A Conversation with Andrew Boryga

"Victim," his debut novel, hits bookstores this month

This is an occasional series where I interview contemporary novelists of note. I had the pleasure of reading Victim, Andrew Boryga’s debut novel, which follows the trials of Javi, an aspiring writer who cynically exploits his working class Latino identity to rapidly rise in the world of New York media. Boryga, in addition, writes tenderly on the Bronx and Puerto Rico, as well as the complexity of male friendship. Victim, at its best, calls to mind Percival Everett and Junot Díaz, and I was excited to send Boryga a series of questions on his novel and writing life. He also operates an excellent Substack that offers insights into what it takes to be a writer today.

How did Victim come to be? How long did it take you to have a draft you were satisfied with?

Ten long years, man. It started out as a bunch of short stories I wrote in college that featured Javi and Gio and evolved into various iterations and drafts that didn’t work. It wasn’t until the summer of 2020 when I landed on the premise that finally made me feel like I had something interesting and fresh. I wrote another two full drafts of the book after that. I finally finished the version that sold in the spring of 2022. If I had to guess, I probably wrote about six or seven full versions of the novel over that ten year span.

In the process, the book morphed from this story about two kids who grew up like brothers in the Bronx and took vastly different paths in life (one going on to be “successful” and another going on to prison for drug dealing) to one that also encompassed all these nuanced thoughts and barbs about the media, diversity, and our country’s obsession with identity. The book, at its core, still has that friendship story, but I’m also proud it has these other interesting layers to it, too.

Do you think protagonists of novels have to be fundamentally good? Explain the process behind conceiving Javi.

Hell fucking no! In fact, I think that shit is so boring, man. I really hate when I’m reading a novel and it is clear to me the main character is meant to be this good, almost chosen person, or that the author is set on convincing you that even if the main character has some minor flaws, it’s really these secondary characters who are the “bad” ones and exerting all of this pressure on the “good” one. I’ve seen this sort of thing play out in a lot of contemporary novels, and it's something I always wanted to avoid. Especially as a writer of color because I feel like it only serves to flatten characters, rather than show them as the nuanced complex people they are–the full range of humanity, in other words.

That said, I can’t front. Part of what took me so long writing this book is that I was afraid to make Javi a character who did “bad” things. Mostly because I was afraid people were going to assume I was Javi, and therefore I was “bad.” Part of letting this go included just getting older, and having kids and realizing these worries are kind of silly in the grand scheme of things. But it also involved just accepting people were going to assume I’m Javi no matter what I do, so I might as well have some fun.

Among many things, this is a Bronx novel. How important to you was it to write a story about where you grew up and what you experienced?

It was always important, man. It’s the reason why I dedicated the book to the Bronx. I fucking loved my childhood and upbringing. Sure, in some ways, it was quite difficult and turbulent compared to what others may have experienced growing up. But on the other hand, I learned lessons that you can’t learn anywhere else. I always wanted to write a novel depicting what my upbringing was really like, and what the beautiful, complicated people that make up our community are really like. Not only that, but as I jumped from places like my building in the Bronx to Cornell University, to the New York Times newsroom, and so on, I realized more and more how the Bronx and places like it are so damn caricatured. We’re painted or thought of, too often, as only ruthless thugs, or poor, helpless victims. There’s often nothing in between. So part of me also felt like it was my duty to write about life there as authentically as I could; to write about the beauty and the pain and the humor all at once, and in a way that wasn’t trying to sell you some sob story, but just tell it like it is.

Javi ascends from the Bronx to an elite college to, at his peak, a coveted perch at a popular, left-leaning news outlet that seemed like some amusing mashup of the New Yorker, Vice, and the old L Magazine. What motivated you to write about the inner workings of media?

Honestly, just experiencing it myself. I started writing for the New York Times at age 18, back in 2009. And ever since then I was freelancing quite regularly for big publications, and later served on staff at a few of them. I’ve worked with a lot of editors, been inside different newsrooms, and have always had an interest in the media and its power dynamics, which, despite whatever progressive shit appears in their pages, often revolves around privilege and having the right social network, or attending the right two or three universities. So that is one part of why.

