Life is anticipation. Are the moments that shape our lives the result of our own actions? Or are they the culmination of the long-dammed reservoirs of other peoples’ desires: The delayed dreams of parents. The yearnful longings of spouses. The anxiety-fueled goals that drive individual pursuit of fame, fortune, and fulfillment. Welcome to The Disappointment, Scott Broker’s debut novel, a portrait of a couple navigating the emotional minefields of incapacitating grief amid the burdensome responsibilities (demands?) of love. Partners for more than a decade, over a weekend trip Jack and Randy confront death, fame, and infidelity, questioning their affection and loyalty for each other while they simultaneously, systematically (and sometimes brutally) deconstruct the choices they’ve made about the trajectory of their relationship and artistic careers. The interiority of their conflicts is intimately wrought, painful in its delicacy and brazenly, bravely human. The novel is replete with moments of their tender fondness for each other, but also offers perspective on the complicated, at times horrific, honesty of love from those who supposedly know – and love – us the most. Scott and I spoke via email. This interview has been edited and condensed for clarification.
Doug Jones: Let’s start with the title, The Disappointment. Disappointment in one’s life? Disappointment in one’s choice of partner? In one’s childhood? Please tell us about the title as it relates to the protagonists, Jack and Randy.
Scott Broker: When I started this book, Jack was the titular disappointment. Not because he is a disappointment, but because he feels so much like one, having abandoned his career as a playwright and having found, as of yet, no new purpose to guide his days. The more I wrote, the more I realized I wasn’t just drawn to this acute case so much as I was the psychological duress (and power) of disappointment more broadly. There’s a certain type of person—and I fear I may be among them—who is predisposed toward being disappointed. Is Jack’s life disappointing, or is it his perspective that dooms him to be let down by whatever life gives him? The answer is probably both, and not just for him but for everyone in the book, and maybe even everyone in the world, at least to a certain degree. How we contend with our disappointment is fascinating to me, as it feels key to how we might discover happier lives. The key word here is might. I wish I knew for sure.
DJ: Jack and Randy have been together for a little over a decade. Clearly, they love each other. However, at this point in their lives, there is an emotional brutality (insecurity?) between them that is absolutely astounding. And it spills over into all aspects of their lives. The roots of their emotional trauma seem to be sourced back to their experiences with their parents. Through the lens of this novel (haha, Randy is a photographer), please tell us about your commentary on the structure of relationships — familial, romantic, platonic.
SB: I like (and fear) the idea that every relationship in one’s life is informed by every other relationship in one’s life. Parents, or parental figures, are the first place to look for evidence of this—and look I do, much like Jack and Randy are inclined to—but it certainly extends well beyond them. Friends, siblings, coworkers, partners, and even strangers all contribute to our webs of association in different ways. In this book, I hoped to show how networked characters’ relationships with one another can be. The way Jack encounters Randy is informed by a hundred other people. The way Randy encounters Jack is informed by a hundred more. What to make of this choir? Who sings loudest, and when? Whose voices should we listen to, and whose should we ignore? This shapeshifting song of entanglement is part of what makes relationships so dynamically unpredictable. Also, beautiful.
DJ: Grief is a current running through the novel. Randy grieving his mother. Jack grieving his career. The two of them grieving what they used to be to one another. However, they don’t seem to want to resolve their grief, to move beyond the circumstances of their sadness. Can being stuck in grief also be entrapment (in a relationship)? Are you showing us ways in which grief prevents our emotional evolution?
SB: I’m not sure I believe grief prevents emotional evolution. Really, I think grief might be the place where the most emotional evolution can occur, only it happens very slowly, or in a manner that is hard for us to register. Maybe this is because grief is incommensurate with other emotions, yet often held to similar expectations. If sadness is a glass of water, then grief is a bog. What looks like entrapment might simply be navigation. We can only get through marshy landscapes so quickly, particularly when we wish to understand their inner workings. I do suspect Jack and Randy hold to their griefs for different reasons, but I also think that their griefs hold to them for reasons all their own. I’m sure many readers will be keen for resolve, because witnessing someone else’s grief (whether in life or in literature) can create a lot of discomfort. Maybe we want people to move on because we’re afraid of the possibility that some things can’t be moved on from, and that we might in time encounter those things for ourselves. But I encourage readers to settle into the swamp and see what might be observed there.
DJ: Throughout the novel, various characters opine on the role of art. Can we summarize the opinions to: the synthesis between how the artist sees oneself versus the artist’s societal reception (aka fame)? How do Jack and Randy’s experiences as artists influence their relationship and the way they move through the world?
