Alejandro Varela’s Middle Spoon is an epic page-turner narrative structured around emails (72 in total!) to an ex-boyfriend. The story takes us on a deep dive into the corners of a heartbroken mind while simultaneously negotiating mental health and polyamory. After Ben breaks up with our narrator, a public health worker in New York City, he is bewildered, grieving, searching for ways to make sense of his pain and loss. The context behind this loss deepens its force: the narrator’s husband of 20 years, their two children, the two therapists receiving the avalanche of emails and the backdrop of a contemporary New York City. 

In Middle Spoon, we get a close view of the anxious mind at play: the imaginative leaps of jealousy, the intellectualization of feelings, the obsession over details. Navigating this specific breakup for our narrator also means dealing with his own mental health, people’s views on polyamory, his own ideas [of/about] gay men’s sluttiness, as well as the social and political ramifications of structural inequalities as they manifest themselves in New York City. Yes, there’s an obsessiveness in this epistolary saga, and that is its strength: The obsessiveness sizzles with humor and honesty. The pull of the text is visceral because it deals with the very human ways we want to be seen, witnessed, and loved in our pain. 

Varela and I spoke about anxiety, being gay while heartbroken, and the very strong desire to be witnessed while we experience loss.

Julián Delgado Lopera: How’s your heart?

Alejandro Varela: Exhausted, frightened, happy, you know. Thanks for asking.

JDL: I loved your book. I was trying to figure out, what is it that I really love about this book? The voice of the narrator is smart, sassy, very self-aware, anxious and, at times, absurd. How did you arrive at this voice,and why is it the best one to tell this particular story?

AV: The book is a love story, a heartbreak story, a poly story. It’s all those things. But it’s also a mental health story. I had this feeling as I was writing it, that I was trying to transcribe an anxious mind—I can’t say that’s super different than what I do in my other books—but the character in Middle Spoon is grappling with mental health issues. And I thought this was a great way to communicate the intensity of the experience, both the heartbreak, but also the way his brain processes emotions and life. The voice is then aided by the structure, because the letters allow him to be . . . I don’t use the word manic here, but he is in a high energy.

JDL: That anxiety to me is an emotional engine for the narrator and also for the piece. What keeps the momentum going is the fueling of this anxious mind.

AV: I think anxiety, which I have dealt with in my life, can be very debilitating and scary and frustrating. But when you’re writing it, and maybe even when you’re reading it, there’s a humor there because the anxious mind, or at least this narrator’s mind, is such a gloom and doom, like worst case always. Everything for him is intense and urgent and scary. But, in the end, it’s just heartbreak. I mean, it sucks, but it is just heartbreak. When I’ve been through this process of heartbreak, all I need is to talk to a few people in my life, and I can see and hear in their voice that they feel bad for me, but they’re also like, okay, and what are we making for dinner? Which could be callous and is actually very grounding because it’s a reminder this is going to pass, I’m not dying. But the anxiety communicates something different. When I was writing Middle Spoon, I wanted so badly for how terrible heartbreak feels to come across. This is heavy, this is real, but then also the fact that the narrator loses control over himself is fascinating to me. I wanted to intellectualize the pain away, because I knew it was not going to be there forever.

JDL: Why is the epistolary form the best way of capturing heartbreak here?

AV: The age gap between the narrator and his ex is almost a decade. The narrator has been out of the dating pool effectively his entire life because he married his husband very young and has been with him a long time. In addition to feeling this pain, he is also trying to navigate the rules of breakup. As he says in emails, he just wants to reach out to Ben. He thinks it is ridiculous that they’re not talking. I mean, even if they’re going to break up, they should talk about it, they should process it. At no point does Ben say, “never contact me again.” But our narrator is held back by this idea of boundaries. He could have been reaching out to Ben the entire time, but he’s like, No, I’m going to be strong, and I’m not going to break these rules, I don’t want to be seen poorly. 

