I first met Christina Cooke when we read together at an event in Woodstock in 2022. That was long before the publication of her debut novel Broughtupsy, about a woman grieving the loss of her brother and seeking to reconnect with her estranged sister in Jamaica. It’s a powerful book with a subtle precision in how its characters interact with one another and make their way through the world. With Broughtupsy now out in paperback, I talked with Cooke about the challenges of writing it, how to best to evoke the recent past, and our mutual admiration of Ali Smith.

I wouldn’t call Broughtupsy a historical novel, but it opens in 1996. Were there challenges that came from setting a book in the recent past?

You know, I resent when people call my book historical fiction because in my emotional memory, 1996 is a decade ago. It wasn’t that long ago. It feels so contemporary to me — and now people say, no, there are people who have been born after that who now have children. I don’t condone teen pregnancy, basically, is what I have to say to that. 

I guess this is kind of like how you know that you’re aging: you realize what decade it is your mind perpetually lives in. And I think for me, that’s the nineties; the nineties is the decade that seems the most rich with meaning and is where my imaginative self seems to perpetually live. Almost everything I’ve written as an adult has been set in or close to the nineties.

I can relate to that a lot. My second novel is largely set in the nineties, and I think there’s a whole breadth of experiences I had in my youth that didn’t involve having a cellphone present.

Yeah. I don’t have that intrinsic sense of technology being a through line of my life to the extent that Gen Z and Gen Alpha does. And so I don’t know how to weave it into the mechanisms of human connection, you know? It’s so very much an object to me and not a subject. I think I’m right on that cusp because there are people who are not even five years younger than me who are totally writing things that involve technology.

I think it’s a mixture of not being born in the US, therefore I was not in the cradle of technology progression. I had old-school parents and they said, “No, we’re not getting you a cell phone.” And so I didn’t, it wasn’t until I could afford to get my own that I got a cell phone. And so those kinds of formative years were technology free. Can you imagine? I used to just go out and like nobody knew where I was. If people wanted to reach me, they had to leave a voicemail and I would get it six hours later, you know?

You’ve written  a novel where several of the protagonist’s family members have died either at the beginning of the book or before the book began. Is there a challenge to create a character who is going to be felt more by their absence than by their presence on the page?

The fact of there being two major deaths was intentional because I wanted a way to make this idea of a yawning grief tangible. Because that is the through line of the novel, in the sense of Akúa grieving like the loss of like that native cultural connection, that kind of very clear sense of who she socially and politically and culturally is, at the same time that she’s kind of claimed a new identity as a woman who is queer. And so that internal struggle, that mental juggling of those two parts of herself, she can only hold but so much. So in order to hold one or even to hold half of one, she has to give up the whole or half of the other.

But I didn’t want to just deal in the land of esoterics. At that point, it just becomes a treatise. I was very much interested in writing a story. So I was asked myself, how can I make this idea of grief very salient and on the page and deeply felt and accessible? You have to take the idea, take the feeling and put it in people.

Broughtupsy features scenes set in both the U.S. and Jamaica. Do you find it more challenging or less challenging to write about a place when you’re not there? Has your own experience of having lived in several different countries over the course of your life shaped you as a writer as well?

For sure. I find that it’s very freeing to write about a place that I’ve previously been. It’s very hard for me to write about a place that I’m going to be. And I also find that I can’t write about the place that I’m in right now. It needs to be a place that I was in and then I left because then I have concrete details, rich details that I can draw from.

But through the distance of having left, then that’s where my imaginative self can really shine. I have the hard data from which I can make shit up. For so many of the Jamaica sections, because I go back to Jamaica pretty regularly, I wrote none of them while I was in Jamaica. While I was there, I felt too beholden to like the truth that I could see instead of simply the imaginative truth that would make sense on the page.

And so while I was there, I was just living. And of course, part of that living means soaking up details. I’m gathering data. And it wasn’t until I got back to Iowa City or New York City that I could draw on that bank when I felt free of the truth of what was around me, of my circumstance.

Are there any places that you’ve been that you would like to write about that you haven’t yet?

Memphis. I lived in Memphis for four years. And it was an interesting period in my life. And also, Memphis is just a deeply complicated place. It has lots of layers to it, and I’d love to write about it. I think I just don’t know how to enter because there’s so much there.

