After ten-year-old Suzanne Delgado watched her parents’ marriage disintegrate, she leapt at a chance to go on tour with her father, who she adored; Gil Delgado, brimming with melody and charisma, was finally on the verge of breaking through, to becoming “somebody.”
But Gil and the Kills were a combustible bunch, and life on the road with a hard-driving band, while exhilarating, was ultimately no place for a little girl. The resulting conflagration essentially ended her relationship with her dad and left deep scars on Suzanne, even as she did her best to deny and suppress the wounds.
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“Hot Wax,” M.L. Rio’s first novel since her 2017 debut, “If We Were Villains,” shifts between that late-‘80s storyline and 2018 when Suzanne inherits her father’s old car and takes to the road, trying to both chase and shed ghosts from her past. Ditching a conventional marriage that was suffocating her, she joins a loving couple, Simon and Phoebe, who flourish on society’s fringes.
The characters’ lives are all messy, and both timeframes are propelled by a sense of impending and explosive violence.
“I live life like a contact sport and my fiction is the same way,” Rio said in a recent video.
Rio will be at Book Soup on October 8th, discussing the book in conversation with Amanda Montell. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Q. You’re wearing a Band of Skulls T-shirt. Do you pick a different rock band shirt for each interview and promotional event?
As you can probably tell from the book, I do really love vintage clothes, I love kitsch and record collecting and analog media. In the digital age, I find stuff you can hold onto in a tangible way increasingly charming. So with a 34-city tour, I’ve had a lot of fun pulling vintage clothes from my closet – but most of my clothes are actually band T-shirts and hand-me-downs or vintage.
Q. What did you listen to while you were writing?
I’m very research-heavy about everything. I’m kind of a Method writer. When I was working on this book, I actually lived out of my car for 18 months because I wanted to get out there and do it right. So I lived out of a two-door 2012 Honda and drove six or seven coast-to-coast road trips. I listened to a lot of the Stooges, because I was thinking about Iggy Pop’s animal magnetism and The Gun Club, The Birthday Party and the big hard rock acts of the ‘80s like Guns N’ Roses. I did think a lot about the New York Dolls, and another touchpoint for me was David Bowie in his Ziggy Stardust era and the plastic soul era – there’s a lot of that in Gil’s DNA.
I would love to see if I can get a real band to record tunes for the lyrics I wrote as Gil for their songs.
Q. Was it important to show that Suzanne’s relationship with Simon and Phoebe was real and legitimate, not just a finding-herself fling?
That was very important to me.
My family and the culture tried to push me in one direction. And I found that really frustrating. I never wanted to be a mom and was not interested in getting married. I value my autonomy and my agency. So if the nuclear family is not for you, what other options are there? And how do people on the margins socially find ways to build community and take care of each other?
I’ve been very lucky that I have very, very good friends in my life who have become found family. Suzanne finds a version of that with Simon and Phoebe. Representing polyamory in the book, I wanted to be careful not to give the impression that this was about sex or convenience, which is why there is so little sex depicted on the page. It was much more about alternative ways of building a life that can actually be more comfortable and healthier than the sort of traditional family model of a married couple with kids.
Q. You write at one point that Gil and Suzanne had ruined each other, which implies that she was still carrying the feeling that she was responsible for what went wrong. Why doesn’t she see things clearly as an adult?
The book is this journey of unlearning the guilt complex that she’s carried with her since she was a child. That comes not just from the concert tour, but also the breakup between her parents and how she’s in the middle. When you’re young, it’s difficult to separate feeling bad about things that are happening around you and what is actually your fault.
Q. Do you hold onto your past in a similar way?
Absolutely. I was raised by very Catholic parents, and spent what I call ten malformative years in Catholic school, where we got the ideas of guilt and sin and damnation banged into our heads.
When I was about the age of Suzanne in the book, I really struggled with that. I was beginning to recognize that I was a queer person and getting messaging that everything about me was bad and wrong and sinful and messaging that as a woman you’re supposed to get married and have some guy’s children.
It took me a long time to separate out the guilty feelings when I wasn’t actually doing anything wrong. Still, my first reflex is always to blame myself for everything that goes wrong around me.
One thing that was helpful was I spent time in my PhD program as a trauma researcher focusing on the history of science and medicine and how that influenced early modern theater. So I’ve spent a lot of time with Macbeth and all of the guilt complexes that are unraveling there.
Spending so much time looking at trauma and cognition in the historical record of human experience and the way we respond to guilt and trauma and how it’s hardwired into our biology was really helpful. Now, when I have a bad impulse to blame myself or have a trauma response, I’m able to intellectualize it. But it’s been a long learning process and it’s definitely not perfect.
I’m ultimately very interested in performance because I’m interested in bodies. You work on trauma and you have to be interested in how the body and the brain work together. I’m also interested in violence and why we are so drawn to it, why violence and entertainment are so closely aligned in what the human brain craves. That question animates a lot of my work, but I don’t have a firm answer.
M.L. Rio, in conversation with Amanda Montell, discusses “Hot Wax”
When: 7 p.m. Oct. 8
Where: Book Soup, 8818 Sunset Blvd., West Hollywood
Info: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/ml-rio-in-conversation-with-amanda-montell-discusses-hot-wax-tickets-1497659161869
