The New Yorker Radio Hour - For Brontez Purnell, “Memoir Is Fiction—I Don’t Care What Anyone Says”

Episode Date: February 20, 2024

Brontez Purnell is a Renaissance man. He’s a musician, a dancer, a filmmaker, and the author of a number of books. His latest is “Ten Bridges I’ve Burnt,” a departure from the traditional memoir form. It's written in verse and playfully embellishes the truth throughout. “Memoir is fiction—I don’t care what anyone says,” Purnell tells The New Yorker Radio Hour’s Jeffrey Masters. “You [or] I could both write down our lives as true as we know it. But the second our mom reads it, or one of our siblings reads it, or anybody else peripherally in the book, they can easily say, ‘What are you talking about? That never happened like that.’ ” Purnell, who came of age in the underground punk scene in Oakland, California, during the early two-thousands, is no stranger to hard knocks, but that doesn’t mean he needs to divulge everything. “If you write about your life, you have to protect the wicked; namely, yourself,” he says. “So there is this game of pulling and punching.” New Yorker Radio Hour listeners, we want to hear from you.  We have a few questions about the show and how you listen to it. The survey takes about twenty minutes, and your feedback will help us make our podcast better.  Take the survey here.

This is The New Yorker Radio Hour, a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker. This is The New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Ramnik. While it's accurate to call Brontes Pernell a novelist, his books, and there are many of them, are just one slice of what he does as an artist. Pranel has made films and he's written for TV shows like Queer as Folk. He plays in bands, and his first solo album, in an electronic vein, was called No Jack Swing. I'm wondering. Ghosting is a clear form of communication. Like, what do you mean by that?

All of that work reflects the underground spirit of the Oakland, California punk scene in the early 2000s, where Brontes-Pernel came of age. Prannell's new book is a memoir with the unbeatable title, Ten Bridges I Burnt. He spoke with Jeffrey Masters, who's a senior producer on the radio hour. You know, when I pick up a Brontes-Prenel book, I always know that there are going to be scenes, specifically sex scenes, that make me gasp and blush, that make me cringe and always laugh. And that is definitely true with this new book. It's a memoir, a memoir and verse, but it skips over these traditional memoir beats. These capital L life events that we often see, they're not a dat and they're presented when necessary, but it's these smaller moments of his life that stand out.

and it's these smaller moments, or seemingly smaller moments, we should say, like getting into a fight at a poetry conference, or as he describes it, the humiliation of jogging. It's those things that Brontes gives the most weight to, and just one of the many reasons why I wanted to talk to him about this new book. Okay. Should we jump in and do it? Let's do it.

One of the things that I find so compelling about your work, both in this book and your last book, that was called 100 Boyfriends. And one of the things I'm so interested by is how much you honor a deep platonic love, right? It's almost like a platonic romance in many ways among your friends. And I wonder to start if we can have you read a section in the book that deals with that. I was thinking page 49. Okay. He is my father and my newborn. I take the greatest of care with him. When I rub the sleep from his eyes, rub his shoulders, pull the boogers from his nostrils, wipe the shimmer from his starry eyelids. Before we go back to the party, it is not hard to see what they see when we are together, the way our eyes soften in each other's direction. Hence that the silent song we feel. We sing to each other. The vowels so clear, they are invisible, sometimes even to us. Yeah, thank you. I love that because, you know, we as a society, we uplift romantic love only, right?

That's the thing to aspire to the most. But here you are writing a love poem to a friend. Oh, yeah, I know. And not just a friend, we should say. The poem's name is called For Jackson Howard. And that is your editor of your book? Yes. Me and Jackson, it is giving manic pixie 40-year-old and manic pixie-twink energy. Literally, I remember, like, it was like he hit me up about a book deal, and then, like, a week later, he was like, hey, come to New York, come sleep on my couch. Yeah, we talk every day. And so is he the reason why you're now with your publisher, FSG?

