I was also doing the work-study my program offered and editing for a literary magazine. But when I got to New York, I found a full-time job at a trade publisher, about a week before my program started.
I hoped I could build a cushion just in case I couldn’t find a job that paid enough or was flexible enough to accommodate my program once I was in New York. As soon as I got out of my full-time job, I put on my Postmates cap and started my route. I remember the joy, and then immediately this feeling of: How do I afford this? Not the course credits, but the capital to uproot my life and live in a city as expensive as New York. I was in D.C., and I was at work, on lunch. My program offered me assistance - and I only applied to programs that could offer funding, because I still had a mountain of student debt from undergrad - but my time working for Postmates came immediately after I got the call that I got into my program. RAVEN LEILANI I worked for Postmates in addition to a full-time job before I even made the move to attend my MFA. How did having to balance multiple jobs while in school influence the writing of Luster? I read that while you were a student there, you also worked a full-time job and a bunch of side gigs to make ends meet (including working as a delivery driver for Postmates - something you share with the novel’s protagonist, Edie). JENNIFER WILSON You wrote Luster while you were enrolled in the M.F.A. I spoke with Leilani about money, work, and why she “needs to know how characters eat and pay rent.” As Edie struggles with racism and tokenism at her first job and scalding herself with clam chowder at her next, readers are forced to confront the near impossibility of anyone who was not born into privilege living a creative life under capitalism. Luster is a novel about many things, but it is also about something we all tried to do this year - epidemiologically, psychologically, and financially. (At least part of the appeal of a married man who lives in the suburbs is that he can buy her dinner.) When she loses her job, she starts working for a food delivery app unable to afford city rent, she moves in with Eric and his family. Twenty-three-year-old Edie works at a New York City publishing company that pays her a salary typical of places that think you can eat prestige. That forced puritanism was precisely what made watching the novel’s main character Edie as she came home to her dirty, mouse-infested apartment after getting off a sweaty subway car before texting her married lover Eric (mixing households!?), irresistibly base. We flinched at the sound of heavy breathing, felt enraged by the sight of lips, and singed our hands with alcohol wipes if we touched something or someone.
When Raven Leilani’s debut novel, Luster, appeared last summer, many of us were living the most sanitized versions of our lives.
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