A couple years and a new publisher later, Burnett has brought B.K Troop back in The House Beautiful, the sequel to Christopher. The House Beautiful picks up four years after Christopher left off. B.K. has inherited a brownstone in NYC, and, to make ends meet, he's turned it into an artist's colony of sorts. B.K. has handpicked each artist with the idea that he will become their mentor, if not their muse. He keeps a close eye on all of them with them by eavesdropping, snooping, and the occasional, well-placed peephole. It's all in their best interests, of course.

Then along comes Adrian, a young man with little more than a trash bag full of papers and a lot of secrets. B.K. immediately decides that Adrian is a lyric poet at heart and only needs his help to discover his inner Keats.

The story is both laugh-out-loud funny and remarkably heartwarming. Burnett juggles a large cast of characters with ease. You come to care about each of them, and when you come to the last page, you'll wish you could spend more time in The House Beautiful.

I recently had the chance to sit down and talk with the author about writing gay characters, the state of the publishing world today, and how becoming a father has changed his life.

Josh Aterovis: Congratulations on the publication of The House Beautiful. I loved Christopher, so when I heard you were working on a sequel, I was thrilled.

Allison Burnett: Thank you so much! I think you'll be very pleasantly surprised with the third book, too, because it's finished. It came out better than I'd hoped. And it really is the culmination of everything that is Christopher and The House Beautiful, but it's just a bigger book. It's set in LA and it's just a more involved story.

JA: It wasn't an easy road to get The House Beautiful printed. You changed publishers, right?

AB: It was very hard, because Christopher was published by Broadway Books, whose parent company is Random House, you know, Doubleday, part of a conglomerate. Publishing these days is very much like Hollywood. Hollywood might buy a movie from you, a script, but there's absolutely zero guarantee that when you write another script that they're going to take it. Well, publishing used to be different. Publishing used to be that they really invested in writers. Great writers like Hemingway and these people, they were lucky if their first book sold 500 copies, but publishers made investments in writers and their futures. For the first time, maybe ten years ago, it all began to change, become more like Hollywood. I've had agents tell me that they had a writer who did three books in a row for one publisher that did well, and then the writer would write a proposal for their next book and the publisher would say, "Oh, we read it and we're going to pass." The agent would say, "Pass? What are you talking about? You have a relationship with them. If you don't like it, let's talk about what you do want, or what you'd like them to change." They thought of it as an ongoing relationship/investment/discussion. Instead, it became "What's your next thing? What have you done for us lately?"

So when Christopher came out, they were very proud to publish it and my editor at Broadway Books really loved it, and it came out and the reviews were wonderful. It was a finalist for the PEN Center USA Literary Award, which for a paperback original is kind of a big deal. I'm sure it was the only paperback original of any of the finalists. They were very happy, but they had a number in their system for how many copies I would have to sell for them to justify taking the next book. They had read The House Beautiful and really loved it, were very excited about it, but I didn't make that mark. I never knew exactly what the number was, but I think it was somewhere around 12,000 copies. For a first novel with a gay narrator, that's an awful lot. I ended up selling somewhere in the 8000's, and that wasn't enough for them.

When it became absolutely clear that they weren't going to print The House Beautiful, I was talking to my editor and he felt terrible. The reason he got into this business was to do books that he loves and cared about, so he actually helped me and steered me toward the publisher who ultimately bought it. I had known that they weren't going to print it for a long time, and had begun sending it out to other agents and publishers and it was brutally hard. For a publisher to take on a book that shares a narrator with another book that some other publisher owns the rights to is a big deal, but I was very lucky and I ended up at Carroll & Graf. They're wonderful, one of the last of the truly independent publishers. They would be more than happy if The House Beautiful sold as many copies as Christopher did. So, I'm not in that pressure cooker of having to hit certain marks. Plus, they want the third book. Eventually, when the rights to Christopher revert back to me, they can have all three B.K. Troop novels. Maybe we can even put them in one edition some day.

JA: What made you decide to continue telling B.K.'s story? This you always plan to write three books?

AB: No, I never did. I just can't describe it. I can't explain what it is about B.K. Troop's possession of my imagination. He's very alive to me, very real. He's constantly evolving as he gets older, and I just find that when I imagine in certain situations or in certain locales, it's like I'm channeling this guy. I don't want to queer it by questioning it, so it just happened. With the third book, I thought, "Okay, enough is enough. A trilogy is perfect. Three B.K. Troop novels. That'll be the end of that." And then, just a month ago, I started imagining what would B.K. be like well into his 70's? I spent some time in New Mexico and I started imagining what it would be like if B.K. visited New Mexico and was wearing crisp denims and a cowboy hat, and suddenly, I just see so many things. Images start triggering in my imagination, so I can't even categorically say I will stop writing B.K. Troop novels. Although, I am well aware that, as long as I do, there's always going to be a certain glass ceiling. How many comic novels with a gay narrator are there out there? I know I'm ghettoizing myself by doing it, but I don't care really. I think you have to go where your imagination takes you. You have to do that.

