The Full Story: Drew Banks on Completing His 'Elba' Trilogy
Banks opens up in this unexpurgated interview about finishing a 25-year-long literary project.
When Drew Banks published his first novel, Able Was I, in 2005, he might never have foreseen that the journey he had embarked on would span twenty-five years and another two novels. Readers who undertook that journey with him discovered a triptych that creates a mosaic of moving human stories that take place across decades and span the spectrum of sexuality — including some of its darker aspects.
(Drew Banks. Photo credit: Sheila Von Driska)
In Able Was I, the protagonist, Grey Tigrett, ventures to the island of Elba, off the Italian coast, where he discovers new cultural and sexual experiences that open a door to parts of himself he’s shut away. In the sequel, Ere I Saw Elba, published in 2009, one of the characters from Able Was I — a French woman named Brigitte — takes center stage, with the story of her life the focus of the novel. Now, after sixteen years, readers can complete the journey with Banks’ third and final volume in the trilogy, I Before E, in which Paolo — first introduced as a child in Able Was I — grows up as a first-generation immigrant in New York City in the 1990s. His mother, Maria, has moved to the U.S. with her children in the wake of a family tragedy, the details of which she refuses to divulge. The mystery so intrigues Paolo that he clings to his Italian heritage and, in the course of a relentless quest that spans his young life, discovers there is more — much more — to the mystery than his father’s untimely death. Adding a dimension of possibly supernatural intrigue are Paolo’s recurring dreams… near-mystical visions that tease him with the possibility of discovery but also point to something more personal.
Complex family dynamics, emotionally charged psychology, generational trauma, and a sexual awakening that takes place degree by surprising degree all propel I Before E. The first two books may have completed the famous palindrome, but Banks’ capstone to the trilogy broadens the canvas and brings everything home… literally, as Paolo, growing into a young man in his own right, heads back to the island where it all began.
As a matter of full disclosure, Drew Banks and I have been friends for two decades. It was a personal, as well as professional, pleasure to interview him via email and a Zoom call about his latest novel.
Kilian Melloy: Our last interview was in 2009, with your publication of the second book in your trilogy, Ere I Saw Elba. It’s been a minute! Did this third book need a long time to gestate?
Drew Banks: I’ll give you so the real story: I was finishing editing Ere I saw Elba while Nick and I were on a vacation in Paris, and I was up at midnight, editing, on our vacation. I woke up the next morning and he said, “Okay, either a startup or a book, not both. You can’t do both.” I was like, “[Writing a book] is not going to pay our bills.” After publishing Ere I Saw Elba and doing that media tour, I had to hit pause. I knew the moment I published Ere I Saw Elba I wanted to write a trilogy. I even had an inkling of the theme. But I just had to hit pause until after I retired.
Kilian Melloy: Did you have any fiction writing experience prior to writing Able Was I? Or are you one of those disgustingly talented people who can say, “I’m gonna write a novel” and then sit down and do it?
Drew Banks: I’m going to go with “disgustingly talented.”
[Laughter]
Drew Banks: Seriously, I love stories; I always have. So much so that I spent much of my “day job” career in corporate communications. Therefore, even though I didn’t have an MFA or a track record in fiction, I knew I could craft a compelling story. I also knew I could finish a story, which, as any novelist will tell you, is half the battle. I knew this because when I started Able Was I, I had already published two business books with Wiley. The first of those books is subtitled: The Power of Strategic Corporate Journalism. It could have just easily been The Power of Corporate Storytelling.
Kilian Melloy: What made you decide to write Able Was I?
Drew Banks: The honest answer is that I wanted to prove my ex wrong after he said I didn’t have the educational chops to write a novel. We were breaking up at the time, and told him, “One of the things I want to do now that I’m single is write a novel.” And he just laughed. He’s like, “You only have an engineering background. You do not have the right credentials to write a novel. You don’t have the right liberal arts education, you didn’t go to the right schools.” I was like, “I will. I absolutely will.” Nothing motivates me more than telling me I can’t do something! I started the next day, and I it took me five years to write that book.
