Photograph by Emma Trim
After two years working on a satire of techno, tourism, and youth culture in Berlin, author Rob Franklin had the sudden realization that “someone else could have written” his book.
While he insists to Atlanta magazine that he still has “a lot of love for” his initial idea, and “there’s a lot of good writing and thoughts in it,” he knew he had to pivot to a “book that only [he] could write.”
The result is Great Black Hope, a coming-of-age mystery about a young queer Black Stanford graduate who is arrested for cocaine possession in New York, and then flees to his hometown of Atlanta. As a born and raised Atlantan who has lived in New York on-and-off since graduating college and currently resides in Brooklyn, Franklin knew this was the personal novel that he had to write.
Courtesy of Summit Books
So the day before his 26th birthday, while Franklin was home in Atlanta and staying in his childhood bedroom, the poet and writer, whose pieces have been published in New England Review, Prairie Schooner, and The Rumpus, started work on Great Black Hope. Tapping into his own experiences, the novel’s exploration of the New York club scene and the Southern Black bourgeois are all loosely inspired by his thoughts and musings while in these worlds.
“It feels so particular to my observations and obsessions,” Franklin says of Great Black Hope. “It felt so specific to me. It just felt like a debut. I really like debuts that are an introduction to the writer’s style and the author’s worldview.”
Great Black Hope has already drawn wide praise from critics, authors, and literary figures alike. Charis Circle editor E.R. Anderson called it “a novel that understands how class operates in [Atlanta]” and even went as far as to label it as “Bright Lights, Big City for the 21st century.”
To mark the release of Great Black Hope, Atlanta caught up with Franklin to discuss his connection to the city, how he became inspired to write, and what he wants to achieve with the book.
I’d love to start off by discussing your connection to Atlanta.
I’m from Atlanta. I originally lived there for the first 18 years of my life. I grew up in Cascade, which features prominently in the book. I was really entrenched in the world of Southwest Atlanta, Atlanta’s Black professional class, and the Southern Black bourgeoisie. That was definitely one of the main inspirations, culturally, for the book. Especially having not seen that really represented in TV and film. There are rare exceptions, I think one episode of [the FX series] Atlanta takes place in Cascade. I was really interested in depicting that milieu.
When did you get into writing?
I’ve been writing since high school. I started writing poetry in high school. I think poetry was very much part of my identity. It still is. I really didn’t try my hand at fiction writing until I was in college. I decided to minor in creative writing. I wrote a couple of short stories. One of which I still really love, which was this short story about a xenophobic shut-in who falls in love with Anna Nicole Smith from her reality show. I was developing a voice in fiction. Then once I graduated, I worked in management consulting. During a longer period when I wasn’t going into the office every day, I decided to try my hand at writing a novel, which took place in Berlin. I didn’t have this long-held ambition to be a novelist. I wanted to see if I could do it. Working on that book taught me the rules and what worked for me as a process for crafting a novel.
What attracted you to writing? What did it bring out of you?
You feel it. When I was a teenager, I felt very misunderstood. I had good friends, but writing was always a refuge. I went to a conservative, predominantly white Southern prep school. I had this other life online. I was a big Tumblr kid. I was consuming a lot of books, films, and music that I found online. Writing was a way to make this community around different pieces of culture. It was a way for me to communicate core truths that I wasn’t going to talk about with people from my high school.
How has being from Atlanta impacted your creative voice?
As regards to Great Black Hope, it’s really a novel of two cities. The first section is set in New York, the second section is in Atlanta. They needed to have a different feel. Not just content wise, but rhythmically. Atlanta is obviously a driving city. You can be in the car for hours a day, so your mind wanders. In that section, Smith is revisiting sites of childhood memory and personal meaning. He’s also unpacking the ideas in these books that he’s taken from his father’s office about Black scholarship of the 20th century. I wanted it to have this drifting, digressive quality that felt like the rhythm of driving. The texture and feeling of being from Atlanta works its way into the craft.
What did you want to achieve with Great Black Hope?
It took writing a draft to really articulate how I thought of the book. A friend of mine from grad school read it and described it as a “takedown of Black respectability politics.” That’s not exactly how I would describe it, but it was a really helpful exercise to have them describe it back to me. One of the thematic pillars of the book is looking at the twice as good ethos and this fixation on respectability and external presentation and achievement and the upwardly mobile Black value. Looking at how that can become a cancer to the lives of people who are rigorously schooled in that.
What do you hope audiences take away from the book?
There’s definitely political valence to the book. Early on, I realized I was setting out to write a political novel. There’s definitely a lot of thoughts around how radicalized the criminal justice system is. I hope readers bring a great degree of empathy and criticality to narratives around drug use in Black bodies. Fundamentally, this is a novel about relationships, those all consuming friendships in our 20s, about familial ties and expectations. About the power of intimacies across identity lines, how they can be pressure tested by larger systems. Ultimately in the novel these relationships survive, and I think that there’s a lot of hope in that.
How often do you return to Atlanta?
Invariably, every Christmas for a couple of weeks. I usually go back once during the summer. While I was working on this book, I was spending considerable chunks of time there. At one point I wasn’t really based in New York anymore, so I was kind of floating around and would go to Atlanta. It felt really good to be there when I was working on the Atlanta section. I was just there the day before it was published for an Atlanta reading. To celebrate with my parents and a bunch of their friends. It felt very warm to wake up in my childhood bed, where all of it began, and go to a book launch in the city that raised me.
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