JA: I've heard that many of your friends didn't understand why you, a straight man, would want to keep writing such a flamboyant gay character. What was their reaction?

AB: The funny part is women love it. Women couldn't care less. They just think he's great. Gay men, gay women love him. I get nothing but the nicest, warmest responses from people about both books. It's just among straight male friends. They have an easier time with The House Beautiful because there's more eroticism in it between straight characters, and there's a gorgeous, promiscuous lesbian, so they enjoy her. I think it isn't as uncomfortable for them as Christopher was, where an older gay man is obsessed with a young straight man. Somehow, being in the gay seducer's head, no matter how comic or delusional he is, was very uncomfortable for straight, male friends. And these aren't like macho guys walking around slamming beer cans into their heads. These are progressive, secular humanists. These are guys that believe in gay marriage and are very to the left of the political spectrum, but still, it made them very uncomfortable. I was surprised, and there were some that thought I was nuts to do it again. I think they've just sort of resigned themselves. Who knows what they say behind my back? I can only imagine. But I just don't care.

JA: No one ever asks how Stephen King writes sociopaths, or how a woman writes a male character. Why do you think people still can't understand how a straight man can write a gay character convincingly?

AB: I know. The funny thing is, I've found the gay community to be largely really appreciative, and almost flattered, that a straight writer wants to spend all this time in a gay character's head. No one has ever claimed I can't do it. No one's ever said to me, "What gives you the right?" God knows, I've written women. For a while there, I wrote scripts that were very much written for women. I wrote the very first romantic comedy that the Lifetime channel ever made from scratch, called Perfect Romance. It was an original script of mine. It was a romantic comedy for the ladies. I wrote Autumn in New York, which if that doesn't make me an honorary gay, I don't know what does. Nobody has ever criticized the hubris or folly of the undertaking. If anything they were impressed. They would say, "How do you write such good women?" And I would say, "Well I do this radical thing. I actually listen to them when they talk." And it's true. I've always been a good listener. I listen to women, I hear what they're telling me, and I have compassion, and I write from that place. But somehow, it's more unusual to write outside oneself in regard to sexual preference, and I think it's just because most straight men are so uptight about what people will think that they don't even let themselves go in that dangerous territory. We have to use our imaginations, and be brave, and go where it leads us. I think it's almost ungrateful to question it. If your imagination is giving you this character, and he's alive for you, to question it is ungrateful, if not downright stupid.

JA: It almost seems like you have a real gift for inhabiting characters who are outside your life experience.

AB: I suppose, but they aren't that far outside my experience, because I've had older gay men in my life since high school. There were always gay teachers. In college, there were theater and English professors. So if I listen to them, if I listen to their stories, I listen to how they speak and what they read, and I have any sort of empathy... Maybe I find it easy to travel into other people's skin, or I don't have the strongest boundaries in the world, so I'm not keeping people at bay with judgments or an overwhelming sense of self. Whatever it is, B.K. feels like he's as much a part of my experiences as the actresses that I dated.

You know, it's really an archetypal structure; the idea of the young straight man in the big city meeting the older gay mentor who takes an interest. Not even so much in literature, but in life it just happens all the time. I was constantly meeting powerful gay men who were very generous to me. Some of them disappeared as they found out I was straight. I remember when I was 21, I got a call at home from Edward Albee, telling me he wanted to produce a play I'd wrote at Lincoln Center. It was the most overwhelming... Can you imagine the excitement over that phone call? I'd managed to get the play to him, and I remember my roommate answered the phone, and she turned to me with her eyes as big as saucers and said to me, "Allison, it's Edward Albee!" We were just all in shock. So, I was on the phone, and we were talking about how it was all going to work, and I said, "Listen, I'm about to move because I'm getting married, so let me give you my number at my new place." His voice changed dramatically, and I never heard from him again. I was so naïve. I'd write him letters, because I could not believe that it was actually never sincere, that the whole thing was probably just bait to meet this young guy. I'd met him once briefly and that's when he'd agreed to read my play.

So I had crushing disappointments, too, but Gore Vidal once said someone should write a tragic novel about a young straight artist living in New York who can't get ahead because he's straight. In the straight world, there isn't a system that is as supportive. For lack of a better word, there isn't a "straight mafia." It's very hard. Wherein, in the gay community, people give you so much help. In fact, it was my editor at Broadway Books who gave my book to a new editor who gave it to an agent — all these people are part of, or sympathetic to, the gay community. So really, it did help.

JA: Have you found that your books have been treated differently because your main character is gay?

