By Breen Nolan

Award-winning author Edgar Gomez is back with his second book Alligator Tears, an arresting memoir-in-essays that chronicles his experiences growing up in poverty with a single mother amidst the backdrop of touristy Florida. Gomez’s writing evinces a skillful analysis vital for examining one’s life on the page. Whether interrogating the systems hell-bent on silencing marginalized individuals or exploring the path to becoming a YouTube beauty influencer, Gomez transports his readers on a journey that will have them laughing through their tears. .

The Coachella Review spoke to Gomez about the evolving nature of his process, the value of nuance in nonfiction writing, and how he balances humor and sorrow in his work.

 The Coachella Review: I want to talk about your process. How do you get started on a project? Are you an outliner?

Edgar Gomez: My process is so messy. But I’m very comfortable with the mess. I’ve reached a place in my writing where I’m just like, it is what it is. And by that, I mean I may have 8,000 notes in my phone, a bunch of journals, a bunch of books with tabs that I swear I’m gonna revisit, and then I never do. A bunch of random scribbles on receipts that I swear are gonna change the whole book. Then I lose them. I just let it all brew. And over time, my ideas get a little bit more concrete, and I realize what’s important and what’s not important. It’s a little bit all over the place, but in a good way. Because at any moment, I can open a note on my phone, and it’s like, oh my god, this is the key. I have unlocked that thing I had totally forgotten about. And so, there are a lot of surprises.

TCR: After you get your first draft down, how do you move forward with revising? Do you revise as you go or only at the end?

EG: I do both. I revise as I go. Once I have a draft, I revise that draft until it physically pains me to sit down and look at the words in the Word doc again. Typically, I will allow myself to write a draft that isn’t beautiful or lyrical, that isn’t funny. [It] isn’t all the things I want my writing to be. I just let my first draft be a complete story. And then when it comes to revisions after I have the story nailed down, I can think about what’s funny. I think about what I can pull out and emphasize. What moments can I zoom in on? But generally, my first drafts are polished, but bad. It’s really important for me, especially when I’m writing about poverty—and it can be a very depressing subject—that I incorporate a lot of humor to sort of soften the blow for readers. Because growing up in poverty is very traumatic, if I sat down with the intention of—Okay, today you’re going to write a first draft where you’re going to pour out all this trauma, and on top of that, it also has to be hilarious…that’s such an impossible task. So I try to show myself some grace by allowing myself time to do those revisions. Otherwise, it’ll just feel very overwhelming.

TCR: You’re brilliant at weaving humor with sadness. I laughed and cried my way through this book. Can you talk more about how you find that balance between the two?

EG: Weaving the funny, making the descriptions more vivid, weaving in references…all of that comes in much, much later. And how do I balance it? It’s how I think. One thing about growing up poor is that you’re oftentimes forced to be very imaginative, forced to rely on fantasy. Those are things that are great for humor writing. When I read, I want to read stories that are honest about the entire breadth of human experience. And part of that honesty requires acknowledging that, yes, life is very sad sometimes, but it’s also very funny and absurd. And so, even when there is a really dark moment, I try to ask myself, Okay, what is it that got you through that dark moment? And oftentimes, it’s fantasizing or a sense of humor. Those things just naturally go hand-in-hand for me.

I’m so grateful when people acknowledge that there is some humor in the story or that they laugh at any point because sometimes I feel like—and this is the thing that I and a lot of my friends laugh about—we tell one another a sort of traumatic story from our childhoods that we think is funny, and their reaction is like, “I don’t know, that is just… you’re just describing trauma.”

That happens so much that I don’t always trust my funny instinct where I’m like, I think this is hilarious, but do other people just see the trauma?

TCR: That makes sense. Also, it’s very funny! I love that you mentioned fantasy. Just the idea of Florida as a whole. It’s the perfect place to interrogate the idea of “The American Dream” while growing up in poverty, growing up othered. Did you have that in mind when you went into the book? Or was that thread more organic?