But the other part is that during my various stops at publications and the grind of pitching as a freelancer, I noticed there were a lot of editors out there who were only really interested in me because of my status as a person of color, and more so, as a person of color from a poor, somewhat traumatic background with access to similarly situated people. It became this thing where the only pitches I could get accepted, or the only stories I would get thought of to be assigned, were often related to trauma of some sort, or poverty, or tragedy. At first I was okay with it because I felt a lot of these stories were important, and someone had to write them, but after a while, I’d try to pitch more nuanced things, like an investigation of the term Latinx, before it was really a huge thing, and the stuff would be received with an, “eh, I’m not sure you can handle that yet.” It became clear after a while, that my “voice” and “perspective” were really only wanted if I was writing about certain kinds of stories. This pissed me off, especially because everyone and their mom was touting diversity and the need for it. But in reality, what I felt like I was seeing were voices like my own being used to hop on some trending topic and discarded as soon as we wanted to write about anything that didn’t fit the neatest narrative.

Victim comes on the heels of American Fiction, which of course was based on Percival Everett's (much better) Erasure. Both satirical novels take a critical view of how affluent liberals conceive of race in America. What kinds of issues and currents were you grappling with in Victim? What does it say of the society that made a hustler like Javi, momentarily at least, a star?

It’s been cool to see a film like American Fiction come out around my book’s launch. It’s funny because when I started really getting into the draft that eventually became Victim, what I was doing felt a bit taboo. I wasn’t really sure how it might be received. But now, we have American Fiction, we’ve had Yellowface last year, scandals with George Santos and Hasan Minhaj, and it just seems like we’re at this point as a culture where we’re ready to talk about this stuff.

When I was in the thick of crafting Victim, my goal was to just try and poke fun at our culture’s odd obsession with identity and victimhood. It’s clear that from around 2014 or so to very recently, perhaps even still now, we’ve placed a premium on stories in the media that center race, identity, and trauma–especially stories told from either the perspective of a “marginalized” person, or told about “marginalized” people. (I fucking hate those terms.)

As I noticed this trend–both inside and outside of news outlets–I started to get the feeling that a lot of this alleged concern wasn’t about changing things, but more so about telling good, tragic stories people could eat up like a sitcom. The stories were getting clicks. I know because I wrote some and saw the numbers jumping in real time. But in the chase for more and more clicks, I noticed a lot of nuance getting flattened out of stories, and corners cut, simply because the clean victim tale was easier to spin and receive–even if the clean tale didn’t seem to help real, important goals, like improving education or reforming police departments in a meaningful, tangible way. It also seemed to me that this clean story tickled the fancy of affluent liberals a lot easier, because it often put them in the position of being a savior. That is a far more comfortable position to be in than the position of having to make real changes and sacrifices. Getting a rich person to donate money to a vague cause, or shed a tear at a heart-rending article in a magazine and post a picture of themselves shedding that tear is easy. Convincing them to actually support reforms and policies that might result in their own precious kids rubbing shoulders with kids from the hood at school isn’t.

As a writer, it was also weird that in this media ecosystem I was swimming in, my background and skin color seemed just as marketable as my writing ability. People looked at me and where I came from and assumed I thought certain things, or had certain stories to tell, or even wanted to tell those stories. It seemed to me that there was this ready-made path if I was willing to lean into it, and I never really felt comfortable doing that.

So, I wanted to write about all of this stuff. Not make an argument about it, but just kind of put it out there. What are we really doing here? What is this all about? The book took off when I landed on the idea of Javi being the sort of person who was noticing these cultural trends, too. But instead of sitting the game out like I chose to do, he decides to capitalize. What happens if a hustler with the right background and look applies himself to this new market for pain and suffering, for the purpose of advancing his career? What does it say that his hustle is rewarded because he gives people the stories they really want to hear? Is he guilty? Or is he just good at playing the game? Getting at all of that felt exciting. My goal wasn’t to write a sermon or a lecture, but a fun, propulsive narrative about a character in the midst of this who has agency and is making choices he thinks are sound, until he realizes they might not be.

MFA vs. NYC! Who wins? Who's better? (Just kidding, of course.) But as a product of both, tell me how each environment shaped you, and what exactly goes into becoming a novelist today.

Man, that is a great question. Honestly, who knows? For me, both my upbringing in NYC and my MFA at the University of Miami were extremely important to my development as a writer. Growing up in the Bronx completely shaped my outlook on life, as well as my voice. There’s a reason, as you say, that this is clearly a Bronx book. In NYC, however, I never really mixed with the literary world. I was an Uptown kid and mostly hung out in the Bronx and later in Washington Heights where I lived for a couple years. I never really went to Brooklyn, and rarely went to readings. So, I can’t say that my proximity to the publishing industry for 25 years really did a whole lot for me, personally.

