A friendly ghost, a love-sick cockroach, and an amateur radio broadcaster are a few of the eccentric characters readers encounter in How to Fall in Love in a Time of Unnamable Disaster. Published last year, the dystopian fantasy is Muriel Leung’s first novel, though she has authored several story and poetry collections. She’s also the inaugural recipient of the Black Mountain Institute’s 117° Fellowship, which wraps up at the end of July. Before resuming her professorship duties at the California Institute of the Arts, Leung joined Desert Companion editor Heidi Kyser in studio to talk more about How to Fall in Love — specifically, what it's like writing romance, loss, and purpose into a fictional world that’s falling apart. Here’s an excerpt of that conversation.
There’s a layered irony about your being the first recipient of this fellowship, because the extreme heat reference is a nod to climate change, and your novel is set in a time of climate apocalypse. Have you thought or written about this overlap?
Well, in contrast to extreme heat, we have extreme water in How to Fall in Love in a Time of Unnamable Disaster. So, every Tuesday, in the novel, there's these acid rainstorms. Not just any rainstorm, but rainstorms that deteriorate the landscape. It takes place in an urban environment. Las Vegas is a growing urban area as well, but I think there's something different about desert sprawl and the dispersion of the landscape versus New York City, which is where the novel is set …
It's a whole other scenario to think about what it's like to endure extreme heat when things are so spread out. But what I've noticed about the desert is that there is a lot happening under the surface of it, a lot of life underneath, and also what comes out at night, as well as I'm sure Las Vegas residents know — coyotes, scorpions, and whatnot. As a newcomer to Las Vegas, I'm also conscious of all the things I do not know, but that I'm slowly learning while I'm here.
You mentioned that much of it is set in New York and the surrounding area. You lived there, and you have a strong connection to the city. Was there an element of Hurricane Sandy that partially informed this? I ask because of the rain that's so important, and the flooding.
Yeah, I actually started this novel shortly after Hurricane Sandy in New York City, which is where I lived at the time of the storms. Shortly after, I moved to Baton Rouge, Louisiana, for my MFA. If you're familiar with Louisiana, then you know that it's also a very, very wet place. And so, I thought about rain a lot. Maybe (because of) the shock of seeing rain of that proportion during Hurricane Sandy and the disaster that followed, I think I was really terrified at first, being in Louisiana, but then I realized that it was just a part of everyday life. …
Hurricane Sandy was a very terrifying time. New York City has this reputation as a city that's very tough and resilient and not very frequently victim to natural disasters because of its placement. But what happened was that we saw a city shut down for quite a while. Also, I think like any crisis, you see the disproportionate treatment and solution-building happen across people of different classes. Where I grew up was between Queens and the Lower East Side. My grandma, where she lived in the housing projects in the Lower East Side, was just blocks away from Wall Street. And we saw the New York Stock Exchange get power back days after (the hurricane). And meanwhile, my elderly grandparents, who lived on the 25th floor a few buildings away waited two weeks without power or water.
But I also saw that there were many residents in these buildings who didn't have a lot, but who also made sure to haul water up many flights of stairs to get it to the people who needed it. Brought groceries, brought food. It's just a reminder that this is the part of the city that most people never see.
So, you have rain in New York in the book. And you allude to other types of disasters that are happening elsewhere — earthquakes in California. And here in Las Vegas, you're seeing what it's like to have extreme heat so present. As the title of the book tells, you choose not to name the specific event or set of conditions that lead to the setting in which the story takes place. It’s an “unnamable disaster.” Why that choice to leave it ambiguous?
I think so much about naming of disaster has to do with our framing of it, like in a political manner. I like the idea of, maybe there is a sort of larger mainstream name for it. Maybe news outlets have given it a name, but within this community of people who live in this building, they've all opted to call it something else, because, for whatever reason, (the media’s name is) not fitting.
