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The author and journalist sits down with Hadley Stewart to discuss his latest novel, abuses of power and conversations about grief.
It turns out that just like author and journalist Justin Myers, I too toy with how to structure my writing. Unlike Myers and his latest novel, The Glorious Dead, it didn’t take me two decades to get my words in the right order for this interview; but I think we can forgive Myers for taking his time on this book. This one feels different. Somewhat of a departure from his writing that is known for dissecting all things dating and relationships, this novel explores what happens when someone dies, the impact that this has on the people they leave behind, and the retelling of someone’s life from different perspectives.
I first met Myers almost nine years ago at a media event hosted by the magazine I was writing for at the time. There were blue cocktails that gave you a migraine after just a couple of sips, and canapés the size of stamps. He had just ‘come out’ some weeks before the event, having spent years writing an anonymous dating blog under the pseudonym ‘The Guyliner’, revealing his identity alongside the announcement of the release of his first novel, The Last Romeo, which was published in 2018.
Originally from West Yorkshire, Myers moved to Southampton to attend university, before living in Edinburgh and then London. It was whilst working as a journalist that he began writing his blog. Not only did the blog prove to be popular amongst readers, it saw him earn a column in Gay Times and later GQ.
“They say, ‘Write what you know’ and I’m a strong believer in that,” says Myers today. True to his word, Myers’s first novel was about a journalist who writes an anonymous dating blog. Although when I interviewed him about The Last Romeo ahead of its publication, he told me he understood why people might think the book was autobiographical. There were elements of that book that were true to his own life, but like any good writer a lot of it was also made up. He never slept with an Olympic athlete either, he made clear, just in case any of his readers were wondering.
The Glorious Dead is Myers’s fifth novel and tells the story of Laurie Blount, a famous West End playwright, who dies and leaves behind his husband, Jo, and their friends. But when pages of Laurie’s unpublished memoirs are found, those who knew him are forced to face a side to him that they did not know. Whilst he’d considered writing it sooner, it seems that two things needed to happen beforehand for Myers to get this one right: the experience of writing several novels, and the experience of life.
So when it came to writing The Glorious Dead, Myers explains that he struggled in the beginning: “I think I was too young to write a story with any knowledge of those big, heavy themes in the book. I’d lost a grandparent or two, but the kind of mourning that is described in The Glorious Dead is worlds away from that.” He wrote the first chapter in 2009, having had a vague idea for the story in the shower in his late twenties, before shelving it and occasionally returning to the story over the course of two decades.
Has he looked back at that first chapter since? “I still have it! The writing is actually quite good,” replies Myers, who believes that it would have been an ambitious first novel for a debut author. “I was very serious and had no clue about the way my author career would start.”
There is certainly a shift in this book away from what we have come to expect from the author, who is known for his humorous rom-coms. Yes, there are light moments and humour, but there is no getting away from the exploration of “the unpleasant places” this novel takes us.
“I was scared of the plot,” he admits. “I just wasn’t sure anyone was ready for a book like that. Obviously, lots of things happened in the news while that book was going on in my mind, and then being written, that persuaded me that the world was ready. It was happening.” The news that he is referring to, does he mean the abuse of power from those in the public eye? “Well, we can’t name specifics,” he caveats. “But abuses of power, yeah. It came to the fore a lot more as I was writing it.”
One such abuse of power that continues to make headlines of late is the inappropriate behaviour of men and those who have fought to hold them accountable for their actions. The likes of the #MeToo movement and Time’s Up have changed the conversation. All the while, the election of Donald Trump arguably serves as a reminder that there is still work to be done.
The character of Ned, one of Laurie’s friends, feels to speak to this point, I tell Myers. “The character of Ned and that plot predates everything,” he replies, tiptoeing somewhat in his answer, adding that he does not want to name anyone in particular who might have inspired this character. Myers recalls when he was younger, there were certain men who he would stay away from at parties. “It was almost an open secret. And not even famous people, these were just people in a social group, or people you would see when we went out clubbing.”
As for the behaviour of queer men towards other men, Myers tells me that he does know men in positions of power who “not lure, so much, but would draw younger gay men to them.” He took his inspiration from these men when constructing this character, whilst being conscious of not wanting to “sensationalise” what Myers describes as a common story in certain circles.
