Reading Sucks! with Edgar Gomez
Same Bed Different Dreams, Good Material, Edgar Gomez
DISTRACTIONS
-My book of short stories Beyond All Reasonable Doubt, Jesus is Alive! is coming out this September. I’ve been working on these since 2019, a different decade where I was a different girl with a different haircut. It feels like every writer has their precious short stories that show the depths of their soul and their experimental prowess, but then the agents and the publishers are like “y tu novel?”
Anyway, this is my precious collection of short stories. It’s a book about women and the demons they can’t shake and it’s a book about looking for redemption and it’s a book about trying to believe in something, even if it hurts you. I would love if you pre-ordered it.
-To be honest with you, I’m depressed as hell. Every day there’s a new horror and we’re running out funny and smart ways to address that. On top of that, I’m getting grey hairs and I have to decide what kind of señora I want to be. Dying my hair feels truly Latina: a chaotic performance, a vehement denial of my own mortality. On the other hand, letting it go grey is it’s own brand of loca. You know? She only eats meat on the full moon, there’s an odd jingling noise whenever she moves because her pockets are full of crystals, she reads tea leaves to her cats, that kind of thing. Who am I going to be….
-After COVID, I developed a fear of flying. I used to fly all the time for work. I was so booked up as a performance poet (brag) that one time I flew home, slept for two hours, then made my way to the airport again for another gig. The economy was better. Eggs weren’t the same price as concert tickets. I had so much energy and my rent was only $800 a month. I don’t want to hear from you if your rent is still $800 a month or how small towns are actually so nice. I’m sure your life is amazing and your cortisol levels are low but I don’t want to go to a brewery or axe-throwing or get a tick or whatever it is you people do. I like suffering in the city. I like the construction workers who feel like they’re inside of my bedroom. I like the bloated trash bags. The rats are community. I love the parties, and the cocktails and my fucked up industry. One day when I’m a political refugee I’ll live off the land and knit or something. I don’t know where I was going with this. Flying scares me.
-Is writing supposed to be fun? What is your definition of fun? Writing isn’t having a Medalla on a beach in Puerto Rico with your best friends. It isn’t laughing at something until you cry. It isn’t throwing ass across the dance floor. Writing is a practice you return to to make sure you still have a soul.
-I watched Emilia Perez with my friends in western Mass, two cocktails deep. Look, I love bad movies. I live for bad movies. That’s how I survived the pandemic (happy anniversary by the way)! Watching terrible movies and laughing with my roommates and then going to bed knowing that at least we weren’t as bad as that movie. Emilia Perez was not that. Emilia Perez was so bad that we couldn’t finish. It wasn’t even camp. You couldn’t even drink to it. The Spanish is atrocious and I am a no sabo girl, which I just found out was a slur, but maybe it’s a slur I’m allowed to say. (I don’t think that’s true, by the way. It’s not a slur: you just need to grow up.) Perhaps the plot of Emilia Perez could’ve been saved by Pedro Almodovar except I think that was the whole point. It was inspired by Almodovar but didn’t have the sauce, the empathy, or the talent. I ask Miguel if that is what I sounded like when I spoke Spanish. He said no <3
-Trying to do squats before I reach my mid-thirties when the entire world starts disrespecting me.
-I worked all day at the cafe on a Saturday on very little sleep and then was out until 3 AM in Manhattan in a crowded bar and somehow I got COVID. Whenever this happens it feels impossible. What do you mean I got sick? What do you mean one day I’m going to die? I thought that was an anxiety that was fake, just like looking at my sister’s engagement ring and feeling worried that I would swallow it.
GET DISTRACTED BY EDGAR GOMEZ
Edgar Gomez is a queer NicaRican writer born and raised in Florida. He is the author of Alligator Tears and High-Risk Homosexual, winner of the American Book Award, a Stonewall Israel-Fishman Nonfiction Book Honor Award, and the Lambda Literary Award. Their sophomore book, Alligator Tears, was released in February 2025 and was called "triumphant, dazzling, and unfailingly stylish" by Publisher's Weekly. A graduate of the University of California’s MFA program, Gomez has written for The LA Times, Poets & Writers, Lithub, New York Magazine, and beyond. He has received fellowships from The New York Foundation for the Arts, The National Endowment for the Arts, and The Black Mountain Institute. He lives between New York and Puerto Rico. Find him across social media @OtroEdgarGomez.
What was your relationship to reading like as a kid?
I was obsessed. I was a huge dork, with giant gold-rimmed glasses, and nine times out of ten my nose was stuck in a book. I loved everything: Goosebumps, The Royal Diaries series, weird adult stuff that made me feel grown like Dan Brown. Books were like a portable little room I could take with me everywhere. My childhood was chaotic a lot of the time, but I could always open a book and a feeling of peace would wash over me.
