Heartbreaker: Rethinking Love with Alejandro Varela
By hola | Published | No Comments
In “Middle Spoon,” National Book Award finalist and “The Town of Babylon” author, Alejandro Varela, writes about heartbreak, polyamory and loss. The novel follows a narrator who appears to have it all: a doting husband, two precocious children and a pretty comfortable life complicated by a younger boyfriend. But when that relationship abruptly ends, what follows is a spiral into grief that forces him to confront not only rejection but a world still struggling to understand polyamory and the possibilities of loving beyond convention.
Told through a series of unsent emails, the novel reimagines what relationships, marriage and family life can look like.
We sat down with Varela to discuss “Middle Spoon” and the questions it poses about intimacy, love and the limits we place on both.
Can you talk about the origins of “Middle Spoon?” What made you want to write this story?
I became fascinated by this idea of grief and, particularly, the grief that results from heartbreak. All my life, I’ve been hearing and reading about heartbreak, but it wasn’t clear, and I don’t think I’d ever read it or seen it in a way that resonated with me. At the end of 2022, when I was writing this, we were in the midst of the Biden administration and still in the pandemic, not fully recovered from the Trump years, plus everything else going on in the world.
I was thinking about how everyone is walking around with grief to some extent. I wanted to write something that really got at the emotion, so anyone who had ever experienced this sort of grief could relate to it in some way, but also see it from a different perspective.
This book explores heartbreak, polyamory and longing. How did you approach writing such a specific emotional experience in a way that feels universal and relatable?
So the polyamory part, in a funny way, was secondary or tertiary to the writing of the novel. I knew I was writing it in a context that was maybe unorthodox or not mainstream, but I was really caught up in the grief portion of it. When I finished the first draft, it occurred to me that I had written a book that was going to be received as a polybook, and I didn’t mind, but then I felt a different kind of responsibility when I was editing.
Am I presenting this organization of romantic love in a way that’s respectful? Is there one way of living a poly life?
I don’t think the narrator would have said, “I’m someone who is into polyamory who happens to have their heart broken.” No, I think they found themselves in a situation in which they loved two people and then realized, “This is polyamory, and I want it to work.” I think if you had asked him, he would have thought, “This is what extreme religious zealots do, polygamy. This is what people use to oppress women. How do I get my cake and eat it too?”
But now he’s experiencing it, and he’s like, “Is there a way to upend what I have been taught all my life, which is that a loving relationship is between two people and only two people?” That said, the character is queer; he’s brown; he’s married; he has adopted children. At every step of his life, he could have conformed, but he wouldn’t really exist, right? He is someone that, in every way in his life, has broken with convention.
If he hadn’t come out as gay, his life may have been pretty miserable, but being polyamorous does feel like an indulgence, and that’s how I think he approaches it initially.
But that’s also a very capitalist mindset. This idea that there is a certain amount of love and it has to work in this certain way in society is very limiting, and this book is the opposite of that. I wanted to write something that makes people question absolutely everything.
The novel is written as emails: to an ex, the New York City Department of Sanitation, the National Institutes of Health and others. How did you land on that structure, and what did it allow you to do that a traditional narrative might not?
I was just doing a bit of early spring cleaning in my apartment this weekend, and I found some old notebooks that predate the writing of this novel. One of the lines that I wrote was around my drafts folder in my email, and full of frustration, and anger and drama. I think in the back of my mind, I’ve always been interested in these unsent letters and how my drafts folder has unintentionally become a bit of a journal. It’s a journal that I don’t write in often, but it captures a snapshot of where I was and what I was feeling in the moment.
And there’s a reason they’re drafts. Sometimes it’s because I don’t have all the information that I need to send the email, so I start it but don’t finish it. But often it’s because there’s a lot of concern or emotion or anger or happiness or something that I want to get out, but I’m not yet sure if I want to commit to sending it.
That felt like the way I would communicate with an ex. If I’m in a committed relationship with someone, there’s a shorthand to how we talk and how we communicate all day long. It’ll probably be text messages, images or poorly written Signal or WhatsApp messages. But the moment you break up with someone, there’s a loss of that privilege. Everything then becomes a little bit more formal. It would have to be a letter, but he doesn’t write letters because it’s the 21st century, and so, he writes emails. And not sending it allows him to say even more. It allows him to be super annoying. It allows him to edit himself, too, because he can change the email as we go along.
