A.M. Sosa is a queer Mexican-American whose work has appeared in Zyzzyva and the Santa Monica Review and they received an MFA from UC Irvine. Their debut novel, And I’ll Take Out Your Eyes, is an explosive coming-of-age set in Stockton, Calif., in the early 2000s.
We asked Sosa to answer our recurring My Reading Life Q&A so readers could get to know them and the works that shaped their life.
What was the first book you were obsessed with as a child?
I had the same teacher for second and third grade, so same classroom, and in there, my teacher had a copy of an anthology of Edgar Allan Poe stories. There were also accompanying illustrations. The terror of the man being chained in, The Cask of Amontillado has always stayed with me. In my memory, the coldness, the lack of regard for him is what stood out. The adventure and what to me then, felt like obsession in The Gold Bug, was also memorable. As was the growing intensity of guilt, in A Tell-Tale Heart. Overall, it was the intensity of emotion, of pain being explored. I couldn’t articulate that for myself, but in those stories, because they centered pain, they seemed a lot more real, real to my understanding of the world, as cruel, dangerous, and potentially horrifying at any moment. The Pit and The Pendulum was another fun one.
What book helped you through puberty?
I think help would be a highly generous way of putting it. But I related nevertheless to Jonas from The Giver. He sees a cruelty in the unfeeling nature of his world. And yet feeling, feeling profoundly as he is made to do, is also rife with its own dangers and pitfalls. But he has a good heart and he feels the best thing he can do is run away, in order to lead to change. So much there, was very resonant. I can see now how this can all read as, YOU DON’T UNDERSTAND ME, MOM! I was emo in spirit, though never into that aesthetic. I didn’t know how to express myself, and part of what feeling, feeling intensely can give someone, is the necessary impulse to finally locate and articulate, exactly what it is that is there at one’s core. That’s part of what The Giver meant to me back then anyway. To feel, and in feeling, find hope, resilience.
What book do you think all teenagers should be assigned in school?
Hurricane Season, by Fernanda Melchor. Its depictions of gender violence, homophobia, domestic abuse, the psychic space that puts you in, who you have to become in an attempt to survive in that kind of world. I absolutely hate that as a society, when it comes to school curriculums, we pretend children don’t know or experience violence, cruelty. We hardly ever look at it head on. It’s easier to hate what we don’t know, what we think we could never do or become. Who the fuck are we fooling, not the teenagers. Plus, it’s a relatively short novel, who doesn’t love a short novel! Also, it seems stupid as fuck to me, to try to get kids into reading and assign old as shit texts. They have their place no doubt, but more contemporary literature should be assigned imo.
If you were to teach a class on Damn Good Writing, what books would make the syllabus?
For a class on the semester system, ha!
- Hurricane Season, by Fernanda Melchor, no fucking doubt.
- Lot, Bryan Washington.
- Unaccustomed Earth, Jhumpa Lahiri
- Jesus’ Son, Denis Johnson.
- Friday Black, Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenya
- In The Dream House, Carmen Maria Machado
- We The Animals, Justin Torres.
- Waiting For Godot, Samuel Beckett and The Dumb Waiter, Harold Pinter
- The Bluest Eye, Toni Morrison.
- Complete Plays, Sarah Kane.
- Brief Interviews with Hideous Men, David Foster Wallace.
- We Need New Names, NoViolet Bulawayo.
- Where the Dead Sit Talking, Brandon Hobson.
- Convenience Store Woman, Sayaka Murata.
What books helped guide you while writing your book?
Didn’t want to repeat from the list above, so here I’ll mention the following:
Julian Delgado Lopera’s, Fiebre Tropical, the code-switching, there was something so intoxicating about the voice, gossip-like, the propulsive quality of it, and the way it moves from English to Spanish in this no-holds-barred way, I truly admired. I had never read anything quite like that, it revealed something new about what writing could do, how embodied in identity it could be.
There was also, Alejandro Varela’s, The Town of Babylon. The longest chapter in my novel, was one I had to rework so many times. I was fairly close to it, it dealing with a forced hospitalization, reading a portrayal of that from the outside, while I do something quite different, Varela’s novel, was for sure a guiding light.
In terms of structure, my conception about the overall architecture for my novel changed over time, I learned a lot from Last Exit to Brooklyn (Hubert Selby Jr), Woman Hollering Creek (Sandra Cisneros), If An Egyptian Cannot Speak English (Noor Naga), Close to the Knives (David Wojnarowicz), and The End of Eddy (Edouard Louis). The changes in rhythm, how a book is paced, how pacing can do a lot to signal to a reader, the end is not only coming, but make it be felt, have it be mounting and yet surprising. While all five choose different architectures from one another, there was so much care given to their endings, to culminations going beyond completing the circle, the return to where the story began. I think some would call those books ambitious, and they are, but what strikes me most, is their willingness to play, with form, structure, to birth stories that divert from what neatness demands, what came before. The People of Paper by Salvador Plascencia was another formative book in this regard, experimentation isn’t about showing how smart of a writer you are, it’s about doing what is necessary to not just tell a story but have fun doing so. It’s what I’ve integrated from those books in any case. Play takes serious effort, gotta do it with your whole spirit.
What books are on your nightstand now?
Wolf Bells by Leni Zumas. Transanything by Ever Jones. Being in Stockton, I don’t get to go to as many literary events as I’d like, so am happy and excited to read those. And, I’ll Be Gone In The Dark, by Michelle McNamara and House of Leaves by Mark Z. Danielewski. Working on a new project, and while not true crime, I want to use some of those elements/genre conventions, true crime and documentary stories, looking at all the ways a story can be told.