Alejandro Varela’s newest book, The People Who Report More Stress (Astra House, 2023), contains thirteen linked stories that primarily follow Eduardo, a queer Latine/x public health professor, and his relationship with his partner, Gus. Set mainly in New York City, these are stories about anxiety—specifically, anxieties that arise from enduring systematic and interpersonal racism and inequality in the United States.
Like some of the characters in his collection, Varela has a background in public health policy. This experience informs how he writes about poverty and racism’s impact on health and life expectancy. Varela’s debut novel, The Town of Babylon—a National Book Award Finalist—explores similar themes. Without a doubt, Varela’s writing is serious and political but also incredibly funny, sexy, and tender.
I had the great privilege of chatting with Varela over Zoom, where we discussed his connected short stories, the power of the narrative, and how writing with a lens of social justice can yield a love story.
***
The Rumpus: The People Who Report More Stress is a collection of interconnected short stories, so I read them chronologically. Did you know these stories would form an interconnected collection while you were writing them? Do you think short stories—or a collection of short stories—can achieve something that a novel cannot?
Alejandro Varela: Connecting the stories wasn’t my goal initially. Eduardo and Gus started appearing throughout the collection while I was writing. Then I was afraid the stories that didn’t involve Eduardo or Gus would stick out or make the book feel like a forced collection. That’s when I realized I was trying to explore repeating themes from different angles.
During the first two rounds of manuscript rejections, I was told I should reconsider writing this book as a novel. But at the time, I felt I wasn’t skilled enough to do that. How does one take twelve or thirteen different plots and fit them into one novel? Stories all have their own unique dilemmas and tensions.
Short stories are like a TV series, and the novel is a movie. In The People Who Report More Stress, there were so many situations and conflicts I wanted to explore that needed to be at the center of each story. They couldn’t be tertiary plot points. That’s the benefit of the short form. That said, the people who’ve shown interest in adapting my first novel, The Town of Babylon (Astra House, 2022), are convinced it’s a TV series. There are so many characters and subplots that a one-and-a-half-hour or two-hour movie wouldn’t do it justice, they said. I agree with that.
Rumpus: You have a background in public health. How did you merge this with literature, or vice versa?
Varela: I feel a lot of pressure to be accurate because public health is science-based. With fiction, there’s more freedom on the page to explore and create. There’s truth in everything we write, but there’s a lot of fabrication and fantasy, and you don’t have that freedom with science. So when I write about public health, I feel an added responsibility.
As for my background, I went to graduate school about twenty years ago at the University of Washington. I was part of the Community Oriented Public Health Practice program, which focused on getting public health workers out in community settings. Then I did cancer research, then taught at a large private institution. I also worked with an NGO to write a curriculum for health ministries, and I felt a little cog-like. I wasn’t doing anything to move a conversation forward.
I see value in doing community work on the ground. But maybe because of my desire to communicate and to take more complicated ideas and present them in an accessible way, I thought I needed a bigger platform. Then I got to thinking about the forms of communication that linger, and narratives do that. People remember stories.
I also had to find the right balance between entertainment and advocacy. Maybe that’s the thing people talk about most when it comes to my work. Some readers love it, and some readers feel it’s too much. Sometimes that resistance comes from people who don’t want to hear what I’m saying, and it’s not necessarily because it’s a bad way to make art or because I’m doing it incorrectly. Still, I have gone to shows, read books, and watched movies where I’m like, “Oh my God, I completely agreed with the person who created this art, but they’re hitting me over the head with it.” I don’t want to make those mistakes.
Rumpus: As a follow-up question, what role can literature play in public health and public policy in general?
Varela: We don’t have enough frank, common sense conversations about our inequities or our plans for leveling society in a way that makes us all better and healthier. I have always been influenced by political art, and I don’t mind eavesdropping on an intelligent conversation that’ll help me see something in a way I hadn’t seen it before. I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t aspiring to write those sorts of conversations so that people can hear a common sense approach to a thing that seems complicated.