I was thinking of it before. The reason I agreed to write my first business book was because it was in the back of my mind: Maybe if I publish a business book, that’ll help me on the journey to publishing a novel. Not really, because those two worlds do not intersect at all. In fact, the world of literary fiction doesn’t trust you if you’ve written a business book. They’re like, “Your brain works a different way. You can’t do this.” But you do learn to finish a book, which is absolutely essential. That finishing process — editing and wrapping it up — really gets in the way of many, many writers’ ability to publish. So I was able to learn that.
Kilian Melloy: Why did you want to tell that story in particular?
Drew Banks: I wanted to develop a psychologically complex gay character who wasn’t a stereotype or caricature. When I started writing that novel in 2000, we were on the threshold of a new millennium and yet most LGBT stories still lurked in the celluloid closet, even though we had some mainstream LGBT acceptance as evidenced by the popularity of Will & Grace. I wanted to break free of those storytelling confines by writing about a gay protagonist who was a sexual being but whose coming-out process and sexual exploits were not the focus. I wanted the sex in the book to be real—not comic allusions—and sexy, but not pornographic. I wanted to depict our sex and love lives as just part of our stories. I wanted LGBT characters to be as expansive and complex as straight protagonists often are. LGBTQIA+ stories have come a long way since then, but in the early aughts, accessible, serious LGBT literature was far from the norm.
The way Able Was I starts is almost nonfiction. Everything else is fiction.
Kilian Melloy: When you made that book into a trilogy, what was the thinking behind delving into the backstories of characters that had appeared in the first book, perhaps only tangentially, rather than continuing to tell Grey’s story?
Drew Banks: Once I finished the first book and decided to write the second, I was like, “Well, Elba is such a symbol of exile, and Grey is emotionally exiled from himself. That’s going to be the theme of the second book.” I knew I wanted each book to be independent, and Brigitte was my favorite character. I just loved her. When I was writing Able Was I, I was like, “Wow, what’s her story?” And so, I wrote it.
When I made this decision, I realized I was sabotaging any chance of literary success. I had pitched AWI as an LGBT book and had scheduled a book / media tour in predominantly LGBT bookstores / media outlets across the US. Also, much of the feedback from my gay readers praised my ability to write authentic “hot gay sex.” So, I knew that a mostly sex-less prequel with a straight, older French female protagonist was going to alienate my core readers, as well as most distribution / media opportunities. But once I zeroed in on Brigitte and the thematic concept of exile, I never looked back.
Kilian Melloy: And now you circle around to Paulo, who’s very much a tertiary character in the first book. He’s a surprise choice for the protagonist, but if you wanted to bring things full circle, this was the way to do it.
Drew Banks: My original thought was Maria; she wasn’t as tertiary in the first book. I knew what her story was, but I didn’t know how to go deeper into it. As I was analyzing how to go deeper, I said, “Well, going deeper to relationship to her children.” And then I was like, “Maybe I’ll tell a story of two protagonists, Maria and Paulo.” I was halfway through the book about their story, and I realized the thrust of the book was the confusion of his sexual awakening. There are other themes in the book, but that was the central one. I was like, “Well, that’s not her story. That’s his story.” So, I went back and wrote his story.
(Drew Banks. Photo: Susan Brown)
Kilian Melloy: One of the fascinating things about the book was that Paolo explores a particular fetish. What is the story behind that?
Drew Banks: I don’t have an interest in it at all, which made this book a little difficult to write. My fetish is authenticity. If that’s a fetish, that’s my fetish.
[Laughter]
Drew Banks: But that’s the way the poem came to me. I can’t remember how it happened, if his curiosity about why his father drowned could enter his subconscious and then affect his sexual awakening in any sort of way. When I wrote that first dream sequence, I didn’t know it was going to turn into a sexual awakening novel. It just happened organically. It was also very strange for me to write about an underage kid’s sexual awakening. It was very uncomfortable for me, very uncomfortable. I wanted to make sure I dealt with that in a way that wasn’t voyeuristic, but also didn’t avoid the reality of the challenges of a sexual awakening. When something orthogonal enters and you’re like, “What’s that? Is that part of my sexual desire?,” you just don’t know. I wanted to try to be true to that. I think I succeeded, but it’s a hard line to walk.
