Cheap Lit
Claudia Durastanti
I owe most of my literary theories to accidental conversations with drunk friends. Lately, I’ve found myself revisiting one of these conversations, wondering why I’ve cherished it for such a long time. My friend and I were walking around Milan looking for a nightcap during his Italian book tour, talking about a writer we both loved, who’d published sixteen novels.
‘I’m fascinated by how he managed to write for most of his life,’ my friend said.
‘Yeah, me too. I mean, how could he afford it…’
‘Creatively…’
‘Financially…’ I said, almost simultaneously.
‘Wait,’ my friend interjected. ‘What do you mean? I’m talking about how he sustained the energy and the good work for so many years.’
‘Oh. I mean, that’s important. Sure. But how could he afford it?’
The writer we were talking about was a New York native who had given up his job in advertising during the Seventies to write full time. I won’t discuss the historical state of rents in New York, but they could be cheap until they no longer were: affordability in that city had a very short lifespan.
It turned out that my friend and I had been raised in families on the opposite sides of the class spectrum, and so we had been talking about different kinds of affordability. He found my observation on money banal and potentially diminishing of the integrity of literature. I wish I’d found his observations on ‘good work’ and endurance more interesting.
I believed in ‘good work’ too, once. The Good Work no matter what. Keeping things separate, like Church and State. There’s gigs and jobs you take for the money: lavoro che paga le bollette, we call it in Italian. There is work that pays the bills and then there is literature, which must stand apart from the daily grind, always.
This optimistic idea of the Good Work espoused by writers manifests in jokes about the splendid irrelevance of literature: art for art’s sake. If it’s not making money for most writers and if it’s not about cultivating a critical mass, or having a meaningful impact on public conversation, then one should enjoy the freedom to write whatever one likes or prefers. One would assume that this splendid irrelevance would free the novel and bring back some experimental wildness and novelty.
~
When you grow up working class and the idea of writing slowly worms its way into you despite what’s sensible, cannily crawling inside your brains until there is only the thinnest membrane between the stories you make up in your mind and your willingness and drive to take them out in the world, things usually work out one of two ways:
You become feral: the idea of making money out of your books in order to survive (and ideally thrive) overpowers the rest. You’ll fight against common sense, the publishing market, the lowering stats on literacy, and you’ll become willing to turn your difficult social circumstances into an argument to sell books. Or, you’ll hide them carefully in order to sell books. You’ll measure your writing in terms of sales and visibility and become obsessed with the idea of payback and revenge. In my life in publishing, I have met these sorts of feral writers here and there, but not as often as one would think. They are working class authors who were born boomers but never profited from the generational wealth: they weren’t invited to the party. Despite the odds of choosing a life in publishing, they’ve made it this far, and now they’re established they want everything they feel they’ve always deserved: five star hotels, stellar speaking fees, fancy restaurants etc. (Compared to my generation, these writers have a harder time understanding the transformation of the publishing industry from advertising company to Victorian charity).
The other kind of working class writer I know – the kind of writer I am – remembers the broke days of the past, finds a job somewhere in publishing, on its outskirts, or somewhere else entirely in order to secure a reliable income, and writes here and there. In between translation work, as in my case. This kind of writer has little trust in the market and in contributing to cultural supplements as a sufficiently reliable means of supporting themselves. She is still too shy to ask for high speaking fees at festivals, and is happy when someone shows up to an event with a book they have checked out of a public library. In the lottery of literary success, if by any chance one of her novels works out and earns her some money, her instinct to squander it all is immediately suppressed by the wisdom of saving it up, in the knowledge it probably won’t happen again. This kind of writer is rarely affected by depressing sales stats or by the grim state of the industry and doesn’t complain about not being paid by a magazine, because this writer gave up on the belief that writing on its own could be a sufficient means of support a long time ago. This writer is trained in avoiding megalomania or martyrdom: she knows that both can be weaponised against her work. She might be disaffected and hard to unionise, but she is willing to protect other people on the lower bottom of the publishing scale by engaging less and less with literary production and circulation and refusing to take advantage of others.
Going back to that conversation with my friend… Could I really claim that keeping the Good Work separate from the work necessary to financially support its undertaking was a possibility that had ever been available to me, as a formerly working class writer? Furthermore, had this manner of compartmentalising ever really sustained or protected my literary experimentation and freedom to write?
~
I translate about six novels per year, from English into Italian. The writing worm that crawled into my brain was eventually chewed and ingested by a bigger larva: translation. Now they live in a codependent relationship. I couldn’t write or translate without the other, as they nurture and feed off each other. But translation makes me enough money to pay my bills, while literary writing doesn’t, and this has produced some knock-on effects, especially in terms of fatigue.
