Justin Torres lost an entire book manuscript. Then he wrote ‘Blackouts’

Justin Torres’s “Blackouts” has been 12 years in the making. 

In 2011, the author made his literary debut with “We the Animals,” a novel about three brothers growing up in a troubled Brooklyn family. The book drew rave reviews and formed the basis for a 2018 film directed by Jeremiah Zagar.

Torres wrote the book while working a series of bad jobs. But things changed after it was published.

“When I was writing ‘We the Animals,’ I was broke,” he recalls. “After the book came out, I had stability. I got these fancy fellowships, and then I became a professor at UCLA, and I had time to write built into my job. So I wasn’t snatching bits of time whenever I could, but instead had it be the center of my life.

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Now he’s back with “Blackouts,” which follows a young, unnamed narrator tending to his dying older friend, Juan Gay, who has dedicated his life to his pet project, based on a 1941 book, “Sex Variants: A Study of Homosexual Patterns.” (The real-life study was credited to psychiatrist George W. Henry, but much of the work behind it was done by a lesbian polymath named Jan Gay.)

“Blackouts,” which features snippets of art throughout its pages, has been a hit with critics — NPR’s Maureen Corrigan called it “ingenious,” while Hamilton Cain with the Star Tribune described it as a “tour de force.” The novel also has been shortlisted for the prestigious National Book Award, which will be announced Nov. 15.

Torres talked about “Blackouts” via telephone from Los Angeles, where he lives. This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity and length.

Q. Would you say there is any relation between the narrator of “We the Animals” and the narrator of “Blackouts”?

One hundred percent, yeah. I’ve started saying recently it’s the multiverse or whatever. Clearly, the narrative of “We the Animals” and the narrator of “Blackouts” have the same biographical background. They have the same backstory, but the tone and everything else about the books are so different. It’s not like you need to read one to understand the other. They exist in different universes, but they are absolutely related to one another.  

Q. The narrator and Juan in “Blackouts” are such fascinating characters. Did they come to you at the same time or did one arrive before the other?

I was writing these stories about the narrator, this young man in his twenties, and I lost the manuscript. I had written a bunch of short stories about this hustler who’s in his late twenties, who’s drifting through life, and I lost that. I had certain pieces that I’d emailed myself, but everything else was on a laptop that I physically lost. So some of those vestigial elements I worked into what became “Blackouts,” but pretty soon after that, I started thinking about having this book be a kind of Socratic dialogue. I was really interested in writing about intergenerational conversation and wisdom talking to youth, and I really wanted to have lots of literary allusions. And Juan is a really good character to get the narrator outside of himself. He doesn’t know much about the world, and Juan is able to pull him out of himself into the room that they’re in together.

Q. Part of the book deals with a real-life 1941 research study, “Sex Variants.” When did you first come across that report?

I was working in a bookstore in San Francisco called Modern Times, which sadly doesn’t exist anymore, but it was an anarchist, collectively owned bookstore. They sold new and used books, and people would sometimes come and bring in donations, and somebody brought in this box of books, and it had a lot of pre-Stonewall touchstones of queer literature, like [Radclyffe Hall’s] “The Well of Loneliness” and Jean Genet. It also had this medical study, with all of these naked bodies with blurred faces, and all these drawings of genitalia, and the kind of weird eugenics stuff that’s happening in the book. But it also had these amazing first-person testimonies that read like short stories, and somebody had transcribed them with real care.

I started to get obsessed with the kind of competing tones or discourses in the text itself. On the one hand, you could tell that these people had come and volunteered themselves, some of them because they thought that there was something wrong with them, and they wanted a cure, but a lot of them because they thought that nothing was wrong with them, and they wanted to share their stories to change social attitudes. That was really fascinating to me. So I started to research how this study came about. 

I would find little things, but it took me a really long time to piece it together. Eventually, I found the work of Henry L. Minton and Jennifer Terry, and their work pointed me to Jan Gay. And she was fascinating. She left behind all these children’s books that she co-wrote with her partner. She left behind a book she wrote about nudism; she started a nudist colony. She made a film about Buddhism. She did all this amazing stuff,

Q. Can you talk about the multiple meanings of the title “Blackouts”?

The most obvious reference is these erasure poems, these blackout poems that are photocopied images of the original “Sex Variants” study that have been blacked out to say something else than what they originally were saying. And then there’s the idea of lost time and having these blackouts when one becomes too overwhelmed by something, and just the body’s defense against too much emotion, or something happening in front of you, and that’s what’s happening to the narrator. 

There’s also the idea of death. Juan is literally on his deathbed. The whole book takes place in a small room, with the two of them talking to each other in the dark, because Juan is dying, and the desert and bright sun hurt his eyes, so they keep the shades drawn to black out the light. And then there’s the historical erasure, what happened to Jan Gay. You can’t find biographical information about her, because hers was not a life that was meant to be recorded. People decided to erase her contributions.

Q. How did you decide which art to include in the book?

That was really hard. One of the things about doing archival research is there’s so many striking images. There are just some images that I can look and look and look at, and those are the ones that are in the book, where there’s something ambiguous happening in the image itself. I tried to emphasize the ambiguity. It’s a real invitation for the reader to read the images how they want to read them. They just kind of show up in the text, and you get to fill in the space between what you just read. Why is this image here? Sometimes it’s more explicit than others, but sometimes it’s just this image floating in the middle of the text.