That is a preoccupation of mine in this life, in this moment. I’ve been young for so long, and I’m no longer young, and I forget that. I could imagine being in a scenario in which I reach out to someone who’s dumped me, who’s younger, and them being like, what you’re doing right now is such an infringement on my safe space and my boundaries. Our narrator has that sort of self-awareness and always wanting to be a good guy, which can be really annoying. The letters were a way to get it all out. And they never affect anyone because they only go to the therapists. And I liked this idea that they were unsent, because then he could write as many as he wanted, and then I could write as long as I wanted to, because they are never going anywhere. So there’s no danger of like, abusing anyone or mistreating anyone. He’s just getting it all out for himself in a way.

JDL: There’s something really interesting that happens with time in these emails that feels very loopy to me. Time is circular here. Towards the beginning of the novel, the narrator writes how he doesn’t want to forget how he’s feeling, the pain he’s experiencing. There’s this constant back and forth between wanting time to pass quickly while simultaneously not wanting to forget. Wanting to dig and unearth memory after memory. The act of trying to both remember and forget, this push and pull, is an obsessive way of keeping Ben alive inside him. 

AV: There was a very brief moment in the writing process where I wasn’t sure what the time span was going to be for the book. What if this were all one day? What if I really magnified his OCD and his anxiety? What if I just said, this is what happens when you cannot be left in the dark? One of the pillars of OCD is needing all the information at all times to feel safe. But here, there’s uncertainty. The narrator just doesn’t know. He doesn’t really understand why the relationship ended. He doesn’t know what Ben is doing. I could imagine those 72 emails being easily written in one day, but I didn’t want that. I don’t know if I was talented enough to do that. I thought it was important to show a little bit of growth and process, and then you have to acknowledge time. But you’re right. The writing was a way to keep Ben alive. At the beginning, he says he didn’t just love Ben. He loved loving Ben. That whole experience, he didn’t want it to disappear. For the pain to be over, he’d have to stop loving Ben. And so it’s almost like, let’s keep feeling the pain because at least that keeps Ben alive.

JDL: This gets to the strong desire to be witnessed by the therapists, by his friends, his husband. I felt very tender about his need to be seen even though he knows everybody gets a little bit annoyed of constantly witnessing him. The emails are not meant to be read by Ben but there’s an entire audience—the readers—who are witnessing and seeing his pain.

AV: There’s a scene in which he’s in the farmer’s market, and all he wants is to connect with a complete stranger, someone who didn’t know anything else about him, but who knew the experience of heartbreak and could comfort him. When you are feeling that sort of pain and grief, it’s very easy to feel absolutely alone, like you are in a dream. You know people are out there but there’s no way to break out of your haze, and so you feel even more alone. And then it’s scary. I remember once talking to a therapist at the height of grief, we were ending the call and I said, I’m really afraid for the call to end because then I’ll be alone again so I would love to just talk to you for the rest of the day. He started to cry and said, you’re going to be fine, I promise you. And then the call ended. But it was like that feeling, just please someone see this, because if you see it, I’m not alone. I don’t have that particular trait in common with the narrator. When I am going through something, I email everyone in my life, and I say, please come over for dinner every day this week, I need someone. I will cook dinner. Because for me, community is incredibly healing. Writing the book was a way to connect with a lot of people at once. Like you said, it’s a little meta, he’s writing these things that none will see, but I’ve written it as a book for everyone to see.

JDL: Sometimes the narrator would start talking about Ben, but then it would lead into gentrification, and we zoom out and discuss that, and then we come back to bed with Ben. There’s the backdrop of New York, which is where it all happens, and the aspect of public health and social justice claiming space into his memory. How does public health and social justice intersect with heartbreak?

