Jonathan Escoffery: ‘I was trying to write novels aged nine’ | Fiction

Jonathan Escoffery, 43, was born in Texas and lives in Oakland, California. His debut, If I Survive You, about a second-generation Jamaican in Miami, where Escoffery grew up, was shortlisted for last year’s Booker and is currently on the shortlist of the Gordon Burn prize, announced on 7 March. The novelist Rumaan Alam has called it “a reminder of what fiction can do… It’s truly a feat that a book of short stories tackling such big stuff – family, love, violence, race – could be so damn funny.”

What did it mean to be shortlisted for the Booker prize?
It felt like I’d arrived in the UK for the first time, even though the book had been out for months. I’d already connected with readers outside the US because the book is partly set in Jamaica and talks about the African-Caribbean diaspora, but suddenly I was hearing from people in India and Australia. I’d watched the ceremony when Marlon James won with A Brief History of Seven Killings in 2015. I loved what that book did for Jamaica and to see it honoured in such a massive way was beautiful. I felt like that novel was capturing a history of tumultuous politics and rising crime I’d grown up hearing in a very matter of fact way from my parents: “This is what was happening in the 70s, this is why we left.”

On the night, are you kept in suspense with the rest of us?
It’s a wild ride; I don’t know if the winner gets a whisper in their ear but us folks who didn’t win didn’t know until the name was called.

Your protagonist, Trelawny, tells us halfway through the book that his parents left Jamaica “not for economic advancement but to escape the violence the US government funded in the 1970s as part of its war on socialism”.
It’s not even fiction, it’s just a statement, but sometimes you just have to say the thing, you know? I wanted to highlight that maybe the way Americans think of Jamaica isn’t how Jamaicans think of Jamaica. Even if we subtract US involvement in political tensions and crime and bringing in drugs and guns, there tends to be this view of the Caribbean as a playground of vacation resorts that doesn’t really consider people having their own dreams and lives and concerns.

Some people call If I Survive You a novel, others say it’s a story collection. How do you see it?
Over the years I called it one or the other or both. I was thinking of it as a novel but writing it as stories and then trying to put it back together as a novel. It was trying to get to know the characters that led me to the structure: I thought it would be an interesting way to think about how we sometimes make the whole world about ourselves when other people aren’t even considering us at all. Maybe they should be considering us, but maybe we’re also being self-involved. As interested as I was in Trelawny, I wanted to give his father and his brother their say.

Was writing about your parents’ generation harder than writing about your own?
No – I’d heard my parents talk about Jamaica basically all my life. What I did find impossible was to write a story where [the protagonist’s mother] returns to Jamaica in her 60s as someone who’s lived in the US for 30-odd years. I tried and tried but it’s not a story I could write, maybe because I don’t know someone who’s made that transition. The past was more doable than an imagined present.

What drew you to write part of the book in the second person?
It makes it easier for a character to be honest: at least you know your secrets are kept if you’re only telling yourself about your own bad behaviour. An “I” voice talking to the world feels much more exposed and vulnerable.

When it comes to thinking up storylines, are you a planner?
I wasn’t sure where the opening chapter would end: I was just writing forward, mapping the protagonist’s identity problems on to his education in school and college. With the second story, I saw the ending first and thought, let me bring this back to where his father is a young man making the decisions that led to this deteriorated relationship with his son in the US. The title story is the longest – I had to break out an Excel spreadsheet to figure it out scene by scene.

Which books inspired you?
I was trying to write novels from the age of nine, but it was only at college that I started to think about it seriously, when I encountered Nella Larsen’s Quicksand in a class on the Harlem Renaissance, which blew my mind. When I read Sandra Cisneros’s linked story collection The House on Mango Street for the first time, I thought, I’d love to do a Jamaican-American Miami version of this.

What have you been reading lately?
John Vercher’s Devil Is Fine [out in the US in June]. I haven’t finished it yet but I’m really enjoying it. I loved Diana Evans’s A House for Alice and Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah’s Chain-Gang All-Stars.

Where do you write?
So for the last year or more I’ve been travelling. I’m on the road as much as I’m at home. I was on an extended book tour, then the Booker happened. But you can write on the plane, you know, in the car – if you’re not the driver – and do a lot of writing in your head, on your phone, and work it out from there.

What’s next?
A novel that is just a novel [laughs], set in Miami Beach. In the last book, I didn’t want a chapter one that felt like chapter two that felt like chapter three. In this one, I do.