What are some of your favorite queer, coming-of-age memoirs and your favorite Latinx memoirs?
So many. The first queer, coming-of-age memoir that comes to mind is Rigoberto González’s Butterfly Boy, which I read while I was living in Riverside, California (where the memoir takes place). It really blew my mind because it was the first time that I felt like I could truly relate to a person in a story, whereas before, I only sort-of saw myself in books. Like I would read a queer memoir and of course we’d have being gay in common, but with Butterfly Boy González gets into class and growing up poor and Latinidad and all these specific intersections with queerness that I hadn’t seen in a book before. I also felt this way about Ordinary Girls by Jaquira Díaz, especially when she talks about addiction and her Puerto Rico/Florida connection. As for Latinx memoirs, I love Solito by Javier Zamora and The Country Under My Skin” by Giocanda Belli.
Is reading a privilege?
I guess so, in the way that pretty much everything is a privilege… Breathing is a privilege, you know? And there are definitely challenges when it comes to access, education, or even just having the free time to read. I remember once asking my mom to take me to the library so I could get a book, and she said she couldn’t because it’d cost too much gas to get there. That day, it really felt like a privilege. We couldn’t even drive a couple blocks to get a FREE book!
Tell me about the importance of humor in your work.
I write about some tough subjects: poverty, homophobia, machismo. Humor is a way to balance the darkness and help get my message across. Sometimes humor is the message, my way of telling the reader, I know what you’re reading about is hard, that life can be hard, but look, I made it far enough in my life that I can look back and laugh. So hold on, keep going, maybe that’ll happen to you too.
Whenever I write non-fiction, I always feel like I put my foot in my mouth. What freedom does memoir allow you and conversely, what are the limits?
When I first started writing, it was fiction, and I never, ever wrote about people like me, not Latinx people, not queer people, not poor people. When I came to memoir, it felt like the genre was giving me permission to center myself. That was a freeing feeling. The freedom to take up all the space I wanted.
The most obvious limit is that eventually, you start running out of material. There are only so many stories we have until we have to go out into the world and find more. I’m on my second memoir now and need to take a couple years off to find my next plot.
Lastly, when does reading suck for you and when does it rule?
It sucks when I’m not invested in the story or the language and am just pushing through out of some obligation. I used to do that a lot, especially when I was insecure about not having read enough of the canon… It rules when I feel organically drawn to the book, either because of the subject or the voice. The best feeling is when you get so wrapped up in what you’re reading that the world around you peels away and it’s just you and the characters in the book. That happened to me the other day reading Jeanne Thornton’s A/S/L. So good I missed my train.
WHAT I READ
Same Bed, Different Dreams by Ed Park
A Korean-American writer goes home from a meet-up with other Korean-American writers he feels self-conscious around. Waking up on the Metronorth completely sloshed, he looks in his bag and finds a manuscript called Same Bed, Different Dreams. In it is an alternate history of Korea. The book goes from his perspective, which takes place in a dystopian-tech present not unlike our own, to the alternate history, to the legacy of a science fiction book called 2333. It’s a dizzying joy seeing the way everything comes together, and seeing characters from previous chapters run in and out of scenes like UFOs darting across the sky. I feel smarter and I guess, inspired? It made me realize not every reading experience is for pleasure. Sometimes it’s for brain plasticity. At times I wondered if I would be more interested if this book were about a Latinx diaspora, but then I remembered that I gave up on The Savage Detectives because I couldn’t focus (sorry, Ryan). Perhaps I am part of this generation’s problem and why so many people are deep-throating romantasy. At the same time I understood that this book was about how we are all interconnected. It’s a systems diaspora novel that goes beyond the immediate family, into the sky where there’s UFOs and a place that’s better than this.
Good Material by Dolly Alderman
It is really powerful when something makes you laugh alone in public and even more powerful when it makes you laugh alone in your apartment and perhaps the most powerful where you are laughing and crying alone in your apartment. One is more of a performance, anyway. Andy is a thirty-five year old comedian who can’t catch a break and he’s just been dumped by Jen for no reason, though clearly there’s a reason. We follow him in the mad-cap aftermath of his heartbreak, where he gets catfished, starts a photo album in his phone called “BALD” (where he keeps track of the progress of his bald spot), lives on a boat, and gets really, really wasted. This is a Dudes Rock book written by an extremely funny lady. It is a romance novel that you don’t need brain worms for, following the footsteps of Nick Hornby and Nora Ephron. It made me feel tender towards the kind of loser who’s broken my heart and loving towards the the kind of loser who gets her heart broken.
Until next time, readers. xoxox Meli