In her third novel, Last Night in Brooklyn (Flatiron, Apr.), Xochitl Gonzalez reimagines The Great Gatsby as a story of 2007 Fort Greene, with women in the male roles and vice versa. Narrator Alicia, Gonzalez’s Nick Carraway, lives across the street from La Garza, a self-made fashionista who throws legendary parties. Garza wants to rekindle a romance with Alicia’s financier cousin Devon, setting the F. Scott Fitzgerald gears in motion.
In addition to writing fiction, you’re a staff writer for the Atlantic and a screenwriter. How do you think of your career?
I think of myself as a storyteller. I’m nosy, so once I’m telling a story, I want to know what happens. I do find, with fiction, I can’t toggle in and out of it. It’s like acting, where you have to stay with that character, in that world.
You conceived of Last Night in Brooklyn as an early-aughts Gatsby. How did you develop this project?
I went to see a gender-swapped version of Company on Broadway a few years ago, and it was really not good. I’m a Stephen Sondheim fan, but the whole thing is about a bachelor having a milestone birthday, and they never addressed the way that having a milestone birthday is different for a woman than for a man. I was fuming by the end, and I started thinking about other classics. I had reread Gatsby when I was finishing my MFA, and I thought, a woman would never reach out to her ex to brag about her success. Talk about an ineffective strategy! How many times does madly loving a man not go well for the woman who’s doing the mad loving, you know?
You don’t hit all the same beats as Fitzgerald. What were your decisions, adapting the plot and characters?
The first draft mirrored it closely. I scratched the itch, and then I let it become its own thing. I thought, if Nick was a woman, particularly a Puerto Rican woman, you’d know a lot more of her business. A Puerto Rican woman from Brooklyn is always going to give you more context, and she’s going to give you dish.
Your protagonist finds the daring La Garza “intoxicating.” Did you model her after anyone, having lived in Fort Greene at that time?
When I was starting this book, I had lunch in Fort Greene with one of my old neighbors, and this group of young women passed us. She was like, Oh my god, everything felt like possibility. So many of us came from first-gen families or parents who had traditional jobs, and we were all working in spheres that nobody knew anything about. We looked to slightly older people with deep admiration. Mara Hoffman started her fashion line in the neighborhood. Spike Lee still had his film production company there. La Garza is an amalgam of a bunch of women who had no business doing something so high-risk, because they had no safety net, but they were like, I’m an artist, and I do what I need to do.
How did you pitch this novel to Flatiron?
This is my third book with my editor, Flatiron publisher Megan Lynch. I actually made a PowerPoint and a playlist, because I knew exactly what the story was. I had questions lingering about what was going to happen with La Garza, but I didn’t want to worry about perfecting 20 good pages to sell this book on. When I handed it in, we were all amazed at how close it was to that vision.
Readers will see a bygone Brooklyn in your pages. Why take us back to that moment?
I was inspired to document a neighborhood and a national mood that were about to change. Alicia’s retrospective point of view is 2011 or 2012, and it was strange to think about how much changed from 2007 to then. And it was special to capture a time where we hadn’t yet ceded attention to our phones. I would love people to finish this book and be like, Hey guys, let me call a friend! We should go out!
Xochitl Gonzalez will appear at the breakfast keynote and the evening author reception on Feb. 25.
