The Author: Christina J. Cooke
The Book: Broughtupsy (Catapult, 2024)
The Elevator Pitch: Broughtupsy is a first-person diasporic saga and terse sexual awakening when your family, your home, is always out of reach.
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The Rumpus: Where did the idea of your book come from?
Christina J. Cooke: I’ve been asked this question a few different ways since publication, and every time I keep returning to the same answer—not because it’s an easy answer to give but because it honestly feels like the truest thing I could say.
Broughtupsy came about because I wanted to write a book that took the trendy buzzword “intersectionality” and showed the dynamic humanity of that overused phrase. As someone who lives at the crossroads of multiple beautiful yet fraught realities—Black, female, queer, immigrant, gender nonconforming, and with a stutter—I got really tired of social media warriors and faux-academics throwing that phrase around without imbuing it with the nuance and care that it rightly deserves. Because at the end of the day—and I will speak for myself, but know that this is a perspective shared—I don’t think of myself as capital B Black. Or Queer. Or Immigrant. I think of myself as Christina, the weirdo who loves peanut butter to an unhealthy degree and despises anything winter or involving okra.
So when I sat down to write Broughtupsy, I created Akúa: the holder of many intersecting-isms who’s stumbling around, feeling her way through the world, each experience coming to the reader thick and heavy like words whispered in a fever in the dark. Broughtupsy takes intersectionality and gives it a face, a name, a head full of braids and a brother to adore, to remind us that when we invoke any of these -isms, we are talking first and foremost about people. Not just notions of being or systems of oppression, people. Thank God for fiction to remind us of the humanities that, in our haste to pursue justice, we are often quick to gloss over or outright forget.
Rumpus: How long did it take to write the book?
Cooke: I spent about nine years writing and revising and another four or so with the novel out on submission then awaiting publication. So all told, it’s been about thirteen years to take this idea from seed to fruition.
Thirteen years is a long time—too long, some might say. Somewhere around the seven- or eight-year mark, I started to feel panicked. What’s wrong with me? Why is this taking so long? Then I started to feel ashamed. I had classmates at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop who signed two-book deals before they had even walked across the graduation stage. If it could happen for them, why not me?
I don’t know why it took me so long. . . .That’s a lie. I know why it took me so long. The only way I could’ve written the novel’s flashback sections with its visceral urgency and emotive complexity was to be newly emerged from those experiences myself. I was twenty-two. Broughtupsy’s protagonist is twenty. It wasn’t much of an imaginative leap to leave my life and enter hers.
But when it came to revising, I needed to be older, wiser, able to pull my head away from the trees to see the whole forest. Once I turned thirty, I started to gain the writerly insight necessary to gather the experiential snippets I’d drafted and string them together into a compelling story. To do Broughtupsy justice, I needed to be young and passionate, then older and deliberate. I needed to be both, and the only thing for that is time.
Rumpus: Is this the first book you’ve written? If not, what made it the first to be published?
Cooke: This is the first book I’ve written.
Rumpus: In submitting the book, how many no’s did you get before your yes?
Cooke: The answer to this question still makes me wince. It took seventy-two declinations before I got my “yes.” Hearing “no” that many times was by far the hardest part of this process, harder than throwing out my whole novel and restructuring it from scratch—which I did twice.
The worst was the “soft no,” the sweet note from a wistful editor, sometimes handwritten, praising all the qualities of my writing they loved but, “unfortunately, I’m so sorry to say. . . .” I imagined them sitting in front of their laptops, wringing their hands ’til their skin turned coarse.
But what I learned from that experience is this: it wasn’t the industry telling me no. Sometimes it wasn’t even a whole house. It was just one person with a particular set of tastes and toolbox of skills who was self-selecting as a poor match for furthering the art I wanted to put into the world. So thanks, all seventy-two of you. Hearing “no” that many times helped me develop the stamina and tenacity necessary to continue doing this writing thing for the long haul.
