Brandon Taylor designed “Real Life”, his first novel, when he was a doctoral student in biochemistry. An autobiographical fiction written completely scientifically.
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If it is not always decisive to learn where an author works – at his office, in coffee or in his bed? -, the place where Brandon Taylor wrote his first novel sums up part of originality. Real Life was born on the bench of a laboratory, at the University of Wisconsin in Madison, while nematodes (“autonomous microscopic worms living in the earth”) suffered various genetic modifications. The experience only required intervention every fifteen minutes. Between each manipulation, the doctoral student returned to his manuscript.
He worked fifteen hours a day and half the night. In five weeks, the novel was completed. “It was very intense and brutal, I will never do this again,” he admits, passing through Paris, during an interview with “Le Monde of books”.
If, today, Brandon Taylor teaches literary creation at New York University, he was at the time, in 2019, a student in pressure biochemistry. His laboratory boss requires rapid results from him. In this tension, the young researcher precisely sees an opportunity. He who has already published news sets himself up as the objective of writing a fiction as quickly as possible, convinced that she will thus escape the fate of the beginnings of a novel which venge on his hard drive. Above all, he will have to be “diligent” and “systematic”. In short, use what ten years of scientific training have taught him.
The campus works according to his own codes
First, the choice of the subject must be “logical” – to make sense. Previously, Brandon Taylor tried to write on imaginary circles. A failure. With Real Life, he simplifies things. What best does he know? The campus. “It is a romantic and scary place at the same time,” he explains. “The campus is a tank in which we interact with people of different origins, which we might never have encountered in Outside. It’s terribly romantic. “In addition, the campus works according to its own codes, foreign to the outside world, from which it protects students and teachers, like a talisman. “But, once graduated, the student wonders what he is going to do in the world, what is his place.”
Brandon Taylor experienced this, in his flesh, as well as through various “Campus novels”, “Campus novels”. He quotes the master of illusions, by Dona Tartt (Plon, 1993), and the novel of the wedding, by Jeffrey Eugenids (L’Olivier, 2013). Born in Alabama, in the rural south of the United States, where “being gay or queer was not acceptable”, the writer, however, never found a character who looks like him in a novel campus. He therefore invents Wallace in his image, drawing in his diary the scene which will become the beginning of the novel.
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