Yeah, totally I asked that because you know when I first discovered your work years ago you were this like you know more underground writer You had a cult following But it was it wasn't independently published But it's like much smaller houses And now that you're with like a major publishing company

Like how do you think that's like changed your writing at all I think I mean I think a little bit But also too it's like I was already the trajectory of my writing was already happening because I don't know I I mean so many like people who like they ask me these questions about writing and I feel like they want their first manuscript to like win a Pulitzer off the bat like they want to hit a home run their first and like I tell them I was like I've been writing for free for like 20 years you know but you know what I think that was great about being on underground publishers is

that I really got to do what I want. I had the luxury to, like, improv and experiment. And, like, to be honest, like, that is gold. It's just a great way to develop your style. And quite honestly, like, my first book, Johnny, would you love me if my dick were bigger? Like, around the time that was written, I think that was finished, I started writing that in, like, 2009,

and then it wasn't finished to 2012. There was no publisher in the world that would have put that book out. There was no major publisher in the world. But my love was writing and so I kept writing and I kept refining and then I don't know. I think that's why 100 boyfriends, as wistful

as it seems to some people, 100 boyfriends was the work of a lot of dedication, a lot of time, and a lot of devotion to kind of like style and an aesthetic that had been built up you know, five zines in three books before

it ever saw, you know, light on the earth, you know. I think the longer a writer gets to kind of spiral in their own kind of chaos, you know, I think akin it to like building the rue, making the rue, making the rue deep and rich, like that's what you spring out of. So tell me this. For the new book, it's a memoir and verse. This is not a traditional type of book that we often associate with memoirs.

Like what does memoir mean here for you? Oh, memoir is, for me, is complete fiction. To be honest, let me be very honest with you. I'm always playing with the idea and the trope that in order for like women, gay men, men of color, or people of color in general, in order for our work to be accepted as truth, there has to be the word memoir on it. You know, and I've gone over this debate lots of times about how. how in our society, the only people smart enough to write fiction is like white men, right?

And so the second you write memoir, it's like, wow, this gritty tale of this abandoned homosexual spilling his entire guts to the world. Wow, let's use his life against him. When in actuality, even when I write memoir, I can't, like, in order not to get sued, you have to change everything. Memoir is fiction. I don't care what anyone says. You and I both could write down our lives, as true as we know it, but the second our mom reads it or one of our siblings reads it or anybody else peripherally in the book, they can easily say, what are you talking about that never happened like that? And it renders everything we say like kind of fiction. So when I say memoir and verse, I am kind of trickily dealing with the very sticky notion

of memoir. Right. And so are you saying that like full stories, are fabricated or like certain details are embellished or like both. Well, both and neither. But also too, it's like even when you, if you write about your life, you have to protect the wicked too, namely yourself. So there is this game of pulling and punching. And even in my regular auto fiction life, the other books that they call auto fiction,

yeah, there are like things that are totally apicalized mixed with things that are absolutely true. And at the end of the day, like it doesn't, At the end of the day, it doesn't really matter because I think that it's very foolish to believe that a fictional story has nothing to teach you about the human experience or that memoir has exponentially more to teach you about the human experience than fiction. I mean, I think that one example of this not being a, like a traditional memoir as we've been talking about, is that only in passing do you mention HIV. You're listing something and you say, quote, the boy who gave me HIV. and then it's never mentioned again. And that stands out because there have been

entire memoirs devoted to the subject. I am from that weird generation where prep happened like five minutes after I serial converted, literally. Like if I had been one generation younger, it wouldn't have been anything. And also I think that that subject has been written about very well

and very extensively. And so I don't know. I think I wrote about it. And Johnny, would you love me if my dick were bigger? I don't know if you can say that. My first book about kind of like the malaise of, you know, our generation. And, you know, I had older men talk about like how they felt sorry for us because we knew what AIDS was before we knew what sex was. And so that was a way different thing than just knowing what sex was and then came AIDS.

And so sometimes when we talk about. about the disease. When we as gay men, you know, talk about the disease, the conversation always goes to, like, the generation of gay men we lost, which is like horrific or whatever. But we never talk about, like, who it is affecting now, which something about that, I feel is ingenuous. Like, we should be having a smarter conversation about how it shifted and how we could help those people. It becomes kind of how, like, those, like, pro-life people love talking about, you know, the unborn, because essentially the unborn is a a group of people that's easy to advocate for because they require nothing of us. Giving lip service to the scores of men that died of HIV is easy because the dead require nothing of us. Right. What are you doing for the men that actually survived and lived? Like, what are you doing for them?

The answer is usually nothing. The writer Brontes-Pernel speaking with Jeffrey Masters, more in a moment. Sex is one of things that I think you are known for in your writing. in this book, in your last book, 100 boyfriends. What have you learned about how to make sex work on the page? I say that I write anti-erotica. Because I don't know. What does that mean?