EG: It was a little bit organic in that, growing up in Florida, I just had the material there. It is a place where, naturally, all of the themes that I wanted to get into the book are brought to life. The fact that there’s just vastly different worlds. I mean, on a class level, it’s the tourist economy, then there are the people who are serving the tourists. On a racial and ethnic level, it is just like an immigrant hub. But at the same time, it’s the South, where there’s a lot of racism. On a queerness level, I mean, it’s like the campiest place to live, where it’s just very bright; all the gay bars [have] theme-park vibes. But [it’s also where] where the Pulse nightclub shooting happened. Where queer books are being banned. There’s just this constant negotiation between these things. So, in that way, it was organic.

But then as I was writing the book, I was like, Okay, I really have to bring all of these things further to the surface. On that level, there was a lot of intention that went into how I write about Florida [and] the specific places that I wanted to take readers to because I didn’t want to be forced into this role of tour guide…so I had to be very specific when I described Florida. I had to ask myself, How does this relate to the story that I’m telling? How is this relevant? Is this you falling into that tour guide voice just because you think so many people are interested in Florida? Or is this actually serving the larger book?

TCR: When writing about yourself, do you experience self-doubt?  And, how do you manage that?

EG: I think constantly, yeah, of course. Part of the doubt is that, as human beings, we’re constantly evolving and growing and changing our minds about things. And so, the doubt that I have is almost like anticipatory doubt: I am confident about how I feel about [something written] now, but am I gonna look back on this in five years, and be like, is that really what you were thinking? That is a concern I sometimes have. One way that I go about approaching that doubt is by trying to lean into nuance as much as I can. It’s very rare that I’ll just say this is the way things are. I might say, this is the way things are now, but it might change. Or [I’ll say], there are so many different levels to this. But just try to lean into that nuance so that I can make space for complexity of both emotions and my thinking.

TCR: I’d like to go back to the humor aspect of your writing, specifically when you wrote about the Pulse nightclub shooting. There’s so much intention in finding the balance of lightness with the dark. I think a lot of people writing nonfiction want to find that balance, but it’s complicated. What else can you say about that?

EG: Firstly, I would say that one reason that I feel comfortable talking about the humor in my book is that I don’t feel like I make myself the funny character. Everybody else is way funnier than me. I’m just surrounded by so many people that are naturally hilarious and are always there to cheer me up. I think that’s one thing that maybe nonfiction writers could do a little bit more. Because oftentimes, when we sit down to write a “humor story,” we think, Oh my God, I have to be hilarious. But the reality is, we’re surrounded by so many people who are probably funnier than us. They already did the work; we just have to quote them. So, putting myself in the back seat a little bit, and giving other people moments to shine is really important when it comes to humor writing for me.

The second thing is, I approach the humor in each essay in a different way. The type of jokes that I’m going to have in a story about me trying to be a YouTube beauty influencer are going to be a lot different from the types of “jokes” that I use in a story about the Pulse nightclub shooting, where it is very important for me to be respectful and to treat the situation with the appropriate amount of reverence and to give everyone, but especially the victims, their due dignity. And in that essay, the type of humor I leaned into is more situational. Where it’s more like, Isn’t it so absurd that I was at this gay bar at a vigil for the Pulse nightclub shooting and there was some dude walking around in a leather quilt and harness? Those are the kinds of details that I think bring stories to life, that are burned into our memories. And so that’s why it’s so easy for me to reference them—because I will never forget that I was there and I saw that man.

I find that not all the time, but often when people write about shootings, but specifically in this case, the Pulse nightclub shooting, I understand why people approach the subject through this lens of tragedy. It is very tragic. I’ve also written about it through the lens of tragedy, especially in my first book. But this time around, I was thinking a lot about how Pulse was a place that was just this light in my life. And I was thinking about the people who went there, who I was in community with, and how funny they were. How sexual they were. How they would dress to the nines. And as I was thinking about all those things, it really took me back there, and I felt almost, like, safe again. And it was really important for me when I wrote this story, that I wrote it through a lens of celebration—that I was honest about what it was like to be in that space—and part of that meant leaning into humor.

