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The idea of “going home” is, for many members of the LGBTQ+ community, a complicated one. Take, for example, Akúa, the protagonist of Christina Cooke’s debut novel, Broughtupsy, who returns to Jamaica from Canada to connect with her sister after the loss of their younger brother. Akúa is soon forced to question what it means to belong (both in Kingston and with her immediate family) as a young, queer, grief-stricken woman doing her best to heal. Cooke’s narration, at once poetic and conversational, lends Akúa’s story a sense of urgency and resonance.
Vogue recently spoke with Cooke about connecting with her protagonist’s woundedness, taking inspiration from writers including Joy Kogawa and Patricia Lockwood, and where in the world she feels most at home.
Vogue: What does it feel like to see Broughtupsy out in the world?
Christina Cooke: It’s been an exhilarating yet bewildering couple of months since Broughtupsy arrived in the world. It took 13 years for me to see this novel from initial inspiration to the bound hardcover you’re now holding in your hands; 13 years of writing, revising, deleting, restructuring, then writing some more. Along the way, there were many, many moments of crippling despair, when I feared all my efforts would be for naught—that this novel would simply molder on my hard drive, never to see the light of day. So to walk into bookstores now and see Broughtupsy sitting on shelves titled “Buzz-WorthyBooks” or “Must-Read Debuts” is a particular kind of astounding that I don’t quite have the language to describe.
How did you prepare yourself to tell such an intimate story about grief, queerness, and connection? Do you have any particular habits or rituals you observed to facilitate the writing process?
I’m an intensely character-driven writer, meaning all I need to get myself going is a deep and intuitive sense of a consciousness from which I can’t look away. So when I started writing Broughtupsy, I could feel my main character, Akúa. I know that sounds woo-woo and weird, but it’s true: I could hear how she sounds and feel how she moves and sense her inner wounds and yearning as if they were my own. Crafting Akúa’s story essentially became a process of discovering why she was wounded, how it all happened, and who it left her yearning for. That’s when the harrowing complexities of navigating grief and queerness and the clashes between cultures entered the story. To be honest, I wasn’t prepared to delve into those waters. I didn’t know beforehand that was the direction the novel would go in—but Akúa required it, so I did my best to wade on through. To access those depths, music was the crucial trigger that got me into the right headspace. I have a playlist that I only listened to while I was writing. Some of the songs have lyrics; some do not. What unites them all is that they invoked a specific mood or atmosphere that spurred me toward crafting whatever fraught reality the scene before me required.
You present the idea of “home” as multifaceted and complex rather than static. When and where do you feel most at home in the world these days?
Oof, this is such a hard question. Not a bad question, just a hard one. I’ve lived in eight cities across four countries. The longest stint was 11 years; the shortest was nine months. Each place invariably left its stamp on me, reshaping who I am and how I see the world in ways that put me out of step with wherever it was I was headed to next. It’s no surprise, then, that “home” is an incredibly complicated concept for me, and served as one of the central obsessions that compelled me to write Broughtupsy. But if I had to name one singular place as where I feel the closest to “at home,” it would be New York City. We’ve all heard the clichés: NYC is the world’s greatest melting pot, a hodgepodge of cultures, a kaleidoscope of too many people doing too many things. But the too-muchness of the city is precisely why it feels like the perfect container for me. I am a Black, queer, immigrant, gender-variant woman who draws her sense of self from eight different cultures. In the modern parlance, I am too much. It makes sense, then, that the place I can most relax is somewhere that’s big enough to meet all that I am.
What are some of your favorite books that center on family structure and relationships?
One of my favorite books that touches on these themes is Joy Kogawa’s Obasan. My friends are all tired of hearing me go on about it; I recommend it to every reader I meet. It’s a slim novel that follows a Japanese-Canadian family as they navigate internment during World War II. It’s as much about each member of the family trying to survive each other as it is about surviving their situation. I absolutely adore it, and found myself re-reading it more times than I’m willing to admit as I sat down to write my own novel about how to live within a complicated family and the tumultuous cultures that formed it. Another favorite is Patricia Lockwood’s memoir Priestdaddy, primarily because it deals with the difficulties that erupt within a woman’s sense of self after she’s grown up, claimed her place in the world, then makes the difficult decision to go home. It is hilarious and insightful and deeply affecting; Lockwood’s training as a poet makes the sentences soar. On both a technical and thematic level, Priestdaddy helped me articulate Akúa’s own homecoming story—especially the clashes between how she sees herself as a queer woman, how Akúa’s Jamaican family sees her as a sister and daughter, and all the things left unsaid in the spaces between.
Do you have a favorite reaction you’ve gotten to the book?
“I’m filing this one under books I wish I could have read years ago.” That’s the response I got from a reader who reached out to gush over how much she enjoyed Broughtupsy. According to her note, the novel affirmed her own experiences as an immigrant who came to queerness after living in America, and gave her a language for the dizzying commotion she encounters every time she goes home for a visit. Honestly, hearing how much the book buoyed her meant more to me than any rave review I’ve gotten. To know that my work holds such deep resonance for a stranger I’ve never met is a gift I will cherish forever.
This conversation has been edited and condensed.