Some people will feel lectured, but I’m pleasantly surprised when someone says, “That’s what I needed to hear. I hadn’t thought about it that way,” or, “I believe exactly this, and I’m so grateful other people are saying it.” In that way, literature is helpful. It’s one more crack in the foundation.
Rumpus: You have much in common with some of the characters in The People Who Report More Stress. What do you think we gain through fictionalizing lived experiences?
Varela: I write from a skeleton or outline of my life, but because I invent and create so much in my writing, I couldn’t say my work was anything but fiction. I also like my privacy. I’ve never been the kind of person who’s like, “Look at my life. Look at my family.” I see the irony in having those feelings and writing about my experiences and influences, but all artists borrow from their lives.
My voice feels fresh in some ways because queer, working class, and Latinx or Latine perspectives haven’t been fairly represented in art and literature. But I don’t know if it’s my voice or the representation. So, to answer the last question, what do we gain through fictionalizing lived experience? It’s both a general exposure and a more specific portrayal of the variety of experiences that fall under all my political identities. Here’s a person, and this is one facet of their lives, and these are possible experiences.
Rumpus: I’d love to talk about “Carlitos in Charge,” a piece that takes place at the United Nations building in New York City. It contains a line that encapsulates so many of the themes you explore in your collection: “This is the netherworld between possibility and delusion, but we continue to give it our all. . . .” What inspired this?
Varela: I have always been interested in what I would call international relations—or politics outside of the United States—and the relationship between the U.S. and the rest of the world. My parents are immigrants from two different countries, so maybe that was the beginning.
I’ve probably accumulated too much information about international relations and the history of the U.N. This was a space I felt comfortable writing about and commenting on. In fact, I felt at ease being satirical and a bit cutting because I know enough about what’s happening there.
As a person from the United States, I live with this tension: I have access to many things, yet I disagree with so much of what my country does. The desire to see this country change, and to atone for what it has done, was some of the motivation behind this story. It’s some of the motivation behind all my writing. In this story, I could situate the U.S. in a much larger context. love the idea that the world happens in a building in midtown Manhattan.
I also love this idea that we gays are everywhere, in every position of power—and not. I got to thinking about how so much happens at the U.N. and how futile it must feel for many of the people there, knowing that, ultimately, a handful of countries can decide everything. I’m always fascinated by the structure of a Security Council that ultimately has these five permanent members who can determine the fate of the world—which isn’t to say the U.N. is obsolete.
I thought it would be fun—and funny—for there to be a sex club-like environment within the U.N. If you are feeling aimless, if you’re feeling like nothing you’re doing is working, then maybe that’s what happens. Something more animalistic comes out in this environment. “Well, I got nothing else, so what about sex?” As cynical and/or acerbic as the voice might be in that story or other stories, I also love the idea that there’s hope.
Rumpus: In several of your stories, the legacy of the Salvadoran Civil War lingers, as does the involvement of the United States. What do you hope to communicate with your readers when referencing this decades-long war?
Varela: Half of my family is from El Salvador, and I have a personal connection to the country. It’s one of those small places that rarely gets attention or didn’t when I was growing up. Part of me wants to represent and keep El Salvador in the conversation. In recent years, there’s been attention around caravans and criminals, and I want folks to realize that there are causes to everything. There’s the United States’s involvement in Latin America—but all over the world, there are invasions, and we don’t know about most of them. We know about the big wars, but we are constantly deposing and or destabilizing countries, stealing, and plundering.
Then when a handful of people from those countries are like, “Life sucks, where can we find something better?” Everyone here is like, “Oh my God, these criminals, what are they doing here?” But does anyone understand that we have contributed to the conditions that make people leave? So that’s why I keep bringing up the Salvadoran Civil War. It’s a tribute, but it’s also a frank conversation about why we’re in the position that we’re in.
Rumpus: “Comrades” features an attractive leftist Latine/x man who goes on several first dates with various men he meets from a dating app while being upfront about needing a long-term partner he can raise children with. I absolutely love how you wrote the dialogue. Where did you draw your inspiration?
