Xhenet Aliu

Xhenet Aliu’s novel, Brass, was awarded the biennial Townsend Prize in 2020, the 2018 Georgia Author of the Year First Novel Prize, was a Barnes & Noble “Discover Great New Writers” selection, and was long-listed for the 2018 Center for Fiction First Book Prize. Numerous media outlets, including Entertainment Weekly, The San Francisco Chronicle, Real Simple, and the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, named Brass a 2018 best book of the year. Previously, her debut story collection, Domesticated Wild Things, and Other Stories won the Prairie Schooner Book Prize in Fiction. Aliu’s writing has appeared in The New York Times, The Boston Globe, Glimmer Train, Hobart, LitHub, Buzzfeed, and elsewhere, and she has received fellowships from the Bread Loaf and Sewanee Writers’ Conferences, a grant from the Elizabeth George Foundation, and a fellowship from the Djerassi Resident Artists Program, among other awards. She teaches Creative Writing at the University of North Carolina Greensboro.

Aliu's new novel is Everybody Says It's Everything.

My Q&A with the author:

How much work does your title do to take readers into the story?

Disembodied from the text, the title Everybody Says It’s Everything plays with the ambiguity of the indefinite pronouns “everybody” and “everything” in a way I find kind of fun and mysterious. Who’s everybody, what’s everything? Tell me, book, tell me! Spoiler alert: the story pretty explicitly clarifies that the title refers to family, which is very much what the story is about, despite the backdrop of a real-life geopolitical conflict, i.e., the Kosovo War. The title is extracted directly from a piece of dialogue in the book, in fact, though landing on it was a real struggle. Before that, the working title was Eagle Calling, which referred to the name of a fictionalized group of Albanian expats collecting funds and weapons for the Kosovo war; it works fine for that purpose, but as a book title, it read like an issue of a G.I. Joe comic.

What's in a name?

I wish I could tell you my names are an allusion to, say, Roman mythology or something else extremely literary and smartypants. But…no. I pulled the name Drita from the reality TV show Mob Wives; Drita was the sole Albanian among a group of Italian-Americans married to mafia guys on Staten Island and was, if I do say so myself, the breakout star among a cast of characters designed to become viral memes. (Mob Wife Drita is also the absolute opposite of my book’s straightlaced Drita, unfortunately.) Petrit was my father’s name, and I bestowed it on my character because I wanted something easily Americanized–my father went by Pete after he came to the U.S., and I like the single-syllable impact of it. Drita and Pete’s adoptive Italian-American mother Jacqueline just felt like a Jackie to me, with a nice nasal “a” in the first syllable. Pete’s girlfriend Shanda was the name of the real-life human whose driver’s license I paid a lot of money for when I was a minor in order to get into bars. Dakota seems like a name that people who live in an Econoline van and drive to hippie fests full-time would name their son. Between my own name and the names of some of the characters in my last book (Bashkim, Yllka, and Gjonni come to mine), I thought I’d do readers a solid this time and make everything slightly easier to pronounce.

How surprised would your teenage reader self be by your new novel?

Teenaged me had absolutely no idea that she’d be allowed to write novels, because she’d been taught to work exclusively jobs that required punchcards. Teenaged me was also a secret nerd, though; by the time I was in high school, I was reading things like Lolita, which I’m certain I didn’t understand but which absolutely floored me. I was all about realism because real-life humans were so much more confusing and necessary to study to me than, say, dragons or aliens, and that’s where I’ve mostly remained (despite currently working on something I might call horror). I guess if teenaged me had been allowed to consider a future writer version of herself, she wouldn’t be terribly surprised by the characters or content: lonely, confused people who feel alienated from their own family and uncertain about their place in the world.

Do you find it harder to write beginnings or endings? Which do you change more?

100% endings. If I wasn’t excited by the beginning of a project, it would never make it to page 10. It’s all possibility at that stage, like the first date with some not-conventionally-hot-but-somehow-beguiling person you met in the cereal aisle at Harris Teeter. I’m always more interested in investigating the unknowable things about people, and how they get so much wrong, than I am in any conventional resolution, which makes sticking the landing very difficult for me. I always want there to be an ellipses at the end of a story, not a period.

Do you see much of yourself in your characters? Do they have any connection to your personality, or are they a world apart?

In a former life–one that the aforementioned teenaged me pursued–I was going to be a nurse, like Drita. It was both a practical career and one that seemed so useful and purposeful. In fact, I sometimes still wish I had finished that nursing degree and pursued writing from the side door, not just because I probably would’ve paid off my student loans by now but because I still crave tasks that have practical, quantifiable impacts, which writing almost never does. And like Drita, I can be a little judgmental and maybe prioritize goodness over kindness, which isn’t always the most practical way to move through the world. I wish I was more like Mob Wives Drita than Everybody Says It’s Everything Drita, but I just wasn’t built for reality TV.

What non-literary inspirations have influenced your writing?

A very boring answer is “the news,” even if it’s obvious that reading about current events and consequently thinking about things like equity and immigration and class issues has informed my writing. But can I go with the more fun answer of narrative songs? I’ve always loved songs that tell stories, going back to “Rocky Raccoon” by the Beatles and, later, old-timey blues and folk songs, albums like Springsteen’s Nebraska, most of Wu Tang’s entire oeuvre (including solo output by individual members), murder ballads, etc. It was the storytelling form of the working person when “literature” felt so gate-kept and exclusive to a certain class of people to which I definitely did not feel I belonged. I loved that these artists were allowed to use their own voices and vernaculars and cadences instead of trying to adopt to a form of erudition acceptable in so-called high art, and they gave me permission to not chase prettiness at the expense of honesty in my own writing.

Visit Xhenet Aliu's website.

The Page 69 Test: Everybody Says It's Everything.

--Marshal Zeringue