A Conversation With Rob Franklin

I sat down with Rob Franklin to talk about the writing process, side hustles, MFA programs, Anna Nicole Smith, and his debut novel GREAT BLACK HOPE.

Rob Franklin and I met on a surprisingly sunny day at Spicy Village, one of his favorite spots in Chinatown. He came dressed in breezy, all-white linen pants and shirt. I was running late, moving as quickly as I could from the port authority bus terminal. Rob was gracious and kind. I was thrilled to meet with a debut novelist who could provide insight into the path of odd-job writer to published author. We spent the afternoon eating dumplings, walking around Chinatown, and chatting voraciously. Rob’s debut novel, GREAT BLACK HOPE, comes out June 5th from Summit Books and Simon & Schuster UK.

Sarah: What does your writing routine look like?

Rob: So, for this book I was writing every day for years. It honestly felt good. Friends can attest, even on vacation I was writing.

Sarah: Wow, really?

Rob: I like to be alone for a big chunk of the day anyway. So if I’m on a group trip, my excuse is always that I have to go on a run. Then I come home and shower. Then I’ll go to a cafe. I only write in public — so libraries, cafes — I can’t write at home. I can write in other people’s homes, but not mine. I’ll get an iced latte and once the caffeine hits, I can usually write for a good three hours. Then once I start to lose steam, depending on where I am I’ll go on a walk or maybe find another place to hang out. In the afternoon, I’d usually do my “money-making” work. While I was writing the book I had various side hustles, so I’d leave that for the end of the day.

Sarah: I saw in my research that you’re a professor. Were you teaching at the time you were writing the book?

Rob: When I was drafting the book it was a mixture. My second year of grad school, I taught undergrads for my funding at NYU. I graduated with a first draft of the book. Then I edited while living in London, and I was not teaching. The version of the book for my thesis was like 130,000 words, and now the novel is 85,000 words. I cut a lot, rewrote, and added a plot line. I was mainly focused on writing and editing. When I moved to New York, I started teaching again and the book was almost ready to send to editors.

Sarah: So what was it like getting an agent?

Rob: NYU sets you up with agent pitch day, where you basically speed-date a bunch of agents. I met two there who asked to see the novel, so I gave them both a chapter. Then I published a short story in the New England Review and two agents reached out because of it. Then my thesis advisor said her agent wanted to see it when it’s ready. So Ellen, who is now my agent, asked for that to be an exclusive first read. I was happy with that, and once she was interested it was a pretty easy decision. Audrey was very involved in my editorial process. Taking it from the first draft to what was ultimately sold to the publisher was a very long, at times frustrating process. The book got shorter, but we also added in a lot of what became my favorite scenes. Like the whole investigation plot line only came through the editorial process. It only happened because I had agents who really believed in the book and were willing to work with me on it for over a year. I feel really lucky.

Sarah: So, you did your MFA at NYU. Usually when I think of NYU programs, I think, you know, you’re in the middle of nowhere, in a field with a typewriter.

Rob: Right, like the Iowa Writer’s vision of MFAs.

Sarah: Exactly. So I was curious, what was it like doing an MFA in NYC? Were you still able to find the kind of solitude that typically comes with MFA programs?

Rob: I’m a total apologist for MFAs. In some ways, I think I got, like, — it feels a bit tacky to say “lucky because…” — but I do feel I got the best of both worlds. I really only applied to schools in places I didn’t mind living. The only rural program I applied to was Iowa, and I didn’t get in. Shoutout to them. I ended up choosing NYU. I had heard from them in the spring of 2020 which was obviously during the pandemic, so it was unclear if I would defer or not. As we got closer to the fall, they said we would still be in person but we would all wear masks and test every week. So, I decided to do it. And honestly, it was really good. Like I said, it feels a bit tacky to say “Oh, the pandemic was in any way good,” but coming back to New York after I had been living in Berlin, at a time when it was quiet and shuttered with very little to do, allowed me the space and time to write every single day. There was no competing social agenda. I was just writing and spending time with people from my program and a couple of friends. A lot of people had cleared out of the city at that time, so I think I was able to get some of the peace of a rural program while still being in New York and not having my MFA be my entire life. Once everyone got vaccinated and things started opening up, I was able to benefit from the industry side of NYU with agent pitch day and having professors who are famous writers. So I was able to finish a draft of the book in a year, and I think there is a 0% chance that would have happened if it were just normal life in New York. It would have been really difficult to find the focus. Since things were quieted during that period, the novel was able to become a full-minded obsession.

