about “the price of art…not in the starving-for-their-art kind of way, but in the sense that it illustrates how art is made and how much of oneself is poured into it.” It deepened when I spoke with

Jordan Kisner

of the incredible Thresholds podcast (our interview hasn’t been released yet!!) and she pointed out that it is essential that Housemates is narrated by an older woman with her own reasons for telling because “the stakes of being in your seventies and making art are so much higher than they are when you’re in your twenties.” And it snapped into focus when I spoke to dear friend Annie Liontas (Sex With a Brain Injury) for Electric Literature. “One of your characters, Bernie, practices large-format photography,” they asked, “a form painstakingly achieved over many hours, and which the artist cannot ever be really sure of until the image is developed. Is Housemates, in its own way, a large-format portrait of America?” DAMN Annie!

Over on Slate’s Working podcast, my conversation with Ronald Young Jr. about why I absolutely must describe peoples’ bodies and what queer people are wearing helped me figure out that I do this because bodies are part of character (duh) and drastically shape our paths in the world. The lack of neutral, nuanced portrayals of fat bodies in fiction is obviously a huge thing for me — I also wrote a new piece this week for The New Republic about the subject and the intense anti-fatness of the publishing industry at large!) — but I did not expect to hear from so many readers that the attention to Bernie and Leah’s bodies was one of the main things that kept them inside Housemates.

Maybe it shouldn’t be surprising to me (as a depressed person, I am obsessed with looking for hope!), but I have also been floored by how much reviewers and interviewers have described the novel as hopeful. Over at Autostraddle, Drew Burnett Gregory wrote that the book is “also a love story, about falling for the way another person sees the world, the magic of realizing someone sees in a way that is different than you yet insistently compatible.” I’ve been keeping a tally and seven people have now told me that Housemates made them want to make their art again after a period of not making it. If there is any better thing to hear about your book, I don’t want to know about it.

If I had to answer the question of “can art save your life” right now, today, as I lie on my couch with the hazy West Philly morning coming through the window and my cat Gabriel kneading my boob and my back a bit fucked up from plane travel, I would say: yes and no. Yes it can keep us living, keep us alive, make the living more alive; it absolutely has for me. And that in the absence of things like healthcare, housing, and food, no it can’t. We as Americans have decided that art fundamentally does not matter to us — we won’t subsidize it, we won’t invest in it. If art can save your life, it can also kill you or hurt you — a thing that Housemates tries to talk about too. And yet people keep making it, for years, over the course of whole lives. That’s a mystery I’d like to write about one day.

This week in Housemates

Events in Brooklyn, online, central PA, NJ & Western Mass.

THANK YOU to everyone who came out to hang with me for Housemates events in Philly, Manhattan, the Hudson Valley, and Chicago. I had a blast!!!
Tomorrow, Monday 6/10 at 8pm, I’ll be at the lovely Franklin Park Reading Series in Brooklyn (618 St. Johns Pl) with five other amazing authors. Free! Apparently there is yummy beer and a books raffle.
Tuesday 6/11 at 7:30pm EST I’m doing my only online event for Housemates with the inimitable **
Carmen Maria Machado
** via queer and feminist Atlanta bookstore Charis Books & More. ASL interpretation is available. From Charis, “This event is free and open to all people, especially to those who have no income or low income right now, but we encourage and appreciate a solidarity donation in support of the work of Charis Circle, our programming non-profit. Charis Circle's mission is to foster sustainable feminist communities, work for social justice, and encourage the expression of diverse and marginalized voices.”
Wednesday 6/12 at 7pm, I’ll be at the GORGEOUS Harrisburg, PA bookstore The Midtown Scholar in conversation with Clare Beams, Pittsburgh-based author of the “pregnancy horror” novel The Garden which has been getting rave reviews all over town.
Thursday 6/13 at 6:30 pm, I’ll be in the Bucks County area at The Frenchtown Bookshop for an event and book signing in their glorious outdoor garden.
Saturday 6/15 at 6:30pm, I’ll be in Western Massachusetts at
Rachel Lyon
‘s Dream Away Reading Series at the Dream Away Lodge (1342 County Road, Becket, Massachusetts 01223). Rumor has it there is music and food and general dreaminess.
On deck: events in Providence, Los Angeles, and San Francisco.