AB: Well, yeah. I mean, at Borders, they're in the computer as gay fiction, and they're put in the very back shelves, two copies, at the back of the store under gay literature. I don't understand it. It doesn't seem particularly fair when you have a book that has 10 or 20 characters and just the narrator is gay. It seems strange. But as I say to people, you know, it's better to be ghettoized than homeless. If I didn't have a loyal and excited gay audience who wanted to read these books, I would just be one of 10,000 books that are published each year and just get lost. So I'm only grateful. I'm not complaining about the fact that I have a gay following. I just find it bizarre that book stores want to label it like that. I don't think it's helpful at all, certainly for me, or for them selling the book when it's sitting in the back.

JA: Let's talk about the book. This time around, you had a large cast of characters — all of which you flesh out very well, I might add. How many of the housemates are based on people you've known?

AB: I would say, maybe half of them? Obviously, I take a lot of liberties, but I would say, instead of based on, maybe inspired by. Like I knew someone like the beautiful, promiscuous lesbian, Mary Pilago. I knew her. I didn't know her well, but her presence and her beauty and things about her triggered my imagination and started me going. It wasn't like I based Mary on her. I didn't even know who she actually was in that kind of detail. But you know, I lived in New York and I proofread at a law firm in the 80s. It was one of the biggest law firms in the world and we had a support staff of perhaps 90 proofreaders and paralegals, and the vast majority of them were artists. Many went on to do wonderful things, like Michael Cunningham, for instance, and two wonderful painters, Byron Kim and Glenn Ligon, major people in the art world, and David Ives, the playwright. There's just a long, long list these people who went on to do great things, but in the 80s, we were just proofreaders together. So writing a houseful of artists at that time was easy for me because I had known so many in 80s.

JA: Did you have a favorite tenant of The House Beautiful?

AB: Like if I had to write a book about just one of them, who would it be? That's a funny question. I would say there's definitely a big place in my heart for Carl Alan Dealy, the lost actor who spends most of his time masturbating and gazing out the window. I'd say he's pretty near and dear to me. I find him awfully funny and sad. And I like Miranda a lot with her paint-spattered long underwear, combat boots, and secrets. I like her.

JA: In Christopher, B.K. pines after his straight neighbor. In The House Beautiful, he falls in love with the wrong guy yet again. Will poor B.K. ever find romance?

AB: Um... [laughs] It's so sad! I can tell you this much, in the third book, Death by Sunshine, he does not find love, but he is certainly learning how to love. I think he loves more. In The House Beautiful, he has a boyfriend and it turns out very poorly — about as bad as it can get — but at the same time, he has young, straight Adrian who lives in the house, and rather than waste his energy falling in love with this straight boy and having his heart broken, instead, he really takes more of a fatherly approach to this boy, and becomes his mentor. He takes care of him and helps him as an artist and as a person. It's an irony. B.K. is highly lustful and erotic, but it never seems to merge with his noblest longings towards intimacy. They're sort of compartmentalized, but he is learning how to love.

JA: In all reality, B.K. isn't the most likable character. He snoops, he lies, he manipulates, doesn't have the best hygiene, and apparently, he smells. Is it difficult to write a character like that and still make the reader root for him?

AB: You know, I love him, so it never occurs to me that someone else won't. It really doesn't even occur to that just because he has dandruff or his teeth are gray that somehow he won't be lovable. I love wicked, arch, funny... as long as he's so damn funny I forgive him those foibles. I just figure anyone that I would like will like my book, will like B.K., even if they have to overcome a lot. I've had friends who started Christopher, and were enjoying it, but were very put off by B.K. By the end, though, they just love him, because they see the humanity in him, and what a giant heart he has, and how badly he wants to make things work. What I really love about him the most is that he dreams. He's always dreaming. He's always making more of life than what it is. He can take the most mediocre sow's ear and make it into a silk purse. I think that's a beautiful quality in him, that he loves his dreams more than life and he's constantly mythologizing and elevating the common stuff of life. He makes it beautiful and turns it to gold.

JA: On a personal level, you had an addition to your family not too long ago. Has that changed your worldview at all?

AB: Oh, well, I have a six month old son named Keats, and he's quite a divinity. My girlfriend and I are madly in love with him. Did it change my world view? I think it makes me realize how fragile it all is, and it makes me more in touch with my mortality. When you have a little baby at my age, I'm 47, you really want to live a long life, to be there for him. In a way, it makes you realize how precious it all is. If I drop dead, it would be devastating for a kid. You just realize that you have to stay healthy and appreciate every moment that you have together. It also makes me more compassionate. You hear about deaths in Iraq, or deaths in a drive-by, and you really feel the parents' pain in a way that's hard to before you have children. I think it's a sense of mortality and compassion.

JA: Finally, is there a tentative release date for Death by Sunshine?

AB: No. I think we're talking about fall of next year, but it's not definite yet.

JA: Well, I'm really looking forward to it and thanks so much for talking to me.

AB: Thank you!

Josh Aterovis is the author of the Killian Kendall Mystery Series as well as numerous columns and articles. He can be reached at or www.joshaterovis.com

Written (source) by: Josh Aterovis(joshaterovis.com)
Photo: Broadway; Revised edition