It’s a slippery novel about many things - being young, being Black, being a woman, being depressed, feeling lonely, latent trauma, sex. “My book indulges them they are definitely there.”īut like all great books, Luster eludes easy categorization. “I’m a millennial and Edie is a millennial and there are definitely trappings of the millennial novel,” she said.

“I wanted to write a Black woman who is dogged and hungry and who fucks up.”įor Leilani, “millennial” is not a dirty word. “When we’re talking about the sort of dysfunctional urban hungry woman, what we’re generally talking about is the white millennial experience,” explained Leilani in a video chat in mid-July. In that sense, Luster is a book squarely in the tradition of recent buzzy novels about disaffected twentysomething women trudging through our capitalist hellscape, from Ottessa Moshfegh’s My Year of Rest and Relaxation to Halle Butler’s The New Me to, yes, that bard of millennial angst and repression, Sally Rooney, and her novels C onversations with Friends and Normal People.īut there are two notable ways in which Luster, written by the 29-year-old Raven Leilani, differs. Over the course of a taut 222 pages, Edie becomes ensnared in a peculiar living arrangement with Eric, his wife Rebecca, who’s a grimly determined medical examiner, and their adopted Black adolescent daughter Akila.Īll the hallmarks of a sacred millennial text are in this book: There is sex, some of it good, plenty of it bad (“When we have sex it lasts so long that in the middle of it, when it has become less about feelings and more about ETA, we look at each other and call it”) crappy gig economy jobs (“I ride my bike to an address in Sunset Park and when the customer comes to the door, she snatches the bag of waffle fries and doesn’t tip”) and financial precarity (“With a new diet of pear baby food and Top Ramen, I make almost enough money to live”). We first meet Edie when she is about to go on her first IRL date with Eric, a middle-aged white archivist from New Jersey who’s in an open marriage.

The only meaningful difference in status between her and the other Black girl at work is “one monthly student loan payment.”

I have trouble making friends and men lose interest in me when I talk.” Edie lives in New York City and works in book publishing as a managing editorial coordinator she paints but can’t seem to get any real career traction on that front. “Here’s a fact,” Edie, the 23-year-old narrator of Luster, one of the most unsettling, scathingly funny debut novels of the year, tells us early in the book: “I have great breasts, which have warped my spine.

Luster by raven