When I lived there, I was always going somewhere else. It was my home base. And so I think I, because I wasn’t forced to just be there and go nowhere else, I don’t feel that kind of ownership over it that I do about everywhere else that I’ve lived. That’s probably making me nervous about launching in because I have nothing to fall back on if people tell me I got it wrong.

Your novel has been out for about a year now. What was your experience of getting Broughtupsy out into the world? Was there anything that’s really stuck with you in the months that followed?

I’m actually writing a piece for Lit Hub about it. This was really a year marked by grieving in the sense of, I spent over a decade working on this novel. It wasn’t until it was out in the world that I realized how much of the dailiness of writing had become an intrinsic part of who I am. And then all of a sudden, not writing it anymore, it felt as though I had lost one of my legs, like I had just lobbed off a crucial part of how I got through my days and got through the world. 

I’m obviously happy. I’m absolutely thrilled. The reception has been very kind for the most part. Don’t go on Goodreads. I’ve been I’ve been very blessed to get some really great review coverage in Canada, some really great publicity coverage here in the U.S. I’ve done a bunch of events that were just super fun, and that I’m really proud of. But there was always this undercurrent of sadness the whole time. And it’s only now that I’m like a year out, that I realized I’ve been depressed for the past year. It’s weird, right? Even though I don’t write for myself; I don’t keep a diary. I write to be read.

Am I misremembering, or did you say at the Asbury Park event that you’re working on some nonfiction these days?

That’s what I’ve been working on in this year of not being able to do fiction. I’m trying to develop a second genre, if you will, and so I’ve been working on lots of short essays in the nonfiction realm. But because I don’t know how to follow rules, they’re not straightforward essays, they’re kind of hybrid, either hybrid fiction and criticism or like hybrid memoir and criticism. You know what I mean? 

Yeah. I mean, one of my favorite books in the last couple of years is.. I don’t know if you’re also an Ali Smith fan— 

Oh my god, don’t talk to me about Ali Smith. Love her.

Artful is just such a fascinating book, where she does that.  I feel compelled to ask about the paperback, which has a very different cover from the hardcover. How did that come about?

It was a collaboration. The hardcover cover I love with my whole soul. It’s a snapshot of the hills surrounding Kingston, Jamaica. And it’s the kind of photo where almost every Jamaican I know looks at it and goes, “Is this..?” And I go, “Yes, it is.” I love that it has that moment of recognition for other Jamaicans who have lived in Jamaica. But at the same time, I recognize that I started to realize that if you didn’t have that context, you might ask, “Is this a nature book? What kind of a book is this?” The cover didn’t telegraph what it needed to in order to get people to open up and read. 

I don’t write for discrete audiences in the sense of, “My book is for, you know, queer Caribbean expats.”  My book is for whoever likes kind of quirky, emotive, first person stories. And so I recognize that we do judge books by the covers. And so I wanted to — for the forever version — switch to a cover that still stayed true to the Jamaican-ness of the story, but did so in a way that was slightly more concrete. 

If you look at it, and you’re someone who’s totally not of that context, you might ask, “Are those grapes? Are those raisins? What is that?” It was a collaborative decision. My publisher didn’t really have to push very hard to convince me. And also, it’s just cool to say that I did two different covers.

Were there any challenges to writing a very emotionally complex family dynamic while also honing that in revisions and figuring out what’s important to get across to the reader?

I’d say the hardest part was figuring out how to have these very emotionally loud moments communicated through very soft plot gestures. If you weren’t to actually write out what happens in my novel, there are big things like Akúa’s brother dies. Akúa gets on a plane. Akúa eats some cereal. Akúa goes to a market and has a sandwich. In terms of plot, it’s very quiet. And so what I spent a lot of time doing was calibrating the symphonic aspects of the emotional engine to not overwhelm or flatten the plot aspects of the story. If both things are loud, the readers are overwhelmed and they walk away. But then if one is too loud and one is too quiet, then it doesn’t feel real. It’s not relatable.

Maintaining that connection in a way that seemed believable, I think, is probably the hardest part. I have to tell people all the time that the hardest part about fiction is not figuring out what’s going to happen. It’s how to communicate what’s happening through things that seemingly have nothing to do with what’s going on. If the point is that two people are going to get divorced and you just wrote a scene that was very plainly two people on the brink of divorce, everyone would say, “This is boring” and fall asleep.  So instead you have to embed the fact that these two people are about to get divorced into their fight over who’s going to cook the broccoli. And that’s where the skill comes in. 

Photo: Eli Jules

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