The Love that Alchemizes Stardom and the Quest for Belonging
What superstructure revealed to Christopher Castellani about his own novel "Leading Men"
In the last issue, we looked at the one sentence emotional superstructure of Christopher Castellani’s 2019 novel Leading Men — which is about the life of Frank Merlo, partner to the playwright Tennessee Williams — and what we could learn from it about writing great first sentences and powerful secondary characters.
For this issue, I couldn’t be more excited to welcome Christopher as our first ever interview guest on Lit in One Sentence. We delve deeper into:
what superstructure recently revealed to him about his own long-completed novel,
stardom-alchemizing love and the desire for belonging, and
the many uses he can think of for this exciting new craft tool — from revisions, to the creative writing classroom, to marketing and screen adaptations of books.
Paying subscribers are welcome to ask both of us about anything from this interview in the comments below!
Preety: As an early sounding board and advisor to this Substack publication, your own sense of how powerful a one sentence description of any story could be has been evolving. You were initially worried that any such sentence would be reductive. When I joked that I was stumped on the one for Leading Men and maybe you’d disproved the whole idea, you practically apologized and said the book probably doesn’t hang together any way except in your own mind. Which we’ve since seen is spectacularly not true.
So, how would you explain it now to people who are encountering the idea of “emotional superstructure” in stories for the first time? What did it illuminate about your own completed novel that you didn’t know before?
Christopher: What it illuminated about the novel that I didn’t know before is your hooking into a desire for belonging being at the center of the story.
I’d always thought of the character of Frank as someone who had a lot of longing for various things — a lot of unfulfilled desires, a lot of dissatisfaction with life. It felt very static, very like a situation and not a story. Which is why I said I didn’t think this would hang together, because in my mind the novel was variations on my own senses of this static situation. So I thought there’s no way there can be a coherence in all of that.
When you did ultimately identify that one sentence and it had an activeness to it — an active struggle for understanding, an active movement — it surprised me because I certainly hadn’t thought of the novel that way before. But once I read the sentence, it clicked into place for me, and I saw the novel in a different way. For me, that’s the most powerful element of this one sentence idea.
Preety: I’m so glad you said that. I had done it on my own past work as well, and I had the same weird, eerie sense where I’d completed a story and I thought I knew what it was. But once I go through the superstructure process, I understand it in a different way. So it was really cool for me to see that it worked the same way on someone else.
The superstructure sentence for Leading Men is: “A working class gay man whose love alchemizes the stardom of his playwright partner and actress protégée must determine how to belong among them.”
And this is about Tennessee Williams and his partner Frank Merlo and a fictional actress protégée. What does this emotional superstructure reveal about you as a writer? Why the love that alchemizes stardom, paired with the quest for belonging?
Christopher: When I think back to the other books I’ve written, you can see elements of the same kind of longing, self-determination — where to live in the world, how to be in the world — you can see those themes going through almost all the novels I’ve written.
I certainly don’t set out to write about that. Either I’m drawn to characters who are in that state of mind, who have that emotional background, or it’s something about my own self, the way I live in the world and try to figure out the world.
It’s a validation of the fact that there’s been more of a coherence not only to this book, but to other books I’ve written. That is pretty thrilling.
Preety: So the “belonging” part of it is something you see tracking across your work. And I similarly realized, after doing this for some of my work, that “trust” is a theme that comes up over and over again. It might be something that’s in our writerly DNA, our writerly obsessions.
When I was thinking about what was most special about Frank, relative to the journey he’s on, it’s that he is a critical force in the work and lives of these people who achieve this century-defining stardom, there’s something about him that enables that. Did you have anything that you set out to explore about that? It’s much more specific than “love” generally. Did you have any thoughts around Frank’s superpower of helping other people achieve stardom?
Christopher: I think it all goes back to who you are as a person, one’s own background. I myself have spent so much time in my life helping other people, other artists. As a teacher, a connector, helping other people navigate the literary world. I have a lot of experience with that, there’s some instinct driving me to do that.
That is not what I set out to explore in Frank. He was already that person and I think that’s one of the things that drew me to him. He was already a kindred spirit. I wanted to explore the costs of that, of being somebody who is usually thinking more about the person they’re helping than about themselves.
I think in many people like that, there’s a real love of that kind of work. But there are also moments of reckoning where you think about how much you’ve sacrificed of your own dreams and aspirations for the sake of other people. Whether that’s your partner, your friend, your students, your colleagues, whatever.
Preety: Let’s talk more about Anja. She actually gets a lot more page space than Tennessee Williams and she’s entirely fictional. Half the chapters are from Anja’s perspective and take place long after the real historical figures have died. Even when they’re alive, Frank meeting her, befriending her, and launching her on the path to stardom happens in parallel to his relationship with Tenn.
What would happen if we took her out of the superstructure? Why did you need her? What does she tell us about Frank, about his love and his quest for belonging?
Christopher: It definitely came up whether I needed her as a character at all. What is she adding to the story? Why not just focus on the primary relationship? And then there’s also a secondary relationship of two other men. Isn’t that enough?
Until I read the superstructure sentence that you’ve come up with, I didn’t quite realize how important she was. But I always used to say that I didn’t really understand Frank until I saw him through Anja’s eyes.
I understood him in one mode, in terms of his relationship with Tennessee. But only when I saw his friendship with Anja — which obviously didn’t have the sexual charge he had with Tennessee, it had a completely different reason for being — did I really understand. Even though these things were completely different, they were also the same, right?