I’m close to admitting here that the financially reliable job of translation – which I deeply love and would not give up because of the enjoyment it brings me, the chances that it offers me to keep close to the playfulness and mechanics of language – is using up more and more of the energy I should be conveying towards the Good Work of being a fiction writer. In terms of craft, there’s an easier coexistence between translating someone else’s novel and writing personal essays or literary non-fiction, than in writing fiction alongside translating it. This compatibility isn’t borne out of some mystical or romantic notion that a translator must give up everything in order to be immersed into someone else’s world, and shouldn’t be writing her novel at the same time, not at all. Rather, the pleasure I take in translating is partly due to the warm background stability of a contract and a safe economical remuneration. When I translate, my experimental approach and creative interpretations of a text, the risks of success or failure I’m flirting with, are taken on by the author and publisher and I can be fearless – until I realise that this pleasure has drained my energy to work on my own novels.
~
This compatibility or non-compatibility I’m talking about is also related to the specific quality of attention required by translation as a creative process: a deep dive into the vastness of language, into its logics, the smartness of proportion, the harmony of sound. Which is exactly what a writer looks for while writing a high-intensity, layered novel. Tuning plot, rhythm and form so they vibrate together is a consuming practice. It takes time, a kind of monotheistic drive; life becomes a hazy expanse of writing hours. One could argue that personal essays and literary non-fiction require the same kind of energy, but plot can be easily done away with in that case: there’s less of a load, fewer components to string together. Personal essays are a smaller orchestra, a lesser multitude: this is a fact.
I’ve translated intensely while writing my last two books; Strangers I Know and Missitalia. The latter is my most experimental work so far, and approaches plot, rhythm and form in ways I never thought I could afford, both in terms of skills and time. Missitalia is a novel that spans two centuries and switches between three different genres: low fi-western, low fi-noir and low-fi science fiction. These labels are my own: I feel I need to explain the ‘low’ intensity of genre within the book by adopting the idea of reduced gears, an economised or budgeted version of what we believe genres do in literature. I like the poetics of it, and I found my niche in this desaturated version of genre, just like I’d found my way in a desaturated version of the ‘I’ in my former non-fiction work.
My previous book, Strangers I Know, a memoir which deals with the implications of being raised as a bilingual working class child inside and outside my literary life, has been my most successful work to date. While I was writing it, I truly felt that my willingness to open up about class, the publishing market and the exploitation of underclass pain would have created a wider space to reclaim my right to write fiction back. Strangers I Know, albeit being literary non-fiction, made a strong case for the novel being accessible and affordable to working class writers who are widely visible now (as long as they write about that). So I committed myself to the most imaginative novel I could think of for what came next. In a way, I felt I had earned it. Sometimes literary nonfiction is just a transactional market you have to walk through.
But I wonder now if the poetic choices I have made in Missitalia, which have allowed me so much freedom and provided genuine fun, are not hiding something else, which is more brutal and material in nature: could I really afford a maximalist novel at this point? In short, I am realising that the Good Work I am trying to do and to preserve in its autonomy, compared to one’s idea of literary success, high sales, and commercial trends, is affected by economic factors anyway. It’s just sneakier.
Choosing to ignore commercial trends, to look away from what ends up in literary charts is respectable and brave, but this doesn’t mean that the economics of the publishing industry won’t affect your style or your writing in other, subtler ways. You believe you’re writing the book you want to write, but what are the conditions that your writing brain is working under after many years of other editorial work? Isn’t the new literary form I found and which I’m trying to formalise as style a direct consequence of the material conditions my labour is performed under?
I’ve never paid too much attention to how my work is read in terms of time. I realise some novels are ‘devoured’ and ‘cannibalised’ and others need time to be ‘sedimented’, needing to be absorbed ‘one bit at a time’. I don’t believe the devoured novels will disappear over time and I don’t believe the sedimented novels will survive centuries. But I’m interested in how I seem to have achieved a different result with this new novel: it’s 400 pages long and apparently readers are taking between seven to thirty days to finish it. At the beginning, I was truly baffled, if not really flattered: who could afford this kind of reading? And what did it cost me to produce a different reading experience?
When a novel comes out, the writer is constantly tempted to find poetic justifications for the merits of the work and also for its flaws. In interviews, the writer will speak about literary models, influences, precise desires to achieve something, endless and beautiful failures, a whole constellation of elegant particles. They might open up about the pain or trauma or interesting personal developments that have shaped their creative process; we are still in the area of feelings here. To talk about the underlying economics of these feelings and aesthetic choices is rarely welcome, is seen as bad taste. One is expected to conceal the material conditions that informed the finished work to others, until they become strangely unknown to the very same person who faces them everyday.
~
Last year, during the first Italian Working Class Literature Festival organised by Edizioni Alegre and the GKN factory collective in Campi Bisenzio and directed by the writer Alberto Prunetti, I sat on an international panel on working class literature. The festival started in 2023 as a way to support the intersectional collective fight of workers who are trying to envision a different future for the factory they’ve sustained with their labour and creativity, after the owners decided to decommission it. When the panel came round to discussing literature in France, we named the writers who meditate on class and class transition: Didier Eribon, Édouard Louis, Annie Ernaux. After the talk, a literary studies graduate who now works in a factory, asked me why we’d only come up with examples of autofiction. And that’s it. Where were the novels? Where was the fiction written by working class authors? All the examples I could think of dated mostly back to the Nineties, with few exceptions: Lisa McInterney, Anna Burns, Isabel Waidner, Douglas Stewart. Not much in Italy except for the standard Morante-Ferrante axis. I told the graduate worker what I usually say in these circumstances and I believed then to be true: that marginalised groups are often encouraged to marketise their own life experiences, that they are asked to be witnesses before being writers, that many working class writers ‘own’ their self like a weapon and use it to dismantle clichés and expectations. That the best autofictional writing by working class authors is well aware of these traps and subverts them. At that time, I didn’t think: wait. What if autofiction is simply cheaper?