I also think, because it’s a NYC novel, and NYC party novel especially, writing about that club scene while it was shuttered — obviously, I wasn’t going to any clubs at all while writing it. So there was some level of nostalgia. The vaccine was still being made, and we really didn’t know when or if the club scene would ever come back in a real way. So I think it added to the elegiac or nostalgic tone of remembering my mid-twenties in a very different version of New York. Writing and sitting twenty feet from the nearest person while masked in a hotel lobby was a very different experience.

Sarah: In a way, the city was like a blank slate for you.

Rob: Totally, I think so.

Sarah: Another major theme in the novel is class. Obviously, without generational wealth, writers often end up as the “starving artist.” This is in part just me selfishly wanting your advice as a young, broke writer, but I’m curious to know how you made it work? How can young artists in general make it work when they haven’t gotten their career off of the ground?

Rob: You know, I was coming off of working in corporate America. When I started writing full-time, my parents were like, “What the fuck are you doing?” I had kind of published a couple poems here and there, but I really had no tactical reason beyond a belief in my talent, that it would work out anytime soon. When I was working in Berlin, I wasn’t working at all. I was, like, living off savings and going into debt. It was not sustainable. Then when I applied for grad school, I moved back here and worked for this startup of these girls I went to college with — it was an audio porn company called Quinn.

Sarah: Woah.

Rob: I know. Icons. And obviously, I wasn’t telling them I was applying for grad school. Then I got into grad school, and I was furloughed by the startup since the pandemic again. That was a blessing because I was able to go on extended unemployment, which paid for my entire first year of grad school life in New York. So I didn’t have to worry about money that first year of grad school, which was such a gift.

Then, more in earnest, I started doing college consulting where I would basically edit people’s college essays. Soon after that I also started working for my friend from college’s company where we basically ghost-wrote people’s wedding speeches.

Sarah: Oh my god. I didn’t know that was a thing.

Rob: Not enough people know it’s a thing. A lot of it is sprucing up people’s speeches. With a few people, including a well-known influencer, I wrote the whole speech from scratch.

Sarah: Oh my god. Okay, I won’t ask who.

Rob: I’m not allowed to say. But yeah, all of my part-time gigs in grad school, and in London when I was editing, were jobs that were not creatively fulfilling but involved writing and editing. Honestly, that’s not even what I would necessarily recommend because I think it can still deplete your creative stores, but the jobs paid enough per hour. College consulting especially, even though it’s totally soul-deadening, ethically bad work. They were jobs where I could basically work ten hours a week and scrape by in cities. That said, I met my credit limit while at a Trader Joe’s the week before I sold the book. So it was a close call. If the book hadn’t sold, I would have just had to find a full-time job. I was really lucky. At one point, I worked for this partial tech platform. I was pretty decent at the job, and once I was doing it for a while I could usually take a couple hours in the middle of the day to work on my own stuff without anyone noticing.

That’s the first piece of advice I have. If a young writer is doing a career that provides them a good livelihood but isn’t fulfilling, just start stealing time away from it. Only if you’re able to get away with it — don’t be bad at your job. But instead of spending an hour and a half scrolling on Instagram stories in the middle of the day, spend that hour and half submitting short stories or just investing more in the creative side of yourself. If you’re able to make the jump of focusing on writing as your main thing, get a job that doesn’t demand too much of your creative capacity and allows you to survive. Once you have a project that you think you can finish in a couple years, find that job you can do for a few hours a week that will get you by financially. That’s basically how I did it.