And so even these draft messages are highly curated. An email was a great way to keep the narrator definitely unnamed. It keeps this threat hanging there all the time. The difference between a sent and unsent email is just the press of a button. At any point, the narrator could have ruined this perfect streak of no communication by hitting send. He could have at any point, and he doesn’t.
Can we talk about the title? What does “Middle Spoon” mean to you?
Middle spoon, especially in the throuple community, literally means the person in the middle sexually, but for me it was a little bit of a play on that because we’re talking about an unorthodox romantic life for the main character who has — or had — two partners in a way. There is a triangle, but he’s not in the middle. However, the book primarily refers to a person who feels caught in the middle.
I thought it was a nice play on words that alluded to the sexuality and the romantic nature of the situation, but it also really gets at some of my own preoccupations and feelings about where I fit into this world or don’t fit in. And the middle feels about right.
I also think he’s somewhere in the middle in terms of his politics and his aspirations. This is someone questioning how society is set up. He’s not someone who is liberated from those constraints. If we can imagine one end of that spectrum being someone who completely subverts societal constraints or definitions and is just like “I’m going to live my life,” and the other end is someone who questions no one, then he’s in the middle. He’s still trying to figure that all out.
So for me, the middle place isn’t just comfortable, it’s something that I know. It’s a place from where I can write.
This is your third book. What did this project teach you about your writing, or about yourself, that you didn’t know before?
Okay, two things that come to mind. One is that this book was, in some ways, a departure. I mean, there have been epistolary novels in the past, but what I’ve learned is that for a lot of people, this structure is unusual. It wasn’t typically what they read, and it wasn’t for everyone, but I also loved playing with form. Maybe that is my television sort of youth, but I like this idea that narratives can have episodes, and sometimes a chapter isn’t enough. These letters really were clear demarcations, so I’m going to think more about form and not feel so beholden to what’s expected of me. I don’t know that I’ve ever felt those expectations, but when I set out to write the first two books, I really was concerned with if I knew how to write a book.
Then I looked at what already existed and gave myself my own MFA. I’m constantly doing that by reading a lot, as much as I can get my hands on. And in the process, I’m trying to grow from what already exists. But maybe in the process, what I was doing was upholding forms, ideas and structures that already existed. This book has given me some kind of permission to keep going and continue to play.
The other thing is that I realized it held up a mirror to a lot of people and their insecurities and feelings about the way the world works. The husband character for some people was just so unbelievable. They felt he was this doormat, that such a character was not possible. And I know lots of people like that. I know lots of folks who are not insecure about their place in a relationship, who are sexually kind of fluid and disinhibited, people who don’t get jealous, people who want the best for their partners, even if that means multiple relationships.
I have been afraid to really lean into that character or to defend him because it wasn’t believable to a lot of people. But it’s not true. He does exist, and there’s a part in the book where it gets revealed the husband cheated at some point. I added that later because I was getting the same bit of feedback about how the husband is too perfect, so I tried to complicate him. This rule of fiction where, in order to be three-dimensional, you have to have something that’s unlikable, but I reject that, or maybe never understood the rule well, and I will not do that again. To me, the husband is an aspirational character. That’s who I want to be in this world, and that’s who I think we should strive to be in this world. Not comfortable with our partners having other relationships, but not thinking that love, attention and affection are scarce. That if they give it somewhere else, then I’m not going to get enough, I’m not getting what I need or it shows that I’m not good enough. That’s such an old-world capitalist way of thinking. I think the people who didn’t like the husband or just didn’t find that side of him believable were really revealing themselves. I think they were really saying who they are and how comfortable they are.
This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.
–Story by Adrian Gaston Garcia
-Copy edited by Kami Waller
Adrian Gaston Garcia is a queer Latine storyteller whose mission is to share narratives that build community. His work is a love letter to his younger self and a shout-out to all the queer brown boys who choose joy as their form of resistance. He co-hosts Los Bookis Podcast and is the founder of Tintas DC.
Recent Stories
Leave a Reply