(“My life, in some ways, is just a series of inappropriate encounters with heterosexual men,” Taylor joked.) And both have stood on the precipice of a scientific career and had to ask whether to walk back or leap. Both have had confusing trysts with straight men. Both are migrants to the Midwest by way of Alabama. Taylor knows that Wallace sounds a lot like him. Grappling with the death of his father, a nascent romance with a straight friend, the potential failure of his scientific work and a general sense that he doesn’t fit into the predominantly white cohort of his university campus, Wallace must figure out whether he wants to continue on his path as a student or chart a different course. “Real Life” follows one pivotal weekend in the life of Wallace, a black gay biochemistry Ph.D. “I could survive not having science, but I couldn’t survive not having writing,” he said.
But when he received an acceptance letter from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, he decided that, this time, writing would win. Throughout his undergraduate years at Auburn University at Montgomery and graduate school in Wisconsin, he felt he had to choose between science or writing, and science often won. “That kind of seems like a sign, too,” he said. Encouraged, he went back to his novel, recovering it from one of his rejected queries. A few weeks later, he found out he had received a fellowship from the Tin House summer writing workshop. Taylor also deleted the manuscript files from his computer, attempting to scrub the book from his life. The result is “Real Life,” which Riverhead is publishing next week, a novel that merges two versions of him: Brandon Taylor the writer and Brandon Taylor the scientist. “It began in this very mercenary place,” he said, “but it moved to a place of genuine artistic interest.” He gave himself rules, setting a goal to write 10,000 words a day. Scenes he wanted in the book (a tennis match, a dinner party). Things he considered himself good at (tone, dialogue). He started with a series of lists: Reasons he had failed to write a novel (too concerned with inventing everything, problems with setting and time frame). “If there is a problem, I first determine the parameters of the problem, and then I try to lay out a very systematic way of doing it.” “I have this very technical approach to almost everything,” he said during a video interview from Iowa, where he now lives. When he set out to write a novel, Brandon Taylor, a former doctoral student in biochemistry at the University of Wisconsin, approached it like a scientist.
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