I think there is another version of this too. There is the path of doing a full-time job that is more aligned with what you want to do - like people who want to be novelists so they get a job working for a literary magazine. I think there are a ton of benefits to that. You’ll have more connections in the media, you’ll do work that is interesting for you. But in some ways you’re less likely to finish the novel because you’re getting that creative fulfillment from the day job. Versus for me, I was doing jobs where I knew I could not keep doing it for ten years or I’d be miserable, but it was fine for the time being because the book was my real focus.

Sarah: I noticed parts of the novel felt quite satirical — particularly the party scenes. I’m curious to hear more about how satire functions for you and your thoughts around that as a literary device.

Rob: I mean, I’m so drawn to bouncing between a strictly satirical tone and a more earnest one. A show like Girls does this really well, where sometimes it’s very clearly a satire of a Brooklyn, New York transplant, 2010’s hipster scene. But then the next scene can feel entirely earnest. They do that with the character Marney a lot, where sometimes she’s being made fun of and sometimes an episode where she’s meant to be taken seriously. I like that use of satire a lot more. I just think satire is difficult to sustain for hundreds of page because we do, ultimately, have to emotionally invest in the characters in order for the work to really function. I think the way satire usually functions in my work, and certainly in Great Black Hope, is that when Smith is in certain worlds or in certain scenes, because he’s often peripheral to the scene or an outsider, he has this critical lens through which he’s viewing everything. People are varying degrees of ridiculous to him, so he’s able to take some people seriously in those rooms and then other people are purely humorous. He has a rigorous criticality in looking at how people inhabit a certain version of privilege.

Sarah: Another thing that struck me is that, obviously, Smith’s character is originally from Atlanta and grew up in the South. I think there is something to growing up in the South and then moving up North, being in New York City, witnessing the differences in the general culture. I felt like this helped underline the satire and this idea of Smith watching from the outside.

Rob: Totally. I think this comes from not being totally of that world. Something that I really wanted to get right, and something that I observed in my own life, is that — yes, Smith has a degree of class privilege, he’s from an upper middle-class background — but, he is not a part of the kind of high-class society that both Elle and Carolyn are. When he comes to New York, he’s noticing all of these very different social codes to the world that actually produced him. I’m really drawn to a character like this. With Smith’s southern background, he went to a predominantly white prep school, and I think even in his parent’s world he ends up feeling sort of produced by a mixture of these different scenes, so in each of them he feels slightly removed. I think that kind of critical distance is what creates the satirical tone. When you see him in Atlanta in the book, he’s returning as a visitor. It’s “the home made of uncanny” by distance.

Sarah: I know you mentioned you were writing a novel that takes place in Berlin. What led you to switch over to writing Great Black Hope? This story feels quite personal.

Rob: I started writing Great Black Hope the day before my 26th birthday. I was sitting at my parents' kitchen table in Atlanta, and it was a month before I moved to Berlin. I had moved back home for the month, was back in my childhood room and thinking a lot about the front half of my twenties and how differently my life looked from how my parents envisioned my life should look. I sat down and wrote five or ten pages of material that is no longer in the novel, but a kind of character sketch of Smith who biographically shares a great deal in common with me. But I think what really united us was him being a character split between worlds — the southern, Black, bourgeois background of his parents and the downtown club scene. Then I put it away for years and I worked on the Berlin novel. Even when I got to grad school, I was still working on the Berlin novel. I ended up looking back, years later, at the pages I had written before my birthday and I realized it was a story only I could tell. It felt so about my background. As I went back and started writing, I embedded a lot of family history. I interviewed my grandmother which became the grandmother-history flashback in the book. It felt so particular to me, and I knew I wanted to write about Black respectability politics and the southern bourgeoisie. I arrived at the subject of addiction through writing as a way to explore those politics further.

Sarah: Interesting. So addiction is functioning as a tool in the story?