AV: It’s twofold. On a very personal level, my background is in public health. I consider myself a public health worker, and my medium is fiction. I see the matrix clearly after studying public health, in a way that makes me so much more empathic and understanding and creative. I’m thinking constantly about how us individuals fit into a larger system. I like to give perspective, but I want to connect with humans on an individual level. I want to constantly remind myself and others that we are part of this grid, like we’re much bigger than this moment. When I’ve been in pain or sad about something, I’m still thinking about what the hell is happening in the country and in Gaza, they’re on my mind all the time. I wanted that to come through in the writing.

JDL: There is so much gay culture, especially gay male culture, that our narrator is constantly negotiating. For instance, his unwillingness to fuck around or have anonymous sex as the gay-male way of forgetting Ben. How much he’s pressured to do it, how much he is constantly thinking Ben is using Grindr to forget him. And one of my favorite parts are the pages we spend talking about top/bottom power dynamic. All of this takes up so much space in his head.

AV: Everything I write, I realize after the fact, is questioning conformity. It’s like I’m constantly wondering what systems are in place for a good reason, and which ones are in place for a bad reason, and which are just lazy because we haven’t questioned them. And the narrator has been in a relationship for 20 something years, has been primarily monogamous, and so he doesn’t have a lot of experience fucking around. He’s questioning a lot of his own preconceived notions around sex and health and probably religion, and he’s feeling envy. It’s funny, only this moment of heartbreak could drive him to question his values.

JDL: Why is that? 

AV: He’s so desperate to feel something. He’s willing to be like, the last 40 years I’ve been afraid of casual sex, so I’m just gonna give it a try, right? I like that we follow someone who can be so closed-minded or conservative about this sort of thing, and then see him change and witness what it takes for him to change. It was kind of fun to break apart his life a little bit, not in a masochistic or sadistic way. I mean seeing a life change because of the circumstances, the dire sort of straits he’s in, emotionally lead to life changes. 

JDL: The way you’re dealing with polyamory here is very interesting. I noted how people’s reactions to this relationship structure in the narrator’s life were playing out in the narrative. The way, for instance, that Ben was having to be kept a secret, but also how people’s reactions to this structure were affecting the narrator while he simultaneously carries all this guilt with his husband for being such a wonderful supportive man while he is a mess heartbroken over a boyfriend.

AV: When I started writing the book, I didn’t intend for it to be poly. But while I was editing it, I embraced it. I’m very happy to talk about it, but it really was so focused on the grief part. You’ve heard of peps? Progressives except for Palestine. Well, I would add, I know a lot of progressives, except for public school and except for polyamory. For some people, the discomfort with polyamory is around them immediately putting themselves in the place of someone left behind. People that I’ve encountered who are opposed to polyamory [are opposed to it] because they see themselves as being mistreated. As in, in this situation, they identify with the husband immediately and say, well, there must be something wrong. They can’t even imagine being comfortable or safe enough in a relationship or with yourself for this relationship structure to be okay. It’s so foreign. And, in a way, the narrator is having trouble with it, but he’s justifying it to himself. The narrator didn’t decide he wanted a poly situation. What he decided was that he wanted Ben to last, and then it was suddenly like, oh, this is poly. He should have read the book first, but he didn’t. And so he’s figuring it out as he goes. And in his way of trying to fit in, which is back to the conformity, he’s like, Well shit. Now I’m going to be in this unorthodox structure that makes me stand out. So he’s making a case for why it’s normal and healthy, like he’s selling it to the reader because the logic is, if you accept this, you accept me.

JDL: Why is the humor so important for this book?

AV: Because he can get professorial. Also, yes, respect to OCD and anxiety, but it can still be annoying on the page. So the humor, which, by the way, comes naturally to me. Someone asked me the other day if I do a humor pass on my writing, and I don’t, but I think the humor makes the rest palatable. The narrator first disarms you, and then annoys the hell out of you, and then he’s endearing. I believe, I hope, because he’s not easy to tolerate. But it becomes easier if you can laugh, right? If you can laugh a little bit while this is all happening, I think it makes it much easier. We’re talking about reparations in one chapter and then sexual assault in another, and it goes down a little bit more smoothly with humor.