Carvell Wallace’s memoir, Another Word for Love (MCD Books, 2024), is an intimate four-part examination of both Black life and a Black life, the latter of which readers follow from his single-digit years to his mid-forties.
Another Word for Love is perhaps best not thought about in terms of chronology, however. Each part—titled “Stories About Loss,” “Stories About God,” “Stories About Return,” and a postscript titled, “A Story About Dill”—includes short, often lyrical chapters that offer a singular reimagining of love. Within each, Wallace discloses and reflects on paradoxical familial relationships, codependence, sex and liberation, queerness, race, death, and care.
I was grateful to discuss Another Word for Love through Black perseverance, beauty, transitions, horror, and likability with Wallace over email.
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The Rumpus: There are times in my life I best recall by a family member’s frequent use of a word they hadn’t used previously or a new character we seemed to always be interacting with. I thought my way of keeping time was strange, relative to the way other people kept time or recalled periods in their lives. Your memoir seems to have a similar sensibility of conveying time and memory by association, both in how the chapters are titled and how the chapters are rendered beyond their titles. Your approach made me feel that the experiences and events you reflect on in your memoir could be endlessly revisited. Can you comment on this?
Carvell Wallace: I think the two ideas that emerge in the book are that there are no events that exist purely in the past and that every event is linked in some way to a myriad of others. This, to me, suggests that memory is just as useful a timekeeping tool as a clock is, though it, of course, keeps time differently. This is a political argument as well as a spiritual one. Because of the way trauma works, everything can be up at every moment, and you could make a calendar sectioned by core memories just as well as you could make one sectioned by sunrises. I think there are lots of arguments for treating time as a thing shaped differently than how we’ve been taught about it. Trauma is one of those things, but particle physics also suggests that time is not a straight line.
Also, I think of how our indigenous communities, and here I’m thinking specifically of African indigeneity, have considered time to be a thing of cycles, circles, curves, and malleability. But none of that is the reason I wrote it that way, though those are reasons that I can say it makes sense to have written it this way. I wrote it that way because that’s how I wanted to write it. That’s what it felt like. That was the truth for me.
Rumpus: In this book, there was often little or no transition from a setting into descriptions of harm. I found that realistic because difficult life experiences can be sudden or surprising, but realism in that sense rendered on the page is often seen as provocative because of how it can affect a reader. How did you think about transitions in relation to subject matter when writing your memoir?
Wallace: I suspect that in order to capture violence the way I did, it was actually important not to think about transitions at all, and I followed that impulse. Generally, when writing, my first instinct is to get the sentences down and then go back and see what works and what doesn’t. That can lead to a prose style that can feel rather flat, affectless. If, in revisions, it feels like that style might take away from the reader’s ability to connect with the material, then I’m apt to change it. But I’ve found, particularly with traumatic or violent events, that the telling needs very little writing. The events are doing the writing for me, and my job as a stylist is to simply get out of the way and let the story tell itself.
What you name above about how violence often has this quality of breaking through the mundane is probably why that works as a way to write about violence. Again, it goes back to “that’s how I experienced it, so that’s how it makes sense to write it.”
Rumpus: You sometimes have such sublime and grotesque descriptions of your narrator’s experiences. It made me think about how much of the Black experience uniquely dwells within that space. Your descriptions often forced me to reflect on just how beautiful Black perseverance is alongside the anger I felt that such horrific beauty exists. Maybe what I’m commenting on is how unfair it is that such tedious beauty seems to be a fact of Black life. Can you discuss the importance of the language you use surrounding these experiences?
Wallace: I really like this observation. I remember interviewing Lena Waithe for a piece in the New York Times Magazine, and she said something like—and I’m paraphrasing—“It often takes Black death for Black life to be illuminated, and I grapple with that.” That idea has stayed with me because it was a distillation of something I’ve been witnessing and experiencing my whole life, a particular contradiction of Black life in America. Or maybe what struck me was just the idea that here, we must embrace contradiction if we are to survive the attempts to destroy us. Whatever it was, that sentence was sort of present for me throughout the writing of this, the awareness that the juxtaposition of beauty and horror was something of a Black reality in this country. And while I don’t specifically editorialize about that in the book, I was conscious of the fact that for astute readers, the presence of that juxtaposition would be illuminating or touching and may for some be a call to action.