Rob: Yeah, and I think it also helped to define the differences between these worlds — all of which are privileged worlds, but have these predations of privilege. Like the world of friends of mine who grew up in the city, wealthy versus however I grew up. One of the distinctions with the Black bourgeoisie is there is a real precarity to that privilege and the sense that it could go away. One of the ways in which I was always told it could go away in an instant is by getting involved in the criminal justice system. So in Great Black Hope and the grandmother story, I wanted to show how generations of progress and this idea of upward mobility can be undone in a single night. Seeing how these characters navigate substance use and the projections being placed upon them as being perceived as addicts made sense to me as a way to explore these larger questions.

Sarah: When it comes to your process, do you work off of an outline or do you tend to lean towards free writing?

Rob: Sadly, I really don’t outline.

Sarah: It’s not sad.Rob: I kinda wish I did.

Sarah: No, I get it.

Rob: Like, shoutout to people who are outlining. I mean, I basically couldn’t describe what this book was about until I finished a draft. I had a constellation of ideas, which is how I start any project, and then it’s only through the writing that I figure out what the spine of it is. So, I definitely didn’t outline. I wrote a draft that was really just Smith and Carolyn being funneled through the recovery industrial complex. And then looking at how, you know — one of them is a wealthy white woman, one of them is a queer Black man — how their paths diverged in the plot, with the lens of race and class. So it didn’t have the Elle character at all, it didn’t have the investigation plot line. Some of that is still in there, and I liked it, but it didn’t feel like it had the momentum or emotional gravitose that I wanted it to. Like, the propulsion of it.

Sarah: I will say, the novel feels like it combines the “no plot just vibes” with a real plot.

Rob: Right, like certain parts — like the Atlanta section I thought of as elliptical, essay-istic. There is some plot, thanks to my agents, but I thought of it as a section that would dance between essay and narrative. I love a good walking-around-having-thoughts novel. I love a Ben Lerner. I love a Rachel Tusk.

Sarah: Leaving the Atocha Station! I remember reading that in grad school, and I’m still thinking about it.

Rob: It’s the best. It’s so good.

Sarah: So good. I hadn’t really read anything quite like it, when I first read it, and I think my first time reading it I didn’t know that a novel could be that way. That you could have a character just walk around, lie, do drugs, and like, that’s the novel.

Rob: That’s the novel. Yeah, I owe a debt of gratitude to Ben Lerner. I was definitely very into the idea of auto-fiction as a mode. Teju Cole’s Open City was another book I read my first novel in the city.

Sarah: Great novel. Such a twist.

Rob: I fucking love that novel. The voice of it, how smart it was, how he’s always looking at New York through this power lens. It stuck with me. So yeah, Cole, Lerner, Tusk were all massive inspirations and definitely inspired the parts of the novel that were just “walking around, having thoughts.” In the back and forth process with my agent and editor, I embedded more plot in. Originally, I was not putting a lot of things into scenes that were, potentially, the most interesting parts. Once I wrote in Elle, I had all the investigation stuff happening off scene and being learned in exposition. And then my agent was like, “Why would you do that?”

Sarah: Right. I can see where your head was at, though. I also saw you mentioned Bluets in another interview. Obviously, your novel and Bluets on their face are quite different, but they both talk about grief. I was wondering if you could speak to that as well.

Rob: Oh yeah, Bluets was another big one for me. As a poet-turned-novelist, I’m really drawn to hybrid texts that combine things like essay, lyricism, narrative, and I think Bluets is a book that does that beautifully. It’s interesting, because that is obviously a book about grieving a relationship, but there are also the parts where Maggie Nelson is talking about her friend who became disabled. So there was this really elegiac tone to what has been lost. There are so many very-New York scenes in that, but the one I’m thinking of now is where she says something about the last time they fucked at the Chelsea Hotel while looking out at this blue tarp fluttering in the wind outside the window. These images that are so beautiful and embed with that elegiac tone, I knew I wanted my book tonally to be like the come-down from a high. Like the moment at the end of the night when you’re in the cab crossing the Brooklyn bridge and you kind of want to cry.

Sarah: Yeah, like your head is pounding.

Rob: Right, and that particular sadness to the end of the night. I knew I wanted parts of the book to really feel like that, and those were the scenes/moments where I was thinking most of Bluets to capture that tone.

