Five Questions for...Linda Villarosa

This week, Martha Southgate--author of three novels--the prize-winning The Fall of Rome and, most recently, Third Girl From The Left--asks former executive editor of Essence Magazine and editor and reporter for the New York Times Linda Villarosa five questions about coming out, getting rejected (her fiction, not her) and how hard it was to write her first novel Passing for Black.

1. While you’ve been out in your private life for many years, you came out in Essence magazine in the early nineties in an article you wrote with your mother about her reaction. It got a lot of attention. Passing for Black was published a number of years later but was it in any way inspired or influenced by the public reaction to your piece?

Passing for Black was just the story that I ended up telling. But many of the same people who both remembered and appreciated the Essence article enjoyed the book.

2. Why did you choose to write about a character who was conflicted about her sexuality? Why not just a straight-up lesbian (pardon the pun)?

I like coming out stories, so that's what this book ended up being. In many ways, Angela's feeling of conflict are very universal, beyond sexuality.

3. The book’s pretty steamy but is also touches on some hot-button issues in the gay community and is pretty tough on African-American homophobia. Was it hard to combine the steamy with the serious?

No, it was just hard to write the steamy! Because of my background as a journalist and my interest in social justice issues, that part was easy. Writing about love and sex was harder. I had to revise--A LOT. The first round my agent suggested that I find someone to ghost write the sex scenes. Later, once I got better she said, "I see you got that ghost writer I suggested." Obviously, practice helped loosen me up.

4. The book’s title implies that Angela, the protagonist, is feeling a great conflict between her race and her growing realization that she is a lesbian. What made you want to explore that tension in a novel?

I wanted to write a book about passing, but didn't want it to be historical fiction. I think of it as a coming-out story with the larger theme of passing. I was inspired by the work of early 20th-century authors Nella Larsen and Charles Chesnutt. Passing is also part of my own history: My mixed-race grandmother “passed for white,” in a town outside of Chicago in the 1950s and '60s, causing a long and painful rift in our family.

So I thought about who, these days, is dealing with issues related to passing--lying about who you are, being afraid of being found out, hiding your true self. Lesbians and gay men. Many of use who are LGBT and black feel like we have no place to be ourselves. To paraphrase the title of the iconic black feminist bible of the 70s: all the gays are white, all the blacks and straight but some of us are brave.

Though I tried to keep it funny and sexy, the book examines the feelings we’ve all had—or I’ve had—about not being understood, not being able to fit in, not knowing where you’re placed in all of the various cultures and identities you live in.

5. You are now the director of the journalism program at CCNY and the majority of your published work has been nonfiction, primarily related to health issues. I’m going to sneak in a question within a question and ask if the leap from fiction to non-fiction was hard for you to make—and can we look for more fiction from you?

Very. The first draft of my novel was rejected all over town, sometimes by editors that I knew or had worked with. It was an exercise in humiliation. But after about the sixth or seventh rejection, I realized that my experience as a journalist wasn’t helping me; it was making things worse. So I threw away everything I knew about being a journalist—right in the trash next to the rejections--and started over as a writer, not a journalist.

My biggest problem was that while all of the side characters in my book were full of personality, jumping off the page, my main character was flat. No one “got” her. She was observing everyone else—especially all those big, bold side characters--rather than having any feelings herself. She was behaving like a journalist, not a real flesh-and-blood person.

It wasn’t her; it was me. A novel, a good one, is a big, messy train wreck that somehow gets resolved in the end.
Journalism is more controlled and structured--as are journalists who watch the world from the safe distance of objectivity. I had been trained to keep my emotions in check--to be objective and balanced. Once I let that go, Passing for Black got better--and got sold. This exercise helped me too, and has made me a better, more emotionally engaged journalist. I hope to write another novel, and have several ideas. I'm working on a documentary about HIV/AIDS in black America--another passion--right now. So between teaching and the film (and children!) I've got no time. But I hope to start soon.

Tags: #issues we face, #nonfiction, #things we care about, LBGT, Linda Villarosa, editor, ethnicity, journalist

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Comment by Judith van Praag on September 19, 2010 at 8:03pm: Interesting. Born and bred in the Netherlands, and with a background in multicultural theater I'm often surprised by the differences between the U.S. and the Netherlands. I never really knew how different from their experience in America the situation in Amsterdam was for my Afro American gay colleagues.
Re: #5 I guess the question was whether it was hard to leap from being a journalist to being a fiction writer, not the other way around.
Interesting and valid question. As implied by Linda, journalists are trained to stay out of the story themselves. On the other hand, a journalist knows how to focus, how to aim and zoom in, how to be economic with words, how to deliver the story. Having the room to expend is the luxury of fiction.

@Dolen,
Perhaps the editor's suggestion to find a ghostwriter for the steamy scenes was "under the belt", aimed at the writer's professional self respect, vanity, you name it? Obviously it worked.

As for the reality of hiring ghostwriters to write "difficult" parts, why not. As long as they're paid well and if the "writer" doesn't feel insulted or inspired enough to write all scenes well and the ghostwriter doesn't insist on getting credit.
If you think about it, how many of the supposedly self-penned memoirs by celebs are actually written by those people themselves? No offense I hope, but too often I think a good actor not necessarily maketh a good writer, yet a good actor teaming up with a good interviewer can create a bestseller.

Comment by Dolen Perkins-Valdez on September 19, 2010 at 5:42pm: Great interview. Thanks for this. Hey, I didn't know we could get someone to ghostwrite scenes!! Interesting tidbit.

Comment by Susan K. Perry on September 16, 2010 at 5:24pm: Cool interview. I've been planning my own post on making that switch (not from white to black or straight to gay! but from journalism and nonfiction to writing a novel). I'll be sure to link to this.

Comment by Breena Clarke on September 10, 2010 at 5:52am: absolutely agree with both Linda's observations about transitioning from journalism to long fiction and Lori's idea about editing fiction. Fiction and non-fiction are different "head bags" (remember that from the 60's?) and I think it's exciting when you feel that one "bag" is in there checking facts and answering queries. The other "bag" is painting great swaths of color and making stuff up and capturing fleeting bits of dialogue. They work well together.

Comment by Lori L. Tharps on September 7, 2010 at 6:36pm: I'd just like to say that Linda's explanation about the leap from journalism to fiction is dead on. I also think that revising fiction is a real challenge for us journalists b/c in journalism and/or non-fiction you know when you've 'fixed' the problem, but in fiction revision is endless b/c there isn't a perfect fix.

And btw, I'm a huge fan of both Southgate and Villarosa! They are both extremely talented writers.

Comment by Dera R Williams on September 6, 2010 at 11:11pm: Great interview; a lot here. I've been a fan of both Ms. Southgate and Ms. Villarosa's work. I hope you write your family history. It sounds fascinating.

Comment by Roberta Branca on September 6, 2010 at 7:42pm: Thank you to both the interviewer and the interviewer for some compelling insights. While my journalism career never had the successful trajectory of Linda Villarosa's, her comments about her main character being too much of an observer rang true for my own experience writing fiction. I've had to throw out a lot of first drafts after feedback that an mc who I thought of as a hero was panned as being too passive by my writer friends.

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