SB: If I want this book to do anything, it’s to honor the sheer wonder, frustration, unreliability, joy, pain, and uncertainty of making art. Characters opine, just as people do, out of (I suspect) the hope that art might not be so mysterious. By laying some claim to the creative process (stay up late! listen to Bach! write everything by hand!), we create the illusion that there is a right and wrong way to make art, and that that rightness or wrongness may bear on the public reception of what you have done. A lot of Jack’s pain and envy as a character is in feeling that he’s failed to “crack the code” of creativity, whereas Randy has seemingly mastered it. But I don’t think there is any one code to solve. The only method that matters is the one that generates work and minimizes suffering. Everything else is variable to one’s unique needs.
I’m also fascinated in the relationship between self and art, whether the correspondence is made by the artist, the audience, or both. Art is always an externalization of something, but this book hopes to confuse what exactly that something might be. The uncertainty of what Jack’s plays and Randy’s photographs may or may not mean to them as individuals and as a couple is a part of the book’s broader narrative turmoil. Their artwork creates opportunities for (mis)reading between them, just as a snide remark, withheld hand, or glance out the window creates opportunities for (mis)reading.
DJ: The emotional mapping of the characters is fantastic. There were moments that hit me in the gut and ripped my breath away. How was the experience of writing this novel?
SB: I appreciate you saying that. I really wanted to survey the whole array of emotions Jack might encounter, no matter how unsightly or contradictory they might be. Jack is a bit prickly, a bit obnoxious, and a bit self-absorbed; he is also observant, loving, and intent on caring for Randy, even if he doesn’t know how that care should look. By making myself account for this clash of traits, I ended up feeling a lot of tenderness toward Jack, even in his less favorable moments. I didn’t necessarily expect this, thinking my sympathies were going to more readily gravitate toward Randy, but I was glad for it to happen. Eventually, it felt as if I were writing about friends whom I knew very, very well. I was in their lives—“Sorry, boys,” I’d think, pushing them toward another fight—but they were also in mine. I’d go to a museum and find myself reacting to art through both of their eyes. It was a very intimate experience, one that I hope to have with every book I write. Toward the end of the novel, an actor Jack encounters throughout the story observes: “‘…the only way a character will really let you in is if you prove you think theirs is a life worth living.’” This might be a moment where my art is an extension of me, or my way of thinking. I do think you need to prove this, and hope I did.
DJ: Writing such an emotionally complex novel, I have to ask, is any of this lived experience?
SB: The answer to this is both yes and no. While the plot of Jack and Randy’s lives does not resemble the plot of mine, there is probably no feeling they encounter that I haven’t to some extent encountered, even if the manifestation of their feeling is more shrunken or enlarged than mine. The book is also textured with a thousand granular details from my life, though those details exist more often at an object/setting level than an experiential level. Do they assemble to create some exquisite corpse of me? Maybe so. It’s fun to imagine. Here, too, I would like to thank someone who postponed our first date due to a dental procedure involving a cadaver graft. Without them, one of my favorite scenes in the novel, which features its own cadaver graft, would never have been possible. We only went on three or four more dates, but the book will hold the refracted artifact from that time forever.
DJ: In-laws figure prominently in Jack and Randy’s relationship. Any parting advice you’d like to share with readers on the hazards and rewards of in-law management?
SB: I think both the hazards and rewards derive from what I mentioned earlier about the web of connections between people. As two vital strings connected to your partner, you are sure to feel the reverberations the other makes. Sometimes these reverberations can feel antagonistic (a complex developed around splitting bills, for instance), and sometimes these reverberations can feel wondrous (the habit of tapping the tip of a nose while deep in thought). But you don’t get one without the other, and you don’t get your partner without the people who made them. That might be the thing to focus on if you’re feeling down on your luck, in-law-wise. If nothing else, they gave literal existence to the person you love. If that fails, try imagining them as babies. That can be a good sympathy generator.
About the author: Scott Broker is a queer writer, bookseller, and teacher based in Los Angeles. His work has appeared in New England Review, Guernica, Fence, Ecotone, and The Idaho Review, among other publications, and he has received fellowships from Tin House and Lambda Literary.
About the interviewer: Doug Jones is an alumnus of Morehouse College and received his MFA from Columbia University. His debut novel, The Fantasies of Future Things (Simon & Schuster, April ’25) was longlisted for the First Novel Prize (The Center for Fiction). His work has been included in the anthologies Black Love Letters (Zando Projects / Get Lifted Books), Role Call: A Generational Anthology of Social and Political Black Literature & Art (Third World Press) and Sojourner: Black Gay Voices in the Age of AIDS (Other Countries Press). He has written for LitHub.com, Black Issues Book Review and Venus Magazine. An inaugural fellow of the Lambda Literary Writers Retreat for Emerging LGBTQ Voices, Doug’s early work received recognition from the Hurston/Wright Foundation. Doug is an avid art collector who enjoys swimming and traveling and is the proud pet Dad to a lovable mixed bred German Shepherd, Baldwin. Doug lives in Atlanta, GA.