And each of the characters suffers from their own internalized disaster — familial, personal. And I think for them, the rain is one external disaster. But the larger crisis that they're enduring is the complete alteration of their life and their relationships to each other … I think they are realizing that these personal crises become more immediate and have more urgency.
The strangeness of the characters in the book is striking. Sometimes it’s literal, like you have ghosts, or there's the character Sad, who has no head, yet is somehow still alive, or the cockroach Shin, who's a cockroach yet still lovable. How did you develop these characters, who might seem so alien to your average reader?
I think maybe this is the training as a poet that comes into play here. I love the idea of taking a metaphor and applying it to its most literal extreme. So the idea of a headless man is such a joke to play up — the idea that here's this hapless character, who's so earnest in many ways, and so flawed, and representative of so many kinds of lovers who, perhaps, could use their head more often but do not.
And for Shin the cockroach, anyone who's grown up in New York City, especially in the housing projects, knows that cockroaches are commonplace, so the idea that he's there feels very fitting. And also, a cockroach with some ennui is such an interiority. … If the joke is that cockroaches will outlast many apocalypses, why wouldn't this one, too, in its own way and have some kind of feeling about it?
Relationship's an essential element of this book. I noticed a pattern in them that goes something like this: love, loss, loneliness, letting go. And then there are elements of the public response to COVID, such as the government’s confusing rules that no one can keep track of. It took me back to the pandemic and the lessons that people learned during that time of mass sickness and death. Was COVID in your mind as well?
I finished the first full draft of this novel, perhaps, at the start of the pandemic. … I don't think that the novel itself is trying to be prescient or anything, but it is, you know, a reflection of a particular time and a particular experience of crisis that I think just happens to mirror some of the conditions that we went through during the pandemic. The commonality is: What do you do when you go from an earlier period of crisis, in which you're told, “When this is over, I will do this” to a point in which you don't know when there is an ending? And then, that lack of ending becomes a way of life. And that is something that we all experienced during the pandemic. And that feeling is something close to grief and maybe is something that's rare to experience collectively globally, which joins us together in this kind of collective grief that we understand. … So, I think there's something very human in it too.
Was there a lesson about love and loss that you were hoping people would take away from it?
I never really thought of the ending of the book as a sad ending at all, until other people have told me after they read it that they were sobbing at the end. And I was like, but why? I don’t think of this idea of letting go, which can mean so many things, as a sad ending. And I don't mean it in the sense that one forgets someone literally, but that an act of surrender or acceptance does allow you to proceed to whatever the next phase is, and I think we don't ever know what that is.
So, in a world in which your life and afterlife can happen in the same plane — and then there's this other after afterlife that's there — I think it's to introduce the idea that the thing that we thought was the final stage in our grief is never the final stage. … I think of the book as trying to do the what’s next, the invitation to think about that as not something to be terrified of. We spend so much of our life terrified of death, trying to prevent death, but we are not immortal, and also we live in a world populated with ghosts and ancestors.
All BMI fellows work in the community. In June, you did a writing workshop here. How was it?
The workshop was called Writing Futures, and it is a workshop based around designing your own speculative fiction premise, and starting your short story project or novel project based on that premise. We talked a lot about building out those worlds and thinking about what it looks like to write a convincing dystopian or utopian future.
Muriel, if you were to leave Las Vegas today, what would you be taking away with you from this experience?
Most people have an idea of Las Vegas as this very loud tourist-oriented place. And while that's certainly a big part of Las Vegas, being able to be here and to meet people who live here and are building a permanent life here, I'm excited to see that there is, for instance, a growing Chinatown, and Manila Town that honor a growing, diverse Asian community and are collectively trying to answer this question of, What do we want the future of Las Vegas to look like that is not premised upon serving a tourist economy? What would it look like to grow a strong local community base?
For more from Muriel Leung, tune in to the full conversation on Saturday, July 26, at 6:30 p.m. on 88.9 KNPR.
