In 2019, the Oakland-based writer and cultural critic Carvell Wallace sold an idea for a memoir. Wallace had previously collaborated with Golden State Warrior Andre Iguodala on the New York Times bestselling memoir The Sixth Man. For this book, he planned to write a collection of magazine-style profiles of the people who had hurt him in his life, hoping to shine a light on some aspects of each of them. The goal was not necessarily to forgive them, but to help relieve Wallace of his resentment.
This Q&A was adapted from the Alta Weekly Newsletter, delivered every Thursday. To keep reading, become an Alta Journal member for as little as $3 a month.
SIGN UP
He would begin the book in earnest after the release of Finding Fred, the Peabody-nominated podcast he hosted and cowrote about the spiritual, moral, and political philosophy of Fred Rogers. Then the pandemic hit, travel to interview those people became impossible, and Wallace switched to another idea he’d been brewing in his mind.
The result is Another Word for Love, a collection of vignettes from Wallace’s life told with the empathy, reflection, and grace readers have come to expect from his profiles and essays that appear regularly in the New York Times Magazine, Esquire, Rolling Stone, and other publications. We met at Oakland’s Lake Merritt to discuss his book, writing, and the North Star project of his life.
This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.
I was so impressed when reading this book that you were willing to go to certain places, even for a writer known for writing personally. For example, you write about going to a queer POC sex party. Was there ever any aspect of you questioning whether you should go there?
Oh, all the way. But it doesn’t matter because my allegiance is to the story first. And so that chapter and other chapters that may have felt like oversharing or TMI—
Not oversharing, but I really felt like I was reading the work of a close friend. And you’re willing to treat a reader as a close friend, as a confidant.
Yeah, well that’s really important to me. I don’t think that the writing matters until someone reads it. It doesn’t mean everyone has to read it. But to be read is a tremendous privilege. And so I take that responsibility pretty seriously. I try to keep a tone of love and camaraderie with the reader throughout. But the other thing, too, is that a lot of the stuff that is shocking to people isn’t shocking to me.
Like what?
Well, like the queer POC sex party. I recognize that some people might be like, “Oh my God,” but it’s hard for me to see anything weird about that.
Well, in the Bay Area, that might not be so shocking.
Yeah, that’s true. I mean, I am deeply immersed in Bay Area methodology at this point in my life. But I consider that a helpful thing. And there are more important things to investigate around the way we’re physically intimate with each other than just, like, “Oh my God, look, someone had their penis out.” It has a political charge, it has a social charge, it has a spiritual charge. And so to write about that felt more important than making sure I didn’t come off weird to some random person in some other part of America.
What’s the spiritual charge that’s your North Star these days?
Well, it’s love. I often think that if you were born on an island nation surrounded by water, you might have 50 words for the ocean. Because the ocean isn’t just one thing. It’s so many different things, and I feel like love is that way too. And so part of what this book became is a meditation on many of the aspects that make up love. The practice of understanding what love is, dismantling what it isn’t, understanding what love creates, understanding what love doesn’t create—that, I think, is the North Star project for my life.
Could you talk a little bit about your relationship to writing before you became a known writer?
My relationship to writing is that I’ve always compulsively produced words. I haven’t always had the discipline to sit down and keep those words in order and work with them and shape them. I have always had other artistic pursuits. I went to school for theater. I played music for a long time. And when my kids were born, it became untenable for me to devote as much time to performance arts because I couldn’t be out of the house as much. And so writing slowly emerged as the one creative discipline that I maybe had to do if I was to do anything and still be a parent.
How would you describe your relationship with writing now?
It’s definitely in transition. It’s become professionalized, which is always a mixed blessing when it comes to an art. Because when it’s not professionalized, you’re there only for the passion of it. And then after it’s professionalized, it becomes work, expectations, and deadlines. And it becomes a little redundant, or it can. And so then you have to return and look for what compels you emotionally and spiritually about the possibilities of it, so that you don’t just clock in every day and sit at your desk like a robot.
And I always think a book isn’t done until you’ve finished talking about it for six months. Because there’s all kinds of s--- that I don’t think you know about the book until after you’ve written it, and there’s even more s--- that you don’t know about the book until after you’ve been asked questions by, like, a hundred different people. So I think I’m learning a lot about writing right now.•