I might also argue that this is something of an urban Californian sensibility. You can be bleeding out on a sunny and absolutely beautiful day here. That juxtaposition has always struck me as remarkable, ever since I first bled in the sun.
Rumpus: I’m particularly fascinated by your narrator’s articulations of desire. These articulations often include both widely relatable aspirations and more complicated ones alongside each other. For example, how your young narrator describes his admiration for the character Sonny Spoon, played by Mario Van Peebles: “He was impossibly handsome, charming, and smart. He never had any money, though, and he was always conning people. There weren’t that many shows with Black protagonists, so I was transfixed. I wanted to be just like him, running around LA, romancing women, looking good shirtless, getting shot at, solving crimes using my vast networks of informants, dressing up in funny costumes to infiltrate bad guys and gain intel.” Can you comment on the relationship your narrator has to desire, and how his relationship to desire is its own coming of age?
Wallace: Yes. I’m quite horny. To me, the queerness and the horniness of the book—which I hasten to remind readers are not the same thing—are evident from page one. Someone, I forget who, noted nothing gay even happens till way late in the book, and I thought, “Oh, that’s a surprise to me!”
To your point, it’s not a far-fetched notion that I had some kind of childhood crush on Mario Van Peebles as Sonny Spoon, though I didn’t have words for that then. One of the hilarities of the queer experience is that when attraction arises, you’re forever wondering if you want to fuck someone or if you want to be them, and the answer is never quite clear. Often, it’s both?
Here I have to say that compared to many people I know, I didn’t have a whole lot of shame around my queer desires growing up. I knew that being considered gay could get you beat up, so I was reasonably careful about that in certain spaces, but I never had a great deal of self-loathing about it. It seemed reasonable to be sexually attracted to men—more than half the people on earth fuck men—so I never questioned whether it was right. And the religious argument never held much sway because I was always like, “Well, if God is against this, then why did God make me this way?”
I did,however, have a lot of shame/anxiety/self-loathing about the different kinds of sex I like and how much I liked it, and as I grew older, I also struggled with the inconsistent nature of my desire. I might be ready to gangbang several professional sports franchises on Tuesday and then feel positively asexual on Thursday afternoon. I’d say the evolution of this, the “coming of age” to use your phrase, has to do with learning to think of my sexuality not as something to please someone else but as something to please and enjoy myself while in caring and careful partnership with others. When I think of sex as something to please people, I have a hard time even hearing my desires, much less honoring them, because I’m always calibrating my desire around others’ perceived needs and wants. This has led to some very uncomfortable and harmful situations, so I really am very conscious about no longer moving that way. I’m cool. What I like is cool. I’m okay. If someone else is not down, that’s perfectly fine and deeply reasonable, but it no longer makes me feel rejected, unwanted, or unloved. My interest now is in connecting with people who know, love, and are interested in the most authentic version of me.
Rumpus: Who do you hope will read your memoir? I imagine so much of what you imbue your writing with is challenging to readers just as much as I picture your memoir being one that anyone can pick up and read.
Wallace: I wasn’t really trying to be challenging, but some things I write just are for some people, and I get that. When we were talking about the cover, I remember telling the design team that I wanted this to feel like a book that you just have, you don’t know where it came from or where you got it. You may have found it in an attic, and it may be like forty years old, or it may be one of those weird old books you find on your shelf one day, and you don’t remember buying it. I wanted the book to feel like a secret that only the reader knows about.
Now that I look back on it, this was probably related to very specific experiences I had of reading Stephen King paperbacks or salacious Elvis Presley tell-alls from the ’70s when my Aunt Gertie was babysitting me and I was like fourteen years old. I do like the feeling of a book that you discover by happenstance and that pulls you into places you would not have gone by yourself, but I also like to do that with care and a sense of love and camaraderie with the reader. I’m not trying to break you. I’m trying to tell you a human story which I suspect you, as also a human with an interiority and some love and pain, might connect with! So I guess that’s who the book is for: humans with interiority and some love and pain, and perhaps most importantly, humans who care for others.
Rumpus: I love how your narrator reckons with overriding his emotions and tendencies out of responsibility to those who have invested in his life. In addition to the relatability of such feelings of responsibility, it reminded me of what it takes to be in and sustain community as a Black person. Do you relate to that? Can you comment on that idea in relation to your memoir?