His fascination with power and the darker side of celebrity aren’t born out of recent headlines, though. Growing up, he mentions that he observed the impact that power can have on a person, citing that he felt that he had “very little” of it. “Most people who crave power and obtain it shouldn’t have it, because they want it for nefarious reasons, or they just get carried away with it,” he argues, pointing to someone who suddenly gains hundreds of thousands of followers on social media. “They change. They get weird.”
The novel’s main character, Laurie, wields his power differently. Is that still an abuse of power? “It’s not just about the exploitation of power in his case, it’s about how he uses his power on other people,” says Myers. The character, for instance, pays for his friend to go on a photography course, pays for another friend to attend several writing classes, and helps another open a cafe. “It’s just kind of the subtle ways that you begin to own people if you allow your power to open doors for them.”
Arguably one of the most prominent themes in the book, and perhaps the most challenging to successfully pen, is that of grief. I’ve noticed that more and more people are talking about grief, I tell Myers. “Yes, I think it is being discussed more widely,” he says. “I am not entirely sure how useful many of those discussions are. I feel there is still a lot of… not dishonesty, because that makes it sound like it’s malicious. But it’s kind of a misrepresentation of what grief is.”
Myers lost one of his closest friends, Nichola, six years ago. She died suddenly. The two of them had been texting only the day before. “The day of her death is a dark, misshapen jigsaw piece that doesn’t fit the blue-skied, happy and silly puzzle of a life we had shared. I remember it with photographic horror.” he wrote in the Guardian last September.
Similarly to the characters in his book, he too was given unsolicited advice about the different stages of grief. “None of that has ever been useful to me,” he reflects. “I’ve found that the conversations around grief don’t really examine what it is and how other people react to it.” The phrases that people pull out to describe grief to those who have lost someone are beautiful and unhelpful, as he describes it. “It doesn’t help when you are still grieving and you’re back at work a month later, and everyone else is sick of you not being yourself. Grief is much more nuanced than that.”
Myers’s own experiences of grief are woven into The Glorious Dead. His careful construction of how the people who survive Laurie react to his death and deal with their own grief demonstrates his intimate understanding of how everyone moves on at different paces. “You can’t make someone move forward at the pace that’s more convenient for you,” Myers tells me, adding that there is an inconvenience to grief from those who live alongside someone who is grieving. “They’re embarrassed by it. They feel awkward around it.”
There might be advice about how a person should handle their own grief, but what about how to deal with someone else’s? “Everybody fucking dies, and we all experience the loss of someone at some point or another, but we still do not know how to handle someone else’s grief at all,” says Myers.
The book also explores the notion of revisionism when a person dies. There is, Myers points out, the expression: don’t speak ill of the dead. Whilst writing The Glorious Dead, he thought about how people who have died are remembered by others. When he was 18 years old, Myers lost his grandfather. “He was a character,” he recalls now. For Myers, his memory of him is as a “grumpy old man, whose grandchildren got on his nerves.” Today, however, he says that this version of his grandfather isn’t spoken about. “There’s a glossing over of certain things when a person dies,” adds Myers. “And it can work both ways. You can see the bad things about a person only ever talked about rather than the good, and vice versa.”
Something else that struck me about the book was its structure. We jump from multiple points of view, as well as pages of Laurie’s unpublished memoir. When I ask him about this, Myers tells me this was the most challenging aspect of writing the novel. “There’s a responsibility to make each character sound as different as possible and to find that balance,” he says. “My four previous books have been fairly simple. Structures take place more or less over a year or so. There’s a very definitive beginning, middle and end.” This time around, Myers was writing from multiple points of view and a dual timeline. How was that to write? “Sometimes I was just like, holy shit!”
And of course, it wouldn’t be a Justin Myers novel without the exploration of a character’s duality. “I really like the idea of discovering that someone you thought you knew really well was someone else entirely,” he says, before I cut him off, commenting on how he loves to write about people who are not as they seem on the surface. “I’m obsessed with it. I’ve experienced that having written under a pseudonym for all those years. I also think it comes back to growing up gay somewhere in the end too.”
There is also a pretty important plot twist in The Glorious Dead, with Myers leaving a trail of breadcrumbs throughout the book. Some readers pick up on this sooner than others, he tells me. When the recording for the interview stops, Myers turns to me and asks: “So, when did you work it out?”
‘The Glorious Dead’ by Justin Myers is out now. Photo credit: A D Myers.