Sarah: I love that. So going off of this, it feels like a very city novel. Obviously there’s the section in Atlanta, but I thought it was interesting how we see the seasons changing throughout the city. As the novel progressed, it felt like the seasons were reflecting the narrative and whatever Smith was going through. Was that intentional?

Rob: That’s such a good point. The seasonality does factor into the way the city is depicted, and even craft-wise how it feels. The first section of the novel is largely in the summer, especially the very beginning of the novel which is Labor Day weekend. You know, summer in the city has such a particular feel to it. It has a mania to it, and time moves both faster and slower. There’s a real slipperyness to time. I think summer in New York City feels very embodied. If you’re at a party you can smell your neighbor and feel the heat coming off their body. I think that factors into the descriptions I use, and even the pace of it. I think at the beginning of the novel there are a lot of maximalist descriptions packed into it when Smith is entering a party. He’s noticing twenty different things in ten seconds because that’s how summer feels to me. But I think winter is a much more interior time. In the winter scenes, I wanted to ease into a slower, more grief-ridden tone.

Sarah: Right. Like contemplative.

Rob: Yeah. It’s interesting, I’m just now processing this, but over the course of the novel, we see this sort of transformation happening. So there’s this sense of, like, the pacing of those last pages feeling very different from the opening ones. So I wanted that seasonality to be baked into the landscape of the novel.

Sarah: Right. I think that’s also part of creating the vibes of the novel.

Rob: Totally! New York novels thrive on specificity. Something I talked a lot about with my editor is that having it feel like a timeless New York City text — like Just Kids, another book I love that is so of its time, seventies and eighties New York, punk, the aids crises, the places they were hanging out. You know, all the proper nouns, but it’s timeless because it captures the feeling of being young in a city and attaching to a person, letting them be your world. It’s not so relentless in its fixation on proper nouns that it becomes alienating to someone who’s not as familiar. So — sorry, I’ve now forgotten what your question was — but I did want that balance. I think that happened through the editing. Also, in the book there are real places like The Odeon. I thought, well that’s a fixture I can trust in New York, even if it’s not open years from now people will always remember The Odeon. It doesn’t feel like too niche of a preference to where it wouldn’t make sense in five years. Versus, if I picked a random hot spot right now, it might have a really different connotation in five years.

Sarah: Right, like a new hot spot could age the book.

Rob: It ages it, yes. So yeah, I think if I pick a real place that exists and I name-check it, I’m thinking of it more as a New York Institution. And then there were places that I wanted to put in because they’re so evocative of the 2010s in New York. For example, I call it “Chalet” in the novel, but obviously that’s China Chalet. I kinda like doing the half-step of slightly changing it to capture something that felt so of its time in New York.

Sarah: Capturing the spirit of the time!

Rob: Yes!

Sarah: You mentioned you’re a poet. Just from hearing you talk about your novel, it’s clear that there is a real intentionality to how you write which I think is a very “poet” thing — especially you saying that you didn’t totally know what the novel was about until you finished it. I’m also a poet, and I feel the same way about my poetry. I was hoping you could speak to what it was like transitioning from poetry to prose?

Rob: Such a good question. I think the main thing that poetry gave me is a real attention to the line. Poetry is such a molecular practice. Down to the syllable, things have to sound right and make sense sonically. I know a poem is done when I read it through and I don’t stumble. So I tried to bring that to my prose. That said, poetry is also very intuitive. Some of the battle is just evoking a feeling. Certain words have certain connotations, so substitutions can make it into a different poem. So the intuitive aspect of writing — like “I want it to feel like this song, this time of day, this light” — that’s a very poet-y aspect of my writing. That really informed how I write a novel. Even if I don’t know what is going to happen, I know what I want the feeling to be pretty early on, and I know what songs to consume on loop to create that feeling inside of myself before I start writing.