During my MFA program, what felt most valuable to me was the time to write. I was there for three years, and even though I spent a lot of time spinning my wheels trying to figure out what the hell I was doing, it was all useful. Mostly, I just appreciate having had that kind of time to focus on a thing like writing a book and to be paid, albeit meagerly (the University of Miami’s program is fully funded and has an excellent faculty, so check them out), to do so. Coming from where I come from, that felt like such a luxury.

But do I think you have to live in NYC or get an MFA to become a novelist today? No, not at all. In fact, I think that in many cases, you’ll likely be a more interesting writer if you don’t. We probably have an overpopulation of literary writers who live in NYC and hail from prestigious MFA programs. We could use more who maybe just worked blue collar jobs, or who spent their formative adult years in other parts of the country. We could use more people who swim in entirely different circles. A lot of people complain about all literary fiction sounding the same today, and I think some of that has to do with the fact that a lot of the writers are emerging from the same few circles. I also think there are some smart, savvy editors at houses who know this, and who are going to become more and more willing to take chances on people who don’t have all the “right” credentials.

Who are your greatest literary influences?

Authors like Junot Díaz, Ernesto Quiñonez, Piri Thomas (RIP), and legendary New York Times journalist, David Gonzalez, are a huge reason why I ever bothered trying to write in the first place. The real OG’s. Then there are others I stumbled on, a bit later, who completely influenced my style and approach in fiction, like Paul Beatty, Mat Johnson, and Victor LaValle. Finally, there is another class of writers who I just straight up admire, and whose writing always just makes me aspire to be a better craftsman. I’m thinking of writers like Patricia Engel, Ottessa Moshfegh, Justin Torres, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, and Alejandro Zambra.

The dialogue in Victim is strong because you capture, through Gio and Javi especially, how working class kids and young adults in New York actually talk to each other. Does literary fiction need more of this? Tell me, in particular, about crafting the voice of Gio.

Thank you for saying that, it means a lot. To answer your question: Yes! We need more characters that sound like real fucking people man, not like some avatars spawned off of literary Twitter.

Like I mentioned before, I really wanted this book to be as authentically Bronx as possible, and part of that was ensuring Javi and Gio spoke like people back home speak. Gio was very important because he represented someone who isn’t tainted by this weird, theoretical, abstract language you start adopting the higher you climb in status, class, and “taste” in this country. He’s a dude who just always lived on his block, and really only knows his one little slice of paradise. A dude who just calls it like it is, and although he is quite smart and savvy in many ways, he doesn’t need to beat around the bush with his language to get his points across. He was great, too, because I could play him off of Javi. Javi was like Gio for a while, but then he goes off to a fancy college, swims with campus activists, takes all the ethnic studies courses, imbibes Twitter, and little by little, loses his language in the process. To the point that when he and Gio reunite towards the end of the book, Gio can’t even recognize what he’s saying anymore, and this makes Javi think: Is this new, fancy language I’m spitting all that helpful? Yeah, it makes me sound smart, but what is it really doing to me?

Again, I don’t have clear answers I’m trying to push. I just like the contrast of these two guys on the page. Mostly, I think it’s because that is how I feel today. I’ve got a little bit of Gio in me and a little bit of Javi, the dude from the block who lived in the same building for 25 years, and the dude climbing these social rungs and trying to make sense of it.

You write well in your Substack about the mental and emotional challenges of finishing a book, especially one you are proud of. What is it like to have Victim out there? Writing is a funny thing because it's so personal and then strangers are devouring what you do. Do you feel you've lived with Javi long enough? What are you working on now?

Thank you for the kind words about Dwell. I appreciate it. As for Victim being out there, man, it feels pretty damn incredible to be honest–especially when I hear from readers who get what I was up to, and who appreciate it, even if some of it makes them feel uncomfortable. I just feel so rewarded for that long ass grind I put in. There were so many times where I thought I was just wasting my time, but now I look back and I’m so grateful it took that long. It cooked as long as it needed to, and because of that, I’m at peace. I feel like I left it all out there. I didn’t save up any punches, and even reading it back today, there isn’t anything I would really change. I’ve said what I needed to say in the best way I could, and now I can move on.

As for what’s next, I had a good draft going of a new novel, something about parenthood and fatherhood, and the weird transition from being a modern day childless person to a parent, which is my new obsession being that I’m a father of two small kids. It’s something that I hope will be just as funny and poignant some day. I wrote about 100 pages of it, but had to put it aside because publicity stuff picked up, and like I said, I got kids, not to mention a full time job. When things die down with Victim, I’m looking forward to getting back to it. In the meantime, I’m thinking about it every day, turning the characters over, thinking about possible plotlines, etc., which lets me know it’s something that is probably going to stick. So that’s exciting.