Success can feel sus!
Tommy Orange on following up his bestselling banger, our fascination with Native stories, cashing fat corporate checks, magic-mushroom medicine & more
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— Jonah & Erin
Tommy Orange — he’s a young literary champ who wrote one of our favorite novels in recent memory, the New York Times bestseller & Pulitzer Prize finalist There There. Published in 2018, the novel unfolds in the Native American community in Oakland, CA, where Tommy, a member of the Cheyenne and Arapaho tribes, was born & lives today. Of course Oakland — unceded ancestral land of the Muwekma Ohlone Tribe, don’t get it twisted!! — is also Blackbird Spyplane’s adoptive home, and reading Tommy’s novel helped to deepen our understanding and appreciation of the place… It was also a huge international hit, celebrated far beyond this city, because the s**t ripped.
Next Tuesday, February 27, Tommy’s putting out Wandering Stars — a kind of combined prequel and sequel. It’s about religious searching, alcoholism, drug addiction, psychedelic medicine, noise rock, the legacy of forced assimilation at Indian boarding schools, & more… Reading it, I (Jonah) was also intrigued to learn that the chorus of Portishead’s “Wandering Star” takes its lyrics straight from a deep-cut verse at the end of the Bible, which is tight… I was also inspired to formulate Mystery Mindset — where you essentially give yourself something you already own as a gift, to see & appreciate it anew — after one of Tommy’s characters does something similar.
Also — Tommy loves magic mushrooms and is apparently a beast on these rollerblades?? So I was eager to hop on the Spyphone with him and chop it up about these & other unbeatable topics.
Blackbird Spyplane: I saw you do a City Arts & Lectures in San Francisco in 2019 and Tracy Chapman was at the afterparty. I was too dumbstruck to approach her and say what’s up — did you build with her?
Tommy Orange: “I didn’t even see her! Was she there?”
Blackbird Spyplane: What!
Tommy Orange: “Struck is the right verb, that would have been a freeze moment. No, I wish I’d known she was there.”
Blackbird Spyplane: We played ourselves. So, you had this enormous, smash-hit debut novel, which is an incredible thing. Writing in the wake of that kind of success, was this second novel an easier or harder proposition for you? Was there a part of you that’s, like, ‘OK, I’ve been here before, people love my writing, I know what I’m doing, I’m basically the f**king man??’
Tommy Orange: “Show me the author who has success and strides that confidently into their second book and I’ll hurl something at them. No, I don’t think that happens. I think people are really crushed by the pressure to follow up that kind of success — I’ve heard that a lot from other writers. I knew it while it was happening: I was already dreading getting to the next book and figuring out, ‘How can I clear all these voices from my head?’
“You know, There There was the book I had to write. And for years the only person reading it was my wife, so I never really had an idea of an audience in mind, and certainly no idea of ‘This thing has to be better than the last thing.’ So there was that pressure, and then the pandemic happened, and it was not a good time for me to work. So that’s probably why this one took 6 years — it took the same amount of time as There There, and I’d say it was 100 times harder.”
Blackbird Spyplane: There’s a related thing I wanted to ask about, which is how a certain type of success might start to feel sus: I watched a talk you gave at a book event sponsored by B*nk of America, where this rep from the bank came out and talked about the Power of Storytelling before you took the stage. It made me wonder, is there a dynamic where, writing this intensely personal novel from an outsider perspective, you come to feel a bit suspicious of the mainstream insider institutional embrace?
Tommy Orange: “Definitely. I tend to be very suspicious of things that a lot of people love generally. But I’m also really deeply interested in things that are popular, whether I think it’s good or not. There’s always something interesting to me about looking into why.
“I also think there’s something at the center of the American imagination, and the way Americans think about themselves, where we know the native story has not been told — we know it happened, and we know that it hasn’t been told right, because we never change the story on an institutional level. We still celebrate Thanksgiving and think about Pilgrims and Indians, because that’s the story we’re taught in educational institutions up to college, and we never skip from there to now, where 80% of us live in cities and work in offices, and some of us work for B*nk of America. I’ve been brought to speak at corporations where they have native cohorts — I did a thing at T-M*bile where they had me speak and paid me a ton of money, because this cohort wanted visibility within the company, and they invited me.
“Because there’s almost no representation of us as contemporary. And reservations remain pretty mysterious, too. So Americans, I think, want an update — they’re fascinated by our people and our story as it relates to the country and its origins. And yet we also kind of don’t want to know. So there’s a fascination, and in part I’m suspicious of that, but it’s central to our identity. I guess that’s what makes what I talk about appealing.”