I’ve been writing poetry since I was in high school. A friend of mine had given me this book called Crush by Richard Siken and I was sort of enamored by it. I started writing copycat poetry, heavily inspired by his style. I was in this hipster friend group at my little Southern prep school, and we would all read submissions anonymously. My first poems I shared with my friend, who was the editor-in-chief, and we were in the room when the editorial board of our friends was reviewing all the submissions — mine included. I remember my first couple poems got very high feedback, so I was like “Oh, I’m good at this.” So I felt affirmed in that as a college. When I got to college, I took workshops and realized I had enough classes to make it my minor, so I minored in poetry.

Sarah: Which one do you prefer? Poetry or prose?

Rob: It’s interesting, now that I write fiction I find it really difficult to write a poem. Poems really only occur to me incidentally, so I will often wait a long time to have a good idea for one. I usually write narrative poetry also, so it’s usually about a moment. So yeah, sometimes it just occurs to me that something should be a poem. But it’s very difficult for me to sit down and say “today I will write a poem.” Now I’m out of practice from reading a lot of poetry — I minored in poetry in undergrad so I used to read it a lot — so as a result, poems just don’t occur to me as regularly. I like the aspect of fiction writing which is that any day you can make progress on it, you could edit existing pages, you could outline — although I don’t do that — you could write new stuff. Even if you write for three hours and only one line is good, that can be a good jumping off point for the next day. To write a novel, I have to do it every single day, and eventually I’m living in the world of the novel enough that the writing becomes less painful.

Sarah: When did you first write fiction?

Rob: I think the first time I wrote fiction was in a sophomore year intro workshop where I wrote this story that I think was actually iconic, I love it still. It was about a shut-in who falls in love with Anna Nicole Smith from re-runs of her reality show and doesn’t realize she’s dead. Then a delivery driver reveals that she’s dead, so he has a breakdown once he discovers she’s dead.

Sarah: Oh my god. Can I read it?

Rob: I know. I kind of ate with that one.

Sarah: You kind of did.

Rob: I have no idea how I got the idea. I do love Anna Nicole Smith though.

Sarah: She’s such an un-sung icon. People don’t talk about her enough.

Rob: It’s true. I love a sort of doomed-socialite figure. That’s one of my narrative obsessions.

Sarah: Would you ever write a novel about that sort of figure?

Rob: Well, in some ways we get that with Elle and Carolyn. We get a sense of the teetering edge of glamour and tragedy. I’m really drawn to that. Like — I’m really stanning Lena Dunham in this interview - but have you heard her podcast, the C word? Her and this writer, Alissa Bennet, talk about women who were denounced as crazy by the tabloids. So they do a mix of properly famous women like Left Eye or Judy Garland, and then they also do more tabloid-fixture people, heiresses who died young like Casey Johnson, or historical figures like Barbara Hutton. But they’re all united in being glamorous women who were tragic. I’m totally addicted to that kind of story. And I’m fascinated by the question of why there is a media ecosystem that is devoted to commodifying this kind of story, and everything it says about our culture.

Sarah: I remember when Anna Nicole Smith died. I used to watch E.T. all the time when I was, like, eight years old. My mom loved all of that tabloid stuff. And I remember how they were constantly reporting on Anna, talking about who was the father to her child, etcetera. And then suddenly they reported she died. I felt like I was watching a soap opera. I think people forgot these were real people.

Rob: And I think — maybe this is me trying to forgive my own interest - but I think there is a way to engage with those figures that is out of a deep love, sympathy, and interest in someone who is confined by their fame and image. And then there is the way to engage that is delighting in their misfortune.

Sarah: I also noticed in the acknowledgements you mentioned several artists who inspired you. Did you have any go-to songs or artists for your writing process or when you were having writer’s block?

Rob: I listen to a lot of music scores when I’m writing almost exclusively. I don’t know, I find it difficult to listen to words while I’m writing. So I’ll listen to a lot of Max Richter, for example - especially this one song, On the Nature of Daylight, I’d listen to on repeat. Or I’ll listen to Bon Iver.

Sarah: I love him.

