Eve Gleichman and Laura Blackett in conversation ‹ Literary Hub

July 1, 2024

This is an excerpt from an interview between Eve Gleichman and Laura Blackett, co-authors of Trust and securitya novel about a newlywed heterosexual couple who move from Brooklyn to upstate New York and quickly become entangled with a queer polycule living his dream of analog living. They talk about their inspiration for the novel and cover a range of topics including loneliness, Instagram, bi erasure, what it’s like to write unlikable characters, and their individual writing processes.

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Eve Gleichman: We wrote the first chapter of this book in 2020, which feels like a long time ago. So much has changed since then. What was your life like when you started this project?

Laura Blackett: I had just moved from New York City to a small, rural town. Like our protagonist, I was feeling lonely, aimless, and craving change. So I looked for a short-term sublet to test out what it would be like to live in the country. I was supposed to have just one roommate while the other residents went away, but then the pandemic hit and everyone came home. Anecdotally, we had all ended up in this particular house because we had all matched with the homeowner on Tinder at some point.

So I was doing my remote tech job in a queer artist’s house. There was a seamstress, a painter, and a mycologist. During Zoom meetings, I would peer over my computer and see through the window one of my roommates tapping maple trees to make maple syrup while someone else was dyeing bedding pink from avocado pits. I felt inspired, but I didn’t quite fit in. I was working on our first novel, so that was creativity-wise, but I also felt very corporate in that environment. I had my feet in both worlds.

What makes writing a book so difficult is that you start with a blank page. A novel can be anything, and how it ends is highly personal.

LB: Your living situation was completely different. Can you talk about that?

Eg: Yes, I was in the north of the state too, right near you! I moved there temporarily in the first few days of quarantine. I lived with my partner and—for custody reasons—her ex-husband, kids, and our pets. I can’t believe we did this. When I got home, I thought, “This is either a horror movie or a twisted romantic comedy.” But I found there was something interesting and actually inspiring about the fact that my partner and I were living our queer relationship in the shadow of her previous heterosexual marriage, the evidence of which was all around us. To take a break from that, I drove to your house. I remember it was cold, so we parked our cars trunk to trunk and kept six feet between us. We talked about our living situations and the different dynamics in our homes.

LB: I think the tensions that were brewing in our households were very different. It wasn’t until we finished the novel and reflected on how the story came about that we realised how much of our lives and circumstances at the time had gone into the book. I don’t know if we were consciously trying to do that when we first met – to me it felt more like we were just talking and commiserating.

Eg: I think that’s true. I’m curious what you consciously thought the book would What did we want to write? What did we write? How did we get there?

LB: Writing a book is so vulnerable because you start with a blank page. A novel can be anything, and how it ends is very personal. There were some things I was very excited to write in the book. I knew I wanted to try to capture some of the lush, beautiful parts of rural upstate New York. I knew I wanted to create an obsessive infatuation and some voyeuristic elements between these two neighboring properties. I wanted to try to capture a feeling I sometimes had on vacation, of being in a beautiful and unfamiliar place and wondering, “What if I belonged here?”

On a character level, I also knew that Rosie, our protagonist, would experience feelings of loneliness and aimlessness, and that much of her efforts to find a sense of belonging would be misguided. Things actually came as a surprise. Our book also deals with ambivalence around motherhood and the relationship between parents and their adult children. I was also surprised to have written characters who are unlikable, or at times unsympathetic.

LB: We didn’t try to write unlikable characters, but I think they turned out that way anyway. Do you agree?

Eg: No one agrees who the villain is in the book. I think readers are polarized, and I like that. It makes me feel like we’ve done something right. I think of this lesson I once learned: that characters should only be 51% good or evil. I think there are some characters in this book that are 65% or 70% evil. But most of them take you for a little spin. I think once you get comfortable with liking a character in this book, something happens that changes that.

LB: I think no matter who you love or hate, in the end everyone is punished a little bit for it.

Eg: Yes. I also think there’s a bit of me in all of our characters – and I’d be curious if there’s a bit of you too. I really feel myself in all of them.

LB: I actually feel that way. The experience of writing these characters was a bit like a psychological thriller. Depending on the day, I could identify with one of them and hate another. It was exhausting. The first half of the project for me was about writing my own desires into Rosie. And then, about halfway through, I had to step back and look critically at her and her choices and efforts to change her life and connect with other people. She believes her husband Jordan is holding her back from reaching her full potential, but in reality it’s her own ambivalence.

Eg: Rosie’s ambivalence is further heightened by social media. Can you talk about the role of Instagram in our book?

LB: Instagram is a great place to feel stressed and then buy something to relieve the anxiety. Rosie is a consumer. I think she believes that buying something helps her achieve self-actualization. She feels that if she only had the right things and a little peace and quiet, she could become someone she likes. However, this mindset is very problematic. It’s through Instagram that she meets her husband; it fuels her unhappiness; it shows her a house she can buy and she buys it.

LB: But there are some benefits to the way Instagram connects people. I remember using Instagram to connect with queer women in relationships with cis men for research purposes while we were writing.

Eg: Right. We asked women in this category to tell us about their experiences because we wanted to get to the bottom of Rosie’s character. Many of the women we spoke to felt excluded in queer spaces. They didn’t feel fully recognized or accepted as queer because of their relationships with cis men. At the same time, many also felt like their queerness wasn’t valued, understood, or acknowledged by their partners. So there’s a lot of fear and isolation that we ended up writing into Rosie’s character.

I want to talk about our collaboration. We often get asked how two people write a book together. One answer is that we sit down together, create an outline, and send the draft back and forth in Google Docs. But it occurred to me that I don’t know what your solo writing process is like. When do you write? What do you need to write?

LB: Your question makes me laugh because one time when we were writing in the same room you said something to me like, “You’re doing such a good job,” but in the meantime I was online shopping. I have to go home and procrastinate a bit. I have to start feeling guilty about holding up the process, and then when I’m feeling bad enough I have to make myself work by doing things like getting up at the crack of dawn to convince myself I have more time, or setting a timer so I only have to work for an hour. I never achieved what some people would call a “flow state.” It was just hard all the time.

Eg: I also like to feel like I’m getting away with something when I write. Back when I was commuting to work, I would write in the notes app on the subway. I like to write when I only have 15 minutes or I’m in the elevator. I have to feel a little bit bad. There’s nothing worse than being in a quiet room. I can tell how much I put off writing when my room is clean. It’s incredible that we managed to write this book.

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