Kilian Melloy: In our generation — maybe not so much now, I hope — you’d start having feelings and not understand what they were. When you got an inkling of what they were, you’d retreat into shame and secrecy. And then you’d have to have a whole different kind of sexual awakening to drag yourself out of the closet.
Drew Banks: Absolutely. You have to find out who you are as an integrated person, who you are beyond that sexual awakening. That’s just so complex, to have that many iterations of, like, “Oh, I’ve got to figure out my sexuality. I’ve got to figure out how to come out with my sexuality. I’ve got to figure out who I am, being open with that sexuality.” When you throw in gender, like, for trans people, how much more difficult is it? “What is my gender? What is my sexuality? Who I am with both of those things, and who am I a person?” It’s just so complex.
Kilian Melloy: When it comes to writing books about a cast of characters with complex interplay over generations, the only thing I can think of in gay literature is Armistad Maupin’s Tales of the City novels. Has anyone made that comparison?
Drew Banks: I love [his work]. He’s a very different writer than me. I sort of wish I had the lightness of his way of writing. But yes, one other person has made that comparison. It was last year at a creative writing program at Oxford, where my tutor said, “Your writing is like a combination of Armistead Maupin and Elena Ferrante,” the Italian writer that wrote My Brilliant Friend. While this comparison is flattering, my stye is not as commercial as Maupin or as literary as Ferrante. I’m probably somewhere in the middle.
Kilian Melloy: It feels like you are approaching these characters in a way that’s meant to allow for all colors of the rainbow.
Drew Banks: That’s exactly right. Having fought my way out of the closet, I didn’t want my sexual orientation to force me into a literary ghetto. I want my characters to resonate beyond the genre categories the literary and cinematic world has created for us. I’m fully aware that I may not have “the right credentials” — as my ex said — to pull off upmarket cross-genre fiction and that I am limiting my readership size by attempting it, but what can I say — I hate reductive profiling. I always have.
Kilian Melloy: Another place where there’s a depth of nuance — and also some dark mixed with those rainbow hues — is a pair of scenes in I Before E that involve, respectively, a blackout room at the back of a gay bar and a play space at the Folsom Street Fair. Your approach is a delicate balance that doesn’t delve into trauma porn — though trauma is clearly present. What was behind this aspect of the novel?
Drew Banks: It will come to no surprise to my readers that I was abused as a child. I don’t want to say much about this other than my abuse was groomed, not perpetrated by a family member, and the form it took was more akin to Brigitte’s trauma in Ere I Saw Elba than Paolo’s in I Before E. A surprising sidenote, I had no idea that I had based Brigitte’s childhood trauma on my abuse until years later when I was asked about my personal connection to the novel. I started my reply by saying that while Able Was I started out loosely based on me — like the protagonists of many debut novels — Ere I Saw Elba had nothing to do with me. Brigitte was simply a side character in Able Was I who’d fascinated me, and then I stopped cold in the middle of my answer. I think I even said, “You’ve gotta fu*#!ing be kidding me.”
Such a belated realization may sound crazy, but when I started writing Ere I Saw Elba I had never divulged my abuse to anyone; I had locked it away in a mental vault, so unexamined that I barely remembered it and didn’t consider it when I was writing the book. It wasn’t until answering that question that it suddenly hit me.
