With Dead in Long Beach, California, she takes on the kind of grief that can lead to deception.
Dead in Long Beach, California is out from MCD x FSG on January 23.
Photo: Nicholas Albrecht Dead in Long Beach, California is out from MCD x FSG on January 23.
In 2008, Venita Blackburn’s mother died unexpectedly — and at first, one of Blackburn’s brothers refused to tell his daughter, for whom their mother had been an important maternal figure. Whenever anyone suggested he break the news, he would deflect and evade. His way of handling the death shattered his sister. But it also fascinated her. “I know why he did it: You don’t want them to feel what you feel right now,” she says. “And if you can keep it from them, you can keep it from yourself.”
For Blackburn, loss is a pet subject. She’s a writer with a penchant for the sort of tales that kill the mood at a dinner party, edged with wit and pared down to the bones — her primary form is flash fiction, or very short prose works, usually under 1,000 words. Something of a cult figure in the flash-fiction community, Blackburn writes stories that orbit the themes of youth and friendship, family and duty, sex and care, faith and memory, and that are often set in Southern California dreamlands. This month, she publishes her first novel, Dead in Long Beach, California, detonated by the kind of denial she observed in her own family. When the protagonist, Coral, discovers that her brother, Jay, has killed himself in his apartment, she is, at first, more annoyed than bereaved; their parents are already dead, and Coral keeps becoming the involuntary keeper. “More dead shit. It never ends. For me,” she thinks. “And sometimes it gets to be about me, okay. I am a person. I’m not some kind gay nun with a credit card.” When she finds that Jay’s daughter has texted him on his unlocked phone, she makes a knee-jerk bid for time: She texts her back — as Jay.
What follows is a brutal, weeklong tour of Coral’s memories and losses told through the collision of three genre-bending narrative strands: Coral’s fraying reality, the graphic novel she wrote, and a Greek chorus of artificial-intelligence librarians who decode the runes of civilization. Coral’s impersonation of Jay “matches my philosophy that I know how to live everybody’s life better than they do,” says Blackburn, sitting at her kitchen table in Fresno, California. “Which is wrong, of course. So here’s my fantasy of what it would look like if I did.”
At 40, the writer has a self-possessed mien and an easy smile that could get her out of a moving violation. When we meet in December, she wears a button-up, tan cargo pants, and her signature gold-framed specs with round pink lenses. Lean and nearly six feet tall, she is, by her own description, “built like a Barbie doll with no boobs.” Dead in Long Beach, California is poised as her breakout, her third book following her well-reviewed short-story collections Black Jesus and Other Superheroes (2017) and How to Wrestle a Girl (2021). A novel may be the publishing industry’s darling — it’s what gets you the cachet and the publicity — but in an era of six-figure book deals for first-time authors and media-savvy literary “It” girls, Blackburn says she still finds the idea of writing one “horrifying.” Dead in Long Beach, California is febrile, high concept, fragmented; in a way, it’s an anti-novel that applies her shortform philosophy to longform. After all, she says, “if you can’t find it in three pages, how are you going to do it in 40?”
Blackburn grew up in Compton, the youngest of three. Her family attended a Southern Baptist church where she began questioning why she was expected to yield every thought and judgment to a mystical future husband — “and this is before I even recognized how extraordinarily gay I was,” she says. She graduated at 16 and enrolled at the University of Southern California, then went on to grad school at Arizona State University; she began to imagine a career writing and teaching in tandem. A merciless self-editor, she whittled her M.F.A. thesis from a 300-plus-page novel to four pages. “I’ve never been precious about my writing,” she says. “I can always make another sentence later.”
The day after she defended that thesis, her mother died. Suddenly Blackburn, the golden child, was the family linchpin. She notified relatives and friends, made the funeral arrangements, and tacitly took on the majority of the financial and emotional burdens. She was 24. Her divorced brother and widowed father moved in with her in Arizona. It took a couple of years for her to realize her martyr complex wasn’t a life sentence; she wrote a letter to her father explaining that they all had to move on with their lives, separately. Four years later, he died. Again, she was the “kind gay nun with a credit card” left with the cleanup.
Around the same time, she started teaching full time at ASU and committed herself to the short story. She used to think she had to write like Toni Morrison — to kill the goofball within. She tells me “awkward Black girl” authors like ZZ Packer and Zadie Smith gave her permission to “have irreverence and a sense of humor on top of offering some really deep insight into certain kinds of worlds.” Her already economical prose densified under a new command. She cleaved through exposition and other background noise; what details remained were reserved for character and voice.
Although flash fiction has always existed — it’s perhaps more closely related to a sonnet or Zen koan than it is to a novel — that name for it was coined in 1992 by the W.W. Norton editors who published the first Flash Fiction America anthology. A hallmark of Blackburn’s writing, and flash in general, is the single sentence that can span a lifetime. “Flash fiction has to take that leap into the expanse, to the grandness of life, before you know the story is done,” Blackburn says. Her story “Scars,” published in 2012 by the lit mag American Short Fiction, was one of the first where she allowed herself to overtly explore the weird and funny parts of girlhood and sexuality. It plunges in: “Teenagers like me and T don’t have much going on; of course there is more to do than go shopping and get pregnant. There’s softball.”
Life changed after she won the 2016 Prairie Schooner Book Prize and the University of Nebraska Press published Black Jesus and Other Superheroes. She got a job at Fresno State — where she’s now an associate professor of fiction — and a two-book deal at FSG. Her second collection, How to Wrestle a Girl, is an acrobatic feat of form and function with a grief log, a crossword puzzle, and a quiz. Dead in Long Beach, California began as a short story too, appearing as a 468-word piece in The Paris Review titled “Fam.” In 2020, she started turning it into a novel.
The new book is full of Blackburn’s desire to work in quick spurts, compartmentalized into experimental modes that use text messages, news articles, and horny fan fiction. The staggered perspectives offer psychological cover during the torrential trauma dump; the bossy, alien, hyperanalytical first-person plural of the AI-narrated sections gets out of Coral’s head in order to better understand it. It’s not lost on Blackburn that writing these parts helped her defer the task of writing other, harder chapters. “Sometimes what we remember and what we feel is painful, and it’s difficult to express, and so we have to find ways to put language on the impossible feelings that we never anticipated we’d go through,” she says.
The novel, for her, reads as “one slow good-bye.” In a way, what Coral does to her niece by impersonating Jay is a gift. “The character, of course, does not handle things well, by any stretch of the imagination,” Blackburn says. “But it’s not wrong. It’s a completely legitimate way to process your horror.” And while the plot isn’t autobiographical, there are kernels of truth for Blackburn in its small scenes and its big picture as well as its sharpest pleasures and pains. “I’m obsessed with that part of life — these confined spaces where there’s no acceptance, there’s no big healing,” she says. “You’re just right there in the crack of a catastrophe.”
Thank you for subscribing and supporting our journalism. If you prefer to read in print, you can also find this article in the January 15, 2024, issue of New York Magazine.
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