Wallace: Yeah, definitely. I think that’s kind of Black-coded for sure. I do recognize a particular way we deal with our elders and our responsibility to the community and ancestry that feels different from how some of my white friends seem to do it, and I believe that can be a healing connection if, for no other reason, than that it gives courage and perspective to our own personal journeys. It places us within a larger context and helps free us from the bondage of self by turning our attention to something bigger.
It’s also worth noting that I got on as a writer during—and perhaps due to—this very weird post-Ferguson moment when every bland-ass corporate entity was suddenly like #BlackAF this and #BlackBoyJoy that. I was already like forty years old, so I probably had a little bit of a jaundiced eye toward the sudden enthusiastic mainstream commodification of Black identity, having already seen several iterations in my lifetime. So, early on, it opened up an artistic question of what truly makes something Black AF, since, to me, slapping a hashtag on it is not really enough. I think I’ve been open to answers to that question for years and will remain open to answers for the rest of my life while also being open to the limits of that question to begin with. Here, I think I address that by simply inviting my elders and ancestors to join me in the writing of the book, by invoking them, writing about them, letting my connection to them be a guide as I tackled the book, and trusting that this would help the book function as something of a connection between this realm and the cosmic realms of our African diaspora.
Rumpus How did you decide memoir was the right genre for Another Word for Love? What’s your relationship to memoir after writing this book?
Wallace: I’m not sure that I decided that memoir was the right form for this story as much as I decided this was the story to tell given the fact of memoir. In other words, I knew I’d write a memoir before I knew what it would be about. I also didn’t think a whole lot about what it was about when I was writing it. That also sort of came later. I seem to have a “create first, ask questions later” approach that I think gives the work something my agent once referred to as “a spark of chaos.” So memoir emerged as the first approach because it’s what I knew best through my journalistic essays and profiles, all of which are somewhat memoiristic, and quite frankly, it’s what I thought I had the best chance of getting paid to write. Only later did I start to think about how to tie these disparate elements that I had written about into an overarching story.
To me, the key part of memoir is memory, as opposed to biography. Memory is an endlessly fascinating tool to me because it has an emotional charge on one hand and a kind of magical ability to disrupt linear time on the other—a powerful and mystical artistic combination, in my opinion. I had a sense of that before writing this book, but my understanding and appreciation of its possibilities have only grown since writing it.
That said, I’m not sure that I’ll be in the mood to write another memoir any time soon. I’m only a week into the publicity cycle for the book, and I’m already tired of talking about myself. So naturally, I am beginning to turn my thoughts to works of fiction—novels and television—where I might be able to do more inventing and let other characters take the lead on navigating the difficulties and triumphs of a life in a human form. Memoir is very lonely. I’d like to have someone else be the main character for a change.
Rumpus: Were there other working titles for your memoir? How did you choose Another Word for Love as the title?
Wallace: I did have another title, but that was when I had a completely different book concept in mind, which I may return to at some point. This title, Another Word for Love, was gifted to me by a writer whose literary insight I very much admire, Nina Renata Aron. She just said it to me one day when I was describing the book to her, and it stuck. It ended up being a crucial framing for me because before that, I don’t think I understood that the literary project I was undertaking was to examine, through storytelling, the aspects that comprise love.
Rumpus: How did you come to realize how important it was for you to redefine or reframe love?
Wallace: Like many people, I have bell hooks to thank for the idea that there is a political and liberatory necessity to reframing love and that the current framing of it as “desire” and “really strong like” touted in our movies and songs might carry in its DNA some of the violence and oppression inherent to our society as a whole. hooks argues that this framing should, at the very least, be reconsidered if not outright dismantled, and my personal experiences with love have borne that out. I have failed to love people as they needed or wanted to be loved, and it has forced me to examine what I know and don’t know of love. I consider that a spiritual problem as well as a political one. Similarly, people have disappointed or hurt me in love.
I also like projects that you can do for the rest of your life and always be interested in—otherwise I get bored—and for me, the project of love—what it takes, what it dismantles—is one of those lifelong projects. I think, in some sense, it’s all I’ll ever write about.
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Author photograph courtesy of Carvell Wallace