TCR: Are you the kind of writer who keeps books around for inspiration? If so, what are those books?

EG: For sure. I mean, whenever I have writer’s block, I pick up a book. Whether it’s good or bad, I’m suddenly so inspired. If it’s a good book, I’m like, Oh my god, I have to write something like this! Like, this is the goalpost. If it’s a bad book, I’m like, Oh my god, I can’t believe this got published. It is very important for me that I have a lot of books around me. I would say for this one, a couple that were inspiring were books set in Florida or written by queer authors. T Kira Madden’s Long Live the Tribe of Fatherless Girls. I mean, she just does everything I could possibly want. I [reread] it all the time. Like, how did she do all this? And I would say, I look at books for different things. I mean, I looked at… Meaty by Samantha Irby just because we had some similarities in our childhoods regarding having to care-give for our mothers.

I was also rereading Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston, the most iconic Florida writer. I looked to her for how beautiful her prose is. What I love about her is that she doesn’t take Florida as a joke. She treats it like she would anywhere else. And that’s really important for me, especially because I think some people might be drawn to this book, thinking, oh, it’s going to be messy Florida. And it is, but I also have a lot of love for Florida. I think it is a very beautiful place, and just because there are some bad apples there—or bad oranges—I’m not gonna throw the whole place away. That feels like I’m letting them win.

TCR: What’s something you pay attention to when writing about other people in your life? You mentioned being funnier than you, is there anything else?

EG: I will say, if I do not have to write about a person, I will not write about them. I will kill off people in my life. There are people that I literally grew up with in my household under the same roof that I was like, I’m just not gonna acknowledge you. Because to write about you, I would have to write a whole other book to really treat you with the proper care and respect you deserve. But in general, I do try to ask myself, Am I approaching every person with as much fairness as possible? Even if, in one scene, I show them behaving badly, are there other scenes to balance that out? To really give them dimension? Or alternatively, if there is somebody in my life who I just do not like, but for some reason I have to write about them for the story to work, I will straight up say that in the story. I’ll make it clear that I’m not trying to paint an unbiased portrait—that I’m very biased. So if they do read it, it’s just like, Look, I said that I don’t like you. Then I wrote about how I don’t like you. Where did I lie?

TCR: [laughs] Well said. I was moved by your empathy and the care you took at the end of the book after your mom read your first book, High-Risk Homosexual. The way you brought in her conversation was moving. Can you talk about that part of the book?

EG: I think, in the case of my mom, I was very lucky in that the last chapter, she calls me and we have this long conversation. It was another case of, I just had to quote her, she gave me the material. Because at this point, I’ve written two books in which she’s the main character. I needed to give her space on the page to tell her story for herself, in her own words. I felt very lucky that she gave me this monologue that I could straight-up transcribe and give her the opportunity to tell her story in her own words.

Oftentimes in nonfiction workshops, people can be very callous. They’ll be like, Well, if somebody did something bad to me, I’m gonna write about it. Then they’ll be like, if they want, they can write their own book. And I’m like, Hey, yeah, these are points. But realistically, we know that it is very hard to write a book. And so, it felt very nice that my mom, who isn’t going to write a book, had her own voice very much present in this book.

TCR: Can you tell me what you’re working on next?

EG: No plans yet, but I want to take a little break frow writing about myself to write about something totally different. Maybe gay chupacabras.

---

Breen Nolan is a writer from Rochester, New York. She is a current MFA candidate in the University of California, Riverside-Palm Desert low-residency program in Creative Writing & Writing for the Performing Arts and is the managing editor at The Coachella Review. She lives in Portland, Oregon with her family.