Ryan Gattis: ‘I knew I’d need to tell my own story as a survivor of violence’
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Version 0 of 1. Ryan Gattis’s new novel, All Involved, his third, is actually six interlinked novellas, told through 17 first-person narratives, covering 144 hours of life in Los Angeles. It begins on 29 April 1992, shortly after three police officers implicated in the vicious beating of Rodney King, a taxi driver, were cleared of wrongdoing. Officially, the LA riots lasted six days and resulted in 53 deaths and 2,000 injuries, but the 36-year-old Gattis sets his ambitious, visceral fiction among Latino gangs who used the chaos to settle old grudges and create even more havoc. It’s been almost 10 years since your last novel. Has writing All Involved been a slow process? No, it was really quick. Almost all that time I’d been writing one book that was acutely terrible. It was an incredible grief period when I gave up on that book; I thought my career was over, to be honest with you. But All Involved… I’d already done two years of research, talking to people, and I finished writing it about four or five months after that. Of course if you’d told me, “Oh, you’re going to write a novel, there’s going to be 17 different first-person characters”, I’d have quit, it would have been so daunting. But I had the virtue of ignorance. And I hadn’t felt that fluidity in my writing for many years, so it was a relief. Who did you speak to about the riots?I don’t remember how it started, but it was connected to my joining Uglar, a street-art crew in LA. We’d go to walls, and I’ll say this, the most fascinating people want to talk to you when you’re working on a wall in a neighbourhood. Unfortunately, there are folks who have some mental issues, but I started meeting councillors and former gang members… Over time, the riots came up, and they always reacted as if it were an unhealed wound… as if they were still processing 20 years later. You’re a novelist from Colorado, not exactly their world. Was there a trust issue with the gang members?Any time I went into these situations, I had two rules: always be 100% honest and always presume the person I’m speaking to knows everything about me. The first thing that always came up was: “You’re a white-boy fiction writer from Colorado.” That’s a fact: I can’t change it and I don’t want to change it. And I knew, fairly soon after that, I’d need to tell my own story as a survivor of violence. What happened?When I was 17, in high school, I was hit so hard in the face by an offensive lineman on the [American] football team that my nose was torn out. I had to have two facial reconstruction operations and it was almost a year before I could smell and taste again, because of the nerve damage. I remember I walked into a bathroom and I looked at my face in the mirror and I thought, “My life is over. No one’s going to love me. I’m not going to get a job looking like this.” It’s one of the great fork moments of my life. Why a fork?I come from a military family – the air force: my dad was a captain, my grandfather was a colonel. Up to that point I’d been doing everything I could to go to the air force academy. But after that happened, and given the length of my recovery – where I did a tremendous amount of reading, watching movies, being alone – in many ways that changed my composition as a person. I was far more interested in stories, and I suppose in some ways it granted me an incredibly large share of empathy. The way you describe violent acts in the book is gruesome, but vivid and enthralling. Do you put that down to what happened to you? I hate to say it, but yes, absolutely. I wouldn’t wish what happened to me on anyone ever, but does it inform how I write violence? Absolutely it does, because I write violence from the perspective of someone who has been through it, who has felt it, who has had to sit in a hospital bed for a damn long time. All Involved is published by Picador (£12.99). Click here to buy it for £9.99 |