Jonathan Escoffery, 43, was born in Texas and lives in Oakland, California. His debut, If I Survive You, about a second-generation Jamaican in Miami, where Escoffery grew up, was shortlisted for last year’s Booker and is currently on the shortlist of the Gordon Burn prize, announced on 7 March. The novelist Rumaan Alam has called it “a reminder of what fiction can do… It’s truly a feat that a book of short stories tackling such big stuff – family, love, violence, race – could be so damn funny.”

What did it mean to be shortlisted for the Booker prize?
It felt like I’d arrived in the UK for the first time, even though the book had been out for months. I’d already connected with readers outside the US because the book is partly set in Jamaica and talks about the African-Caribbean diaspora, but suddenly I was hearing from people in India and Australia. I’d watched the ceremony when Marlon James won with A Brief History of Seven Killings in 2015. I loved what that book did for Jamaica and to see it honoured in such a massive way was beautiful. I felt like that novel was capturing a history of tumultuous politics and rising crime I’d grown up hearing in a very matter of fact way from my parents: “This is what was happening in the 70s, this is why we left.”

On the night, are you kept in suspense with the rest of us?
It’s a wild ride; I don’t know if the winner gets a whisper in their ear but us folks who didn’t win didn’t know until the name was called.

Your protagonist, Trelawny, tells us halfway through the book that his parents left Jamaica “not for economic advancement but to escape the violence the US government funded in the 1970s as part of its war on socialism”.
It’s not even fiction, it’s just a statement, but sometimes you just have to say the thing, you know? I wanted to highlight that maybe the way Americans think of Jamaica isn’t how Jamaicans think of Jamaica. Even if we subtract US involvement in political tensions and crime and bringing in drugs and guns, there tends to be this view of the Caribbean as a playground of vacation resorts that doesn’t really consider people having their own dreams and lives and concerns.

Some people call If I Survive You a novel, others say it’s a story collection. How do you see it?
Over the years I called it one or the other or both. I was thinking of it as a novel but writing it as stories and then trying to put it back together as a novel. It was trying to get to know the characters that led me to the structure: I thought it would be an interesting way to think about how we sometimes make the whole world about ourselves when other people aren’t even considering us at all. Maybe they should be considering us, but maybe we’re also being self-involved. As interested as I was in Trelawny, I wanted to give his father and his brother their say.

Was writing about your parents’ generation harder than writing about your own?
No – I’d heard my parents talk about Jamaica basically all my life. What I did find impossible was to write a story where [the protagonist’s mother] returns to Jamaica in her 60s as someone who’s lived in the US for 30-odd years. I tried and tried but it’s not a story I could write, maybe because I don’t know someone who’s made that transition. The past was more doable than an imagined present.

What drew you to write part of the book in the second person?
It makes it easier for a character to be honest: at least you know your secrets are kept if you’re only telling yourself about your own bad behaviour. An “I” voice talking to the world feels much more exposed and vulnerable.

When it comes to thinking up storylines, are you a planner?
I wasn’t sure where the opening chapter would end: I was just writing forward, mapping the protagonist’s identity problems on to his education in school and college. With the second story, I saw the ending first and thought, let me bring this back to where his father is a young man making the decisions that led to this deteriorated relationship with his son in the US. The title story is the longest – I had to break out an Excel spreadsheet to figure it out scene by scene.

Which books inspired you?
I was trying to write novels from the age of nine, but it was only at college that I started to think about it seriously, when I encountered Nella Larsen’s Quicksand in a class on the Harlem Renaissance, which blew my mind. When I read Sandra Cisneros’s linked story collection The House on Mango Street for the first time, I thought, I’d love to do a Jamaican-American Miami version of this.

What have you been reading lately?
John Vercher’s Devil Is Fine [out in the US in June]. I haven’t finished it yet but I’m really enjoying it. I loved Diana Evans’s A House for Alice and Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah’s Chain-Gang All-Stars.

Where do you write?
So for the last year or more I’ve been travelling. I’m on the road as much as I’m at home. I was on an extended book tour, then the Booker happened. But you can write on the plane, you know, in the car – if you’re not the driver – and do a lot of writing in your head, on your phone, and work it out from there.

What’s next?
A novel that is just a novel [laughs], set in Miami Beach. In the last book, I didn’t want a chapter one that felt like chapter two that felt like chapter three. In this one, I do.