When I was growing up, ‘cheap’ was a good word. Cheap meant food we could afford, comics we could buy, a flat nobody would evict us from. As an adult, I do not use the word ‘cheap’ in its pejorative connotation as many do with ease. I don’t use it to label bad art or badly thought-through aesthetics. There’s something profoundly unappealing to me in this throwaway language use of the word, and I refuse to acknowledge my class mobility by adopting it.
My mother’s life forever oscillated between the two poles of ‘cheap’ and ‘debt’, in a chase for minimum and maximum value at the same time. Discount culture and capitalist fetishism were for us intimate extremes: we discarded everything that was in the middle. I guess this affected my own expectations in terms of literature. With my last two books, I went first after something ‘cheaper’ that could maximise satisfaction and revenue – the story of my life and family, an easier sell – and, later, I went for the priciest article around: an experimental novel playing with multiple genres. I’m the same person, but on the grounds of the success of my memoir, I’ve climbed the literary ladder and so for now I am allowed to afford the unaffordable.
Being trained in trauma and darkness, I never believed I would end up thinking that writing about my chaotic upbringing could be ‘cheap’. But in a way, it was: if not emotionally, financially. When I was writing Strangers I Know, I could extract material from my life and turn it into literary matter with less effort than that required to craft an entire world and make up a new language. It’s a matter of lexicon: generally speaking, writing a novel requires the acquisition of new vocabularies, some of which are entirely made up by the author; writing personal essays or literary nonfiction consists more in the perfecting and polishing of an existing shared lexicon about a certain topic. It’s respectable work in both cases, which requires ideas and literary momentum, and the results can be extremely good or extremely bad either way. But it is a different kind of endeavour.
I began my professional writing life as a music critic and I still regularly review for a magazine called Internazionale. Now I am becoming increasingly aware of how my criticism relies on the events of my life. If I am running out of time or I’m already late for a deadline, I will mention a friend's comment about a record or musical trend to open the column. It’s cost-effective and generally relatable. (Didn’t I start this piece by quoting an anecdote featuring a friend of mine?) In the beginning, many years ago, I thought it was refreshing to bring one’s own life experience into the dressed-up world of Italian music criticism, to reveal the qualities of a record: it broke conventions, it let fresher air circulate. The accurate philology of my mostly-male colleagues on those magazines would finally relent its grip in favour of sentiment and literary writing. Other music writers in my generation felt the same way. Maybe as new critics we didn’t know everything about one precise field, but we knew a little of many different fields. We were not specialised, but versatile. As millennials, this versatility felt more in tune with the general economy. We’ve continued to embrace it since, but in retrospect some of it may have been more of a forced necessity. A quicker way to maximise value while we were busy making a living. What felt stylistically compelling – wait! We’re talking about real life here, and it sounds good, it sounds smart, it sounds challenging! – at some point began to feel like telling the same joke for the umpteenth time at the same infinite book launch.
When they talk about creative process, writers often discuss the difference between fabricating memories versus recovering them and the infinite possibilities that stand in-between and make up the history of literature. But to which extent is the option between fabricating and recovering a matter of deliberate style and formal choice? Or, from a market perspective: are we sure the hangover of autofiction during the past twenty years is because the genre sells more copies and every writer wants a piece of the cake, and not because it comes at a lesser cost for a writer? In many cases, what we believe is costly in terms of feeling and insuppressible biographical exposure may be actually cheaper in terms of its demands on our creative time. Or at least, I think this is what happened to me: extracting from my life became an easier form of work. This is why translating and writing nonfiction at the same time feels more sustainable than writing novels and translating novels at the same time.
So here’s my take on this: though literary writing can be idealised as ‘Good Work’, unbeholden to market constraints, our experiments and innovations may be more about affordability than we think. Finding the energy to dream is exhausting. The energy to translate the way a writer does, to ease life into language and into metaphor, craft non-existing worlds that don’t resemble the one we live in, requires care, time and genuine optimism – if not faith. I am an optimist, still. But these things have a cost: all the other jobs we take on to sustain them. Think about it every time someone is not writing the great novel you wish for.
Claudia Durastanti is the author of five novels. She is the Italian translator of Elizabeth Hardwick, Joshua Cohen, Donna Haraway and writes for several literary supplements. Strangers I Know (Premio Strega Off in 2019, Pen Translates Award, longlist Prix Femina and Prix Les Inrockuptibles) has been translated into twenty-one languages. Missitalia (Premio Mondello 2024) will be published by Fitzcarraldo in the UK. She currently lives in Rome and curates the feminist imprint La Tartaruga.