Rumpus: Which writers buoyed you along the way? How?
Cooke: At the risk of sounding repetitive from previous interviews, one of the most pivotal instructors I had was Yiyun Li during my second master’s at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. Close behind would be Sam Chang and Margot Livesey, also at the Workshop, because despite my obnoxious sensitivities and refusal to see reason, they continued to guide me forward to see Broughtupsy through.
Rumpus: How did your book change over the course of working on it?
Cooke: Ha! Well, once upon a time I thought my one book was actually two. Broughtupsy started as a short story collection that I wrote as the culmination of my MA. Then during my MFA, I started writing what I thought was a sequel—this time a novel—that would pick up a few years after where the short story collection had left off. It wasn’t until I’d written both in their entirety that I realized these projects were two pieces of the same whole. In the years that followed, I focused on stitching the two projects together to arrive at the multifaceted narrative Broughtupsy is today.
Rumpus: Before your first book, where has your work been published?
Cooke: The Caribbean Writer, The Journey Prize Stories 33, PRISM International, Prairie Schooner, Epiphany, Lambda Literary Review, and Triangle House Review.
Rumpus: What is the best advice someone gave you about publishing?
Cooke: Do not believe your own hype. Getting on most-anticipated or year-end lists, being nominated for awards, receiving splashy reviews, nabbing invites to galas with the muckety-mucks of the publishing world—none of those things are reliable indicators of the merit of your work.
Many writers publish brilliant projects that don’t receive the recognition they deserve, while others find themselves laden with crowns for their middling effort. At its core, writing is a form of mass entertainment. And like all entertainment, even among the hallowed halls of literary fiction, it carries a tinge of show business. You’re up! You’re down! You’re in! You’re out! There’s no calling when it’ll happen or why. Just do your work.
Just do your work.
Rumpus: Who’s the reader you’re writing to—or tell us about your target audience and how you cultivated or found it?
Cooke: I’m assuming here that when you say “target audience,” you mean in the sense of social, cultural, and economic demographics, yes? Hmm. In which case, let me apologize upfront for how frustrating an answer this is going to be.
When I’m drafting, I don’t have a target audience in mind. I’m not evading the question. I’m being deadass. I suppose I could lie and say I write for Black queer audiences, bonus points if they’re also immigrants—and don’t get me wrong, I love those readers, I hope Broughtupsy will be so lucky as to reach those readers, but it would be lie upon lie for me to say I write for them and only them.
My fear of having a predetermined audience in mind when I write is manifold: (1) What magic or narrative possibility might I lose because I’m too focused on staying within the boundaries of the audience I’m endeavoring toward? (2) By uplifting one audience over another as my project’s final goal, how might it become claustrophobic, making me feel beholden to certain types of social or political truths? And (3) what if I spend years crafting a project for a specific audience and they end up rejecting it wholesale? What then?
All writers need a reliable means of tricking themselves into pushing through the pain of drafting to reach glorious revision on the other side. Imagining a target audience is a trick that works for some. But for me? Not so much.
Rumpus: What is one completely unexpected thing that surprised you about the process of getting your book published?
Cooke: That anyone would care. Again, I’m being deadass. Hearing “no” seventy-two times while writing and rewriting and rewriting over more than a decade does something to a person. It makes your head go a little squirrely. Somewhere along the way, though, I was still persisting, I couldn’t help but feel like maybe I was a little bit of a loser. Of course, I was thrilled when I finally got my “yes,” and then I threw myself wholeheartedly into the publication process. But those lingering loser feelings festered in the background and have only recently gone away.
I’m going to contradict the advice I gave earlier, which is: let yourself believe your own hype just a tiny bit. You enter your debut season expecting to get on no lists and end up on nineteen? Pop that bottle of champagne. Pat yourself on the back. Let the pulsing wounds of loser feelings heal over then return to your work, stronger and happier and more determined than before.