As for Paolo’s experiences in I Before E, all I can say is that they currently don’t feel very connected to my personal experience. With one exception. For most of my life (until I opened up about my abuse), I’ve had an extreme aversion to stories about child abuse. As an example, I literally threw Lolita across the room when I first started reading it in my early twenties and couldn’t finish the book until over two decades later. I also was uncomfortable with any media or environments where dominance/subservience is festishized. For years, my discomfort extended to the kinds of situations like those Paolo finds himself in, where the dom/sub dynamic and sex between people of vast age differences are consensual. Therefore, I can relate to how uncomfortable Paolo feels and his heightened awareness in these environments. I’m sure that I have some other subconscious connection to Paolo’s experiences as well, but I may not realize this connection for years — until someone else asks me a question that triggers a similar aha moment like the one I mentioned above.
Kilian Melloy: Is this the first public acknowledgement you’ve made of that abuse?
Drew Banks: Yes, absolutely, it’s the first time I’ve addressed it. I didn’t realize when I wrote Ere I Saw Elba but — I mean, I knew it had happened, but I never talked about it. I didn’t know until years after that that had influenced the book. When I tried to answer the question of whether I had a personal connection to the book, I was walloped by the realization that, “Oh, my god, that was such a driving force in that book.”
In this book, I don’t think it’s related to Paolo, but I have a feeling that years from now someone’s gonna ask me a question like this, and I’ll realize some connection. There’s probably something about how he relates to the hyper masculine energy that comes at him. I don’t know what it is, but there’s something there related to my abuse. The way that I know that something’s related to my abuse is, I feel it in my body. It’s a really deep feeling. Even though I can’t explain it, I feel it. I’m gonna let that unfold naturally and not try to dig out what it is, if that makes sense.
Kilian Melloy: It makes perfect sense. You ask yourself, “Where does this process end?” I don’t think it ends. I think, like anything in life, it’s an ongoing process. This happens to be part of my life.
Drew Banks: I totally agree. I mean, I’m 64, and I’m like, “Really, I’m still dealing with shit that happened to me when I was nine. I mean, that’s ridiculous!” But, you know, it’s the growth through your life. I’ve made a very conscious choice not to force any resolution. If it comes up, I’m no longer going to suppress it, but I’m not going to dig because I really don’t want to remember. I don’t want to force memories that are going to make me feel horrible. If my past is any guide, once they come up and once I process them, I’m in a much better place, a liberated place. I’m sure after this article comes out there’s going to be a liberation. The first time I accidentally brought it up in public, a group of friends were going around telling traumas, and it just blurted out of my mouth. It was the most liberating day. The lightness I felt after that revelation, and the way the shame just went off. It was unbelievable. I know I’ll probably feel something with this. I’m sort of looking forward to that.
Kilian Melloy: It feels like Paolo is going to make some crucial choices and chart some defining, perhaps painful, territory in later years. Do you have a tickle at the back of your mind to continue his story at some point? Or do you want the reader to continue his story in their own imagination?
Drew Banks: I can confidently say that I’m done with the trilogy. It was supposed to be a single novel, and now it’s been twenty-five years of my life. It’s time I move on. As for the future choices Paolo will make, I have an inkling, but I don’t know because I haven’t written them.
As a final anecdote, many of my Able Was I readers asked me after reading that book whether Paolo was gay. At that point, I had no idea, and it wasn’t until writing I Before E that I began to have a deeper understanding of his sexuality. But I’m still unsure how his sexuality will influence the choices he makes after the close of this book. For example, within hours after the epilogue ends, I hint that Grey might disclose an explosive revelation to Paolo. I truly have no idea how Paolo will react to this confession. I’m as curious as I hope my readers will be.
Kilian Melloy: You’re done with the trilogy, but are you done writing novels?
Drew Banks: I’m not done with writing. I’ve loved this. If anything, this has propelled me to write more. There is a book that I’ve been thinking about for even longer than this trilogy, for over 30 years. I’m not exactly sure what that book will be — whether fiction, or nonfiction, or blurring of the two — but I know I want to get that book done before my life is over. My Oxford tutor says she really thinks I should be writing another sort of gay novel. She loves the uniqueness of my voice and my gay characters and thinks that my next novel should be have a gay protagonist and really be an LGBT genre novel versus the blurring that I’ve done here.
“I Before E” is available now.