Blackbird Spyplane: Native characters & stories figure, directly or indirectly, into some of the best movies and TV shows I saw last year: The obvious one is Killers of the Flower Moon — shout out to the book by Spyfriend David Grann — and also How to Blow Up a Pipeline and The Curse. Have you seen that one? I know you teach in Santa Fe and it’s set right near there.
Tommy Orange: “Yeah, in Española. I’ve had family live there, so I was really curious. I’ve only seen the first three or four episodes, so not enough to get to the place where it makes sense what they’re up to. But I do love the weirdness of the way they depict Española — at one point I think Chimayo was per capita the heroin capital of the world, so there’s a very dark underbelly to that place.”
Blackbird Spyplane: Speaking of cool drugs instead of gnarly ones, there’s an autobiographical detail in Wandering Stars from when you were like 17, which is that you’d go to raves at a Home Depot in Oakland and buy pasta noodles soaked in LSD?? Please tell me some more about these parties.
Tommy Orange: “So it wasn’t in the Home Depot, like raving in the aisles among all the products — it was a warehouse behind the Home Depot. But I don’t know, I had friends who knew about these raves, and I don’t particularly like dancing, so I realized pretty quickly that the whole point for me was the drugs. So after a while we’d just get the drugs and do them in the parking lot outside.”
Blackbird Spyplane: You’re a big mushrooms guy, too. What do you love about them?
Tommy Orange: “It’s one of my favorite drugs I’ve ever done, and it’s brought me a lot of amazing insights and experiences. And a few terrifying ones. I can’t believe the bravery I had when I was younger — taking an 1/8th as a 16 year old.
“One time I thought I was dead, and fully in the afterlife, and that all my friends were dead too and they didn’t know it. And I lost the ability to talk. I’d gotten so high I forgot I’d taken mushrooms, which is when you know you’ve gone too far.”
Blackbird Spyplane: That’s f**ked up.
Tommy Orange: “I didn’t swear off them after that, but I moved towards taking less.”
Blackbird Spyplane: Something autobiographical that did not make it into the book is that you were a serious roller-hockey athlete in high school and nice as h*ll with the rollerblades. Rollerblades used to get so clowned on — what were the haters missing?
Tommy Orange: “Haha, I don’t know if I can sell rollerblading without making fun of it at the same time. But I still play now in, like, an Old Man League, because I got to a level of control and skill where, when you put that much time into anything, you want to stay connected to it. Obviously if you compare it to ice hockey, roller hockey looks really slow and has a goofiness to it. But I love it.”
Blackbird Spyplane: All right finally, I asked you to send a unique cherished possession over and you sent over some handsomely oven-roasted Caterpillar work boots. What’s the story with these?
Tommy Orange: “I was in NYC for the first time ever in early 2017, meeting like 14 different editors over two days, and there was a snowstorm. My agent, Nicole Aragi, noticed I was wearing Adidas shell tops.”
Blackbird Spyplane: It’s funny, I grew up in NYC and in high school I finally put some hiking boots into the rotation, but I basically rocked sneakers ~365 days a year, no matter the weather. I have no idea how that worked, but I did it.
Tommy Orange: “I was sludging through the snow, and she gave me these boots, which belonged to her husband, John Freeman. I didn’t know who he was at the time, but later learned about his prominence. So I don’t wear these, they live a garage life, but they represent a moment in time that really felt crazy.”
Blackbird Spyplane: Are you a big talisman-collector generally?
Tommy Orange: “I’m not. It’s not something I do. I’m more of a purger. Like, I had this 1987 World Series baseball my uncle caught and gave to me from the A’s, and I don’t know where it is any more.”
Blackbird Spyplane: You purged that? This is elite-tier non-attachment.
Tommy Orange: “Well, I’m bad about losing things, too, and that one I probably just lost. I had it, and now I don’t.”
Tommy Orange’s new novel, Wandering Stars, drops next week — you can cop it here. His excellent debut novel, There There, is here.
Our roundup of the Best Pants Out is here.
The SpyTalk Chat Room, where Spyfriends trade elite intel, is here.
Clowning on blading is still lame.
Check the cool shit that companies like Them Skates are doing. Blading was abandoned by mainstream/pop culture, which made it become a truly open and self-supporting community and creative culture.
(speaking as an OG-washed up blader)
Thanks for the Orange interview! Love his writing and interview style -- he always sounds like a human rather than a 'creative professional.'