In Conversation with Antoine Wilson, speaking at SBWC, Sunday June 9 at 7:00 PM at the Mar Monte Hotel.
Imagine his surprise when Antoine Wilson woke up one morning, checked his messages and found out that his novel Mouth to Mouth was featured on Barack Obama’s Summer Reading List in 2022.
“None of us new beforehand so, yeah, it was a surprise, but I was elated on behalf of the book because someone would buy it now,” he says with a laugh. “It’s like you write this book, and it’s out there having its own life like a kid you sent off to college. I think the impulse to become a novelist came from my own reading experience. I wanted to get into someone else’s head the way some author had gotten into mine, but when you’re the author you’re not part of the process. You’re not there when someone discovers your novel. It’s like you set two people up on a date, but you can’t go along.”
No one knows how Obama finds the books that eventually make his reading list, but you can’t buy publicity like that. Wilson is also the author of two other novels, Panorama City and The Interloper, which writer T. Coraghessan Boyle found “as assured and sumptuously written as any first novel I’ve encountered.” Wilson’s work has appeared in The Paris Review and Best New American Voices, and he is a contributing editor of the literary magazine A Public Space. A graduate of the Iowa Writers' Workshop and recipient of a Carol Houck Smith Fiction Fellowship from the University of Wisconsin, he lives in Los Angeles with his wife and two children. Check out his Instagram account @slowpaparazzo. Instead of star sightings, he posts photos of places just after a celebrity has left the premises because he’s the slow paparazzo. “I wanted to do something with the frisson of a celebrity sighting but in a way that wouldn’t bother the celebrity,” says Wilson, who has posted a photo of the table that Jeff Goldblum had just vacated at a frozen yogurt shop and the cheese counter at an upscale deli where Oswalt Patton had been perusing the selections. Funny stuff.
Let’s talk about Mouth to Mouth. What was the inspiration for that novel?
The original version was a short story idea I had about a guy saving someone from drowning in a municipal pool. Something similar had happened to me in the ‘90s when I saw a guy who was air drumming with headphones on and would have got hit by a train if I hadn’t stopped him in time. I remember that he said, “Oh my God, you saved my life. I’m going to buy you a big steak dinner.” Then the train went past and he just walked away, still air drumming. The friends I was with made fun of me for not getting that steak dinner. That got me thinking about how many steak dinners a life is worth, but it didn’t work as a short story. So, I wrote this novel about somebody who saves the life of someone who’s not a good person. I abandoned it at least a half a dozen times until I came up with the narrative framework. The whole story is told by the rescuer to the narrator, a writer sitting in the first-class lounge at JFK. I got the framing device after reading Austerlitz by W.G. Sebald, who uses an unnamed authorial stand-in who receives the story of Jack Austerlitz. I thought that it might be the key to making my book work, and it was.
How did you end up at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop?
I found out about MFA programs when I took a class at USC with T.C. Boyle. I didn’t really know any other writers, but when I got to Iowa where the focus was on writing, I felt like I had found my tribe. I had two years to practice the craft, but I had so little education in creative writing that I tried short stories first. I knew I wanted to be a novelist, but I needed to try a lot of different things while I was there. I got a fellowship in creative writing from the University of Wisconsin, and spent three years working on a novel that ended up not being a book that I’d want to read. It happens. I tried to get an agent and failed so that book is in a drawer. I decided that when I embarked on another novel, it needed to be a high-wire act. I needed to step into the void with this premise I had and write a first-person novel.
You delivered on that promise with The Interloper, which was inspired by the murder of your brother when you were seven years old. What can you tell us about that?
It was my older half-brother, the middle child of three boys with my father’s first wife. We didn’t grow up in the same house, but I looked up to him. He was driving across the country and was in Nebraska when it happened. There’s a documentary about the whole thing called “Just Another Missing Kid.” He was 19. I wanted to write about it but also felt it wasn’t my story to tell, that it belonged to my dad and his first wife and my half-brothers. In my book, the narrator, Owen Patterson, makes it his mission to exact retribution for the senseless murder of his brother-in-law by writing letters to the murderer, who is in prison. Owen doesn’t think prison is punishment enough, so he pretends to be a woman, using the pseudonym, Lily Hazelton. His plan is to seduce the murderer, then break his heart. Essentially, he’s the interloper because he has made a mission out of something that isn’t entirely his emotional business.
You’ve said that Panorama City is your favorite book-child. How so?
My son was in a co-op pre-school, and I spent a lot of time with these kids, who were illiterate, optimistic and very social. I wanted to write a comic novel, and they became an under-the-radar influence. My protagonist, Oppen Porter, is very naïve and also illiterate, optimistic and very social. He’s in the hospital where he thinks he’s dying so he uses a tape recorder to tell his unborn son the story of his forty-day journey from innocence to experience, from a self-described “slow absorber” to man of the world.
I like to call it my spiritual autobiography.
Are you working on anything new?
I’m always working.
Antoine Wilson
Photo Noah Stone