Like, I just, I remember, like, you know, when I was 18 and 20, like reading these different sex journals by these, like, gay men. And I get why they wrote that way. They were just like, my body was like a porcelain statue. shoe as I received his da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da right. The sex writing that I saw was very aggrandizing of

sex, very aggrandizing of you know, nothing was flawed or out of place. But it is because men were writing like that because of the AIDS epidemic. Whereas I write about sex in a way that's supposed to return our humanity to us, you know, where sex is gross. Sex is wrong sometimes.

Sex is extremely funny sometimes, you know, and sometimes it's like nice or sweet. And plus I, like, worked at the bathhouse in my 20s. I had this experience that I think a lot of men didn't have. I think every gay man should be required to work at a bathhouse. If you just go sit in a bathhouse when you're young, you know, when your synapses are still open and you're still willing to try some stuff, it will completely change your sexual life forever. It will not make you fear aging, you know what I'm? saying, like, you will be ready to have, like, a lot more fun, I think.

Okay, wait, wait, though. You kind of talk about it on the book, but from the opposite angle, you're writing about your 20s and your 30s, and you say you were trying to be sexy to appear sexy to others, but now you have found, quote, the courage to be ugly, old, and defiantly unwontable. So, like, connect that for me, because you're talking about. you know, not fearing aging and stuff, but also now you write about being like unwontable, as you say. What I mean to say, what I mean to say is I spent, I think, a good 20 years doing that.

I think wisdom comes from having too much just so you know what just enough is. And so I feel like in a way I have answered almost all the questions. I personally have had around the subject of sex. It doesn't quite hold the same fascination for me like it used to. There's more sex in this book than like romantic relationships, you know, romance. Looking back on your life, is it the sex that stands out the most to you? You know, I don't think it's hard to say because it's like, you know, there were men that I had sex with for Upwards to like 10, 15 years that I met at the bathhouse, you know, where I never even knew their last name.

And these were men of like, you know, like they were pretty instrumental to like my formative sexual years. You know, what constitutes an intimate relationship is so, I have a hard time figuring, piecing that out what that means in all of our different worlds. at some point after you've been doing this dance with someone for four or five years, I do feel like that's a relationship and I do feel like it's intimate and I do feel like it's important more so than anybody I ever pretended to play boyfriend with, you know, so. Yeah. You know, you mentioned that you're also a musician. You've been a part of many bands.

You also released your first solo album last year. I understand. Do not say that you will pray about. What does you, like, making music do for you or allow you to express that, that your writing does not? You know, there's just something about singing a melody in your head. Like, I grew up singing in the church choir. And, you know, music is the thing that I've always given the most to that has returned the least to me. You know, I was a go-go boy in this band.

And sometimes I think it's really funny because it's like, I feel like that was the most like support or whatever or that was the most, um, those most money I ever made. You know, when I'm dancing in my underwear on stage for people, there's plenty of money and support for that. But let me pick up a guitar and have my own ideas. That's when the world is just like, oh, well, we'll give you $150 to record. You know, I recorded my first record with my first, my first solo band. for like $150. I remember that. But also, I just, I don't know,

there's, music is definitely a calling. And it's a great time stamp. Like the songs I write, I always, I feel like every year I get better and better at doing it. And plus, I don't know, being able to, being able to work in that realm, I think, helps me in writing too. So. Helps you how?

I feel like in regular writing, like, it's just, you know, The written word is so, it's so staunch. It's like you have to be so stark. You have to be so on time. I feel like, I don't know. I feel like when you sing a melody, you can play with things. And you can be a cheesy poet if there's a melody behind it because it's a whole different thing. Like, I would never in my everyday poet life be like, I need flowers in the springtime.

But once you're behind an acoustic guitar, you can be like, I need flowers in the springtime. And you're like, oh, I can get away with saying that Because there's a guitar here now. Like, it's a weird magic. I can't explain it. Brontes, thank you so much for talking. This was wonderful. Anytime I had a great time.

That's Jeffrey Masters of the New Yorker Radio Hour Speaking with Brontes-Prenel. His new memoir is called Ten Bridges I've Burnt. I'm David Remnick, and that's the New Yorker Radio Hour for today. Thanks for listening. See you next time. The New Yorker Radio Hour is a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker. Our theme music was composed and performed by Merrill Garbiz of Tune Arts

with additional music by Louis Mitchell. This episode was produced by Max Walton, Adam Howard, Kalalia, David Krasnow, Jeffrey Masters, and Louis Mitchell, with guidance from Emily Boutin and assistance from Michael May, David Gable, and Alejandra Deccette. The New Yorker Radio Hour is supported in part by the Cherina Endowment Fund.