How to Write an Imperfect Black Woman

There are no perfect Black women in Raven Leilani’s debut novel, Luster, and that is by design. In a recent interview, Leilani said that she wanted to write the story of a Black woman who was not a “pristine, neatly moral character.” And in Luster, she succeeds. Through Edie, her 23-year-old protagonist, Leilani tries to liberate the Black woman figure’s range of behaviors, thoughts, and feelings from an inherent virtuousness or exceptionalism. This choice challenges readers to recognize Edie’s agency and see her as a young Black woman in progress.

Like most Millennials and older Gen Zers, Edie is barely getting by. Her low-paying job at a publishing house sucks; her apartment, a dilapidated space in Brooklyn that she shares with one roommate and a family of mice, also sucks; and her love life … well that, too, is complicated. Although she dreams of becoming an artist, her relationship to painting is avoidant, and she has spent the past two years moving her paints and brushes out of view. From the beginning, Edie admits her foibles and questionable judgment, especially when it comes to men. “This is not a statement of self-pity … It always goes well initially, but then I talk too explicitly about my ovarian torsion or my rent,” she says. Edie’s matter-of-fact confessions, underscored by Leilani’s caustic prose, are on-brand for Millennial literature of the past few years (see: Sally Rooney, Halle Butler, Ling Ma). But they also establish Edie’s unapologetic, albeit clumsy, self-awareness, coaxing readers to abandon whatever shame or secondhand embarrassment they might feel on her behalf.

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Edie’s adventures begin when she starts an affair with Eric, a middle-aged white man who has an open marriage, an adopted daughter, and a mortgage. They meet online and their courtship blends old-school charm and new-age technology: “He follows me on Instagram and leaves lengthy comments on my posts. Retired internet slang interspersed with earnest remarks about how the light falls on my face.” As their relationship picks up, rules—set by Eric’s wife, Rebecca—are swiftly established (and then broken). Edie and Eric have sex in Eric’s New Jersey home, which leads to a confrontation between Rebecca and Edie that forces the two to acknowledge each other. When Edie is fired from her job and finds herself on the verge of homelessness, she moves in with Eric and Rebecca, forming a friendship with the latter and becoming a kind of babysitter to the couple’s adopted Black daughter, Akila.

Edie’s informal residence in their home requires her to constantly renegotiate her relationship to them. Yes, she is still sleeping with Eric, but she is also Rebecca’s friend (sort of) and Akila’s mentor in all things Black. Edie makes the family her home base as she tries to figure out her life, searching for a new job and apartment. When she starts doing small chores around the home, envelopes of money begin appearing on her dresser. The money, she thinks at one point, “feels finite, tethered to the source in a way that makes it explicitly transactional, and so of course it is demeaning. But it is also demeaning to be broke.” Although Edie is not devoid of personal shame, she also understands the condition of her life in relation to this wealthy family enough to not overthink the exchange. She takes the money for what it is and uses it to support herself and her dream of being a painter, buying raw canvas and primer.