Manuel Betancourt‘s debut book, The Male Gazed, somehow didn’t cross my path until well after it came out. The book, which takes a critical eye toward pop culture and queer desire, originally came out in 2023 and is now available in paperback. After reading and discovering his book, I invited him to the First Taste Reading Series to read and discuss his book.
His second book, Hello Stranger: Musings on Modern Intimacies, is out now. Publishers’ Weekly calls it “steamy and cerebral” while Kirkus says Betancourt is a “witty, intuitive observer of human behavior.” I 100% agree with both of those statements. While Debutiful is dedicated to debut books, but is also focusing on emerging and early career writers because when someone is a damn good writer, we don’t care when you discover them, as long as you do discover them.
Below the author answered our My Reading Life questionnaire, for you to learn about the books he was obsessed with, what helped him through puberty, and what he’s reading next.
What was the first book you were obsessed with as a child?
This may come as no surprise but I was a bookworm from an early age. My mom was a voracious reader (of thrillers and spy novels, mostly) so there were always tons of books at home. One of the earliest books I remember reading that stuck with me was Treasure Island by Robert Louis Stevenson. I think we had a translated Spanish paperback edition of it. And, of course, a 90s childhood was not complete if you weren’t somewhat obsessed with Goosebumps (or, Escalofríos as their translations were marketed in Latin America where I grew up): Welcome to Dead House was the kind of book we were all reading in between playing marbles at recess, a sentence that really shouldn’t age me as much I realize it does now when seeing it in print.
But arguably the book (and as I’m typing all this out I’m realizing how much genre fiction I was reading as a kid!) that I truly became obsessed with—seeking its adaptation, its sequels, and any and all information about it from our school library was The Demon Headmaster by Gillian Cross. I know that basically outs me as the kind of kid who went to a British private school in Colombia. I have no idea why we read this in class when I was like 10 at most, I think? It’s an odd British series about, well, precisely what the title suggests, a headmaster in a school who is clearly up to no good; and so it’s up to a few plucky kids to foil the villain’s plans to hypnotize the entirety of the UK. I hadn’t thought about it in years but I remember treasuring my copy and re-reading it over and over again; an odd thing for a child to do, I’ll admit, especially since it was likely the first English language book I’d come to so obsess over. Though, not, of course, the last.
What book helped you through puberty?
Funny, I don’t think any book I encountered in my teens was at all helpful when it came to navigating my own puberty journey (maybe other queer folks around my age can relate?). After all, nothing in our curriculum really tackled queer desire, let alone queer bodies. For that I’d have to wait until college where it did feel like novels like Hornito by Mike Albo, The Sexual Outlaw by John Rechy and eventually Andrew Holleran’s The Dancer from the Dance and Larry Kramer’s Faggots helped me understand my body and my desires in ways no books I’d encountered until then hand.
Which is not to say there weren’t a handful of books I read in my teens—in both English and Spanish—that had an impact on my own sense of self and the world around me. Reading A Streetcar Named Desire by Tennessee Williams and The Visit by Friedrich Dürrenmatt as we studied modern drama in my English class, and modern classics like Aura by Carlos Fuentes and Rosario Tijeras by Jorge Franco in Spanish class, offered me such a vast sense of possibilities of what language could do that I can’t help but feel incredibly lucky to have had the education I had.
But the book I was absolutely obsessed with by the time I was in my teens was One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel García Márquez. That was obviously required reading in Colombia. But it truly blew my mind. I probably re-read 3-4 times in just as many years while I was in high school. I find it so moving and funny and heartbreaking and cutting and wistful and… it’s just such a perfect novel. Wild, ambitious, epic. Everything you could ever hope a novel could do it does, and then it twists and turns on itself to reveal more and more the more you revisit it. To this day it remains my favorite novel. As for whether it helped me through puberty, honestly, I guess there was plenty of talk of sex and desire and unruly bodies that may have inadvertently helped me during those formative years.
What book do you think all teenagers should be assigned in school?
I mean, other than insisting everyone read García Márquez’s books (maybe teenagers could start, as I did, with Chronicle of a Death Foretold which is a slim novella and thus a good gateway into his magical realism?), I’ll have to say every teenager (and every adult, really) should read James Baldwin. Any Baldwin, though if we’re egging on teens to tackle his work, The Fire Next Time, Go Tell It on the Mountain and yes, even Giovanni’s Room are where I’d suggest people start. There’s a lucidity to Baldwin’s prose and ideas that really feels well suited to those years when you’re aching for crisp writers and thinkers to help break your world wide open.
If you were to teach a class on Damn Good Writing, what books would make the syllabus?
I’ll offer no commentary, since I find every one of these (in chronological order) requires no introduction:
- George Eliot’s Middlemarch
- Virginia Woolf’s The Waves
- Frank O’Hara’s Meditations in an Emergency
- Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children
- Toni Morrison’s Beloved
- Tomson Highway’s Kiss of the Fur Queen
- Jhumpa Lahiri’s Interpreter of Maladies
- Ian McEwan’s Atonement
- Justin Torres’s We The Animals
- Olivia Laing’s The Lonely City
What books helped guide you while writing your book?
Roland Barthes’s The Pleasure of the Text and especially The Lover’s Discourse are books I constantly look to for writerly inspiration. But in this case, they also mapped out a way to talk about intimacy (and its relationship to genre and stories) in ways that remain invaluable to this project I’ve subtitled “musings on modern intimacies.” But there’s also a handful of books I actually analyze in Hello Stranger—including Hanya Yanagihara’s A Little Life, Torrey Peters’s Detransition, Baby and Allan Hollinghurst’s The Swimming Pool Library—that, in addition to John Rechy’s City of Night felt like welcome lighthouses that helped orient me whenever I was feeling adrift.
What books are on your nightstand now that you’re looking forward to reading next?
Trust by Hernan Diaz has been staring at me for a while and I really should finally dig into it. I also just picked out Craig Olsen’s P.S. Burn This Letter Please: The fabulous and fraught birth of modern drag, in the queens’ own words a few weeks back and having loved the documentary by the same name, I’ve been eager to dive into it. But first I need to finish my current re-read of Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway (for, ahem, research purposes).
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