Varela: I’m in my early forties, and I have several friends who are of a similar age and looking for romantic partners, and they’re on the dating apps. My friends and I have family dinners a couple of times a week, and one time, one of my friends came over and we swiped through some profiles together. She kept finding red flags with everyone who popped up, and I completely agreed with her. Then I thought about how I’ve been with my husband since I was twenty-one, and I didn’t have those apps when we met. We’ve had all these years to grow together—politically, emotionally, financially—and that’s a bit of a privilege I realize in retrospect.
I got to wondering: what would I do if everything ended? Would I start from scratch, or would I go straight to the guts of it? An “I know exactly what I’m looking for, and I won’t waste any time” approach. I imagined someone who had ended a long-term relationship and more or less wanted to start where they had left off.
Rumpus: There are playful scenes where characters are cruising, meeting men in bars and public spaces, having sex, and being intimate in all kinds of ways. When writing about sex or using erotic language, what do you hope to convey?
Varela: I like to be direct when it comes to sex. I don’t want to equivocate because that communicates a sense of powerlessness. Some people aren’t going to enjoy sex writing, and it might be unexpected for some readers, so that was partly why the first story is about dating apps and a couple that opens up their relationship. It’s a fun and sexy story that sets the tone for the collection.
I also want readers to see that there’s no shame, and in particular, no shame in gay sex. Although sex is political, especially if it falls in the queer realm, it serves as a way to balance out the explicitly political stuff I write about. It’s a bit of sugar with the medicine. Also, sex is part of life, or it’s part of the conversations I have with the people in my life. In this kind of realist fiction, it would be odd if I talked about politics and political identity, but sex didn’t come into the picture.
Rumpus: Some of your stories follow a circular structure, with an opening in the present moment, the main action taking place primarily in the past, then coming back and ending in the present moment again. When you’re writing, how do you decide where to open and close a story?
Varela: Thank you for this question, and I mean that because no one has really brought that up. The openings for both stories felt like a gamble because they play with tense too. In [the story] “The People Who Report More Stress,” I jump from present to past, and I’m always worried about how that’s going to land. However, it reflects how I think and how I process events.
I’ve sat in front of a fountain or walked down a block while I’m in my head thinking about the ten things that led me to that moment, or the events that culminated in whatever I’m feeling that day. That’s how a lot of us humans function. Those of us who don’t always handle the occasion perfectly but do well after our brains have had time to work through ways we could have dealt with a particular situation, beginning and ending in the present moment, feels more exciting and riveting. There is still possibility.
Rumpus: The People Who Report More Stress is a lament—and a call to action—about the devastating ways stress affects marginalized people, but it also reads to me like a love story. Do you believe this book is a love story too?
Varela: I absolutely do. When you asked me if I had intended to create an interconnected collection, I thought we would—through a series of adventures— follow the relationship, and the relationship would follow the adventures.
I was an adult when same-sex marriage became legal, and it was a large part of the political and cultural conversation. Meanwhile, a lot of gay and queer art about couples—or two men in particular—ends with someone dying of either HIV/AIDS, violence, or both. Along with the political conversations, those stories really informed my idea of what it means to be a gay man in this world. It’s not a particularly positive view of oneself or possibilities.
I didn’t have queer elders growing up, or examples of committed queer relationships, so making this couple the backbone of all these stories felt like a way to say, “We are here too.” It’s not that radical.
Rumpus: Since your debut novel, The Town of Babylon, became a finalist for the National Book Award, you have been interviewed so many times. What have these conversations taught you about your writing process?
Varela: I would like to talk more about craft in general and my process for writing. I’m often asked about political and personal stuff, and I didn’t mind that. I’ve had a lot of fun in those conversations. But I haven’t been asked much about craft. Sometimes, I was grateful for that because I didn’t get an MFA, and I was afraid I didn’t have the vocabulary to have those conversations, but when they’ve come up, I realize I can. I do alright explaining the hows and whys of my writing process.
***
Author photograph by Allison Michael Orenstein