Rob: Oh yeah. Re: Stacks has been a song that I’ve written to since I was sixteen, and it still kind of works. Especially if I’m trying to write a more emotional scene though, I think listening to the same song - usually from a film score — on loop, helps me to create a cohesion to the pacing and forces me to sustain a mood as I write my way through a scene.

I’m putting together a playlist of songs that were either mentioned in the novel or inspired the novel. Like pre-Brat Charli, Track 10 era-Charli, I associate very strongly with the era of my mid-twenties in New York. Like the late 2010s — it’s very spiritually connected. And then I’ll listen to what I like to call “magic negro music,” so Solange, Moses Sumney, twigs — I think that’s another register of the novel that is still meditative without completely leaning into melodrama.

Sarah: Did you like FKA twig’s last album?

Rob: I think there are a couple good songs on it. I really like Eusexua, and I like the visual branding of it. But it wasn’t my favorite album from Twigs. What did you think?

Sarah: I really love the branding and visuals around it. I enjoyed a lot of the album, although I don’t think every song on the album was quite a banger for me. I really love Drums of Death, though.

Rob: Oh yeah. There were definitely a couple that I was like, these are top ten twigs.

Sarah: Definitely. I think twigs is such a great artist. I think she always has a vision, and I think she does a great job at executing that vision.

It’s funny that you listen to music soundtracks when you write. I do the same thing. It’s the perfect way to create a vibe! I think it also embodies this idea of, like yes this is a novel, but really it’s storytelling. It’s not words on a page - it rises, moves, develops. Have you ever listened to Jon Brion while writing?

Rob: I don’t think so.

Sarah: He did the score for Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind.

Rob: Wait, let me look at my spotify. [Rob looks back at his spotify]. That’s so funny. There was one year where one of his songs was my top song on Spotify. I think it’s part of also just how I write. Like, often my top most played songs I’ve never even heard of - I’ll look at it and be like “who is that?” And then I’ll realize I listened to their song fifty times in a row while writing one chapter.

Sarah: That’s so funny. Every time I listen to him, I’m like, why aren’t more people listening to the score?

Rob: Right? Listen to the score!

Sarah: Listen to the score!

Rob: People really aren’t listening to the score enough.

Sarah: They’re not. We need to tell people. I’m also always saying, if I ever write a novel that gets made into a movie, I want Jon Brion to do the score.

Rob: Oh my gosh, yes. I think about that a lot. Maybe I’d want Max Richter? But also I would want a balance, like a DJ I really like to music supervise combined with original songs from a great composer.

Sarah: Who do you imagine playing Smith in a film adaptation?

Rob: The only character of who I have a really strong sense of who should play her is Carolyn. I totally picture Elle Fanning. I think Carolyn, in the wrong hands, could come across as just a Serena Van Der Woodson type where she’s just, like, a wealthy blonde white woman. But honestly, the way I see that character is more textured than that. I think she has this slightly English, stiff upper-lip, gritty thing going on. She’s part wasp, part rock n roll. It’s a specific type of poise that I think Elle Fanning could really embody.

For Smith, I honestly don’t know. My friends always ask me this, and I’m not totally sure when I think of Black, queer actors in their twenties. One person I had in mind was the person who did the audiobook, Justice Smith.

Sarah: Oh, yes! I remember you mentioned him when I first met you. I sort of had him in the back of my head while reading.

Rob: I loved When I Saw the TV Glow, and I thought he did a great performance in that. Also, the fact that his last name is Smith of course. So, I’ve definitely thought of him for it. He was also in a teen romance movie where he played a romantic lead to Elle Fanning, so I can already see it. There’s a few other people that have been mentioned.

Born and raised in Atlanta, Rob Franklin is a writer of fiction, criticism, and poetry, and a cofounder of Art for Black Lives. A Kimbilio Fiction Fellow and finalist for the New England Review Emerging Writer prize, he has published work in New England Review, Prairie Schooner, and The Rumpus among others. Franklin holds a BA from Stanford University and an MFA from NYU’s Creative Writing program. He lives in Brooklyn and teaches writing at the School of Visual Arts.