There’s a line in the book about: if he couldn’t be the fountain, he at least wanted to feel the spray. If he couldn’t be the star, he wanted to at least make the star — be in the star’s light, have played some part in their creation. He thought it would be satisfying enough. I wanted to explore that in both a romantic and a friend relationship.
Preety: I think those two parallels set up why belonging is so important.
Frank doesn’t really know what he’s doing with Anja, he just knows she’s in the wrong situation and comes up with a plan to spring her. She flies from there, from connections he’s able to serendipitously facilitate. She becomes the bigger star in the book than Tennessee Williams.
And Frank’s still trying to figure out how to belong. Even he and Anja have some missed connections, where she’s hoping he’ll come to more of her premieres, and she doesn’t make it when he needs her the most.
Christopher: With both of them, it’s a search for meaning. He doesn’t consciously say, “I want to help her because then I will feel like my life means something.” No one thinks that. But instinctively, he’s trying to achieve meaning for his own life through saving her from a difficult situation with her mother. Not only saving her, but making her. That would be the next level of meaning for him.
Preety: Another fun thing about superstructure is it unifies subplots that might otherwise have felt less connected to the main narrative. Once you find a great superstructure sentence, it’s hard to find any smaller unit of story that doesn’t connect back to it somehow.
For example, Sandro and Jack, who are another couple consisting of one working class man and one accomplished writer, vacationing in Italy at the same time as Frank and Tenn. I joked that Sandro was alchemizing no stardom though. How does their relationship help us better understand what’s special about Frank and Tenn’s relationship?
Christopher: Frank doesn’t see his own relationship as clearly until he spends time with Jack and Sandro, who are kind of funhouse mirror versions of him and Tennessee.
That whole subplot brings out the same issue we discussed about Frank, which is his desire to help people, to literally save Jack’s life, or whatever he thinks is going to happen. He goes in thinking he’s there to save somebody else, when he’s really getting a better understanding of his own situation.
Preety: When he emerges from that, what can we take away about what makes Frank and Tenn’s relationship special and different?
Christopher: Not that they had a super successful relationship, ultimately, but at least compared to Jack and Sandro they did. That experience helped Frank understand better the terms they had laid out for each other, Tenn and Frank. He made peace with the fact that he was there to save Tennessee Williams, that he wasn’t there for himself. He was there to alchemize Williams’s work.
That was the bargain they had struck. Frank and Tennessee had agreed to those terms without even realizing it. Frank’s experience with Sandro and Jack gave him the permission and the clarity to accept that, and to give up some of the things he had wanted for himself, or at least to put them alongside rather than above his relationship.
Preety: And Frank is able to do this in a way that Sandro wasn’t. Frank’s good at it. It works when Frank does it. This highlights another thing that I think drew you to the story in the first place, which is that Tennessee Williams needed that. After Frank’s death he never has another critical hit, though he lives for another twenty years. As I said in the craft analysis last week, he himself attributed his later failures to Frank’s death.
Frank was doing something there that, once removed, left the stardom hollow. There’s a reflection of that in Anja getting to the end of her career as well and realizing that, when she’s not sure what to do with herself, she ends up gravitating back to Frank’s energy and finding renewed meaning in his memory and trying to get him right.
Christopher: Exactly, exactly.
Preety: In the one acting class I’ve ever taken, I remember the professor saying that to create a character, start with yourself and take away everything that’s not the character. I always thought that applied well to fiction too. In creating Frank’s character — especially in exploring love and belonging through him — what did you have to take away or add from yourself, your own personality, to get to Frank?
Christopher: I mean, we’re so similar that it’s a little scary sometimes. I sometimes forget that the character is not me. That was one of the reasons why I was drawn to him, obviously. We are geographically from the same place. We’re class-wise from the same place. His ancestry is almost my same ancestry, though he’s more southern Italian and I’m more central.
What I had to take away from myself is Frank’s willingness to blow things up more than I would have, his ability to shut out Tennessee. That’s probably not who I would have been, but it felt like who the character was. I have some extreme emotions, but his emotions are even more extreme than mine.
Also, he was really into opera and I don’t know anything about opera. That’s about it.
Preety: How much of that came out of the known historical details? As you were researching, were you noting: when I make this character, I have to remember he’s not me in the following ways? And how much was up to your imagination, when you decided: I’m making him different from me in these ways?
Christopher: Again, this was weird, because I didn’t really have to differentiate too much. In terms of his art and his ultimate motivations, they weren’t so different.
I drew on some of my own ambitions, ambivalences, and relationships — with female friends, with my partner, with family, with the literary business. It’s a relatively easy substitution, the publishing and the film world. There are some significant differences, but not the kind of differences that change the emotional superstructure of the dynamic.
The most basic thing was the time period and what he could understand about gay relationships, what expectations he could have for what that would mean. We obviously grew up in completely different generations. They were creating the terms of their relationship as they were doing it and coming up with names for what they had. I already had all those names.
I was trying to get into the head of somebody who hasn’t had the past forty years of the gay rights movement and the push for marriage equality and the different understanding of what same sex relationships could be, and how they could co-exist in the world with “traditional” relationships. Extracting all of that out of his consciousness was super important to me. I think the greatest sin of historical fiction is to ascribe contemporary, anachronistic worldviews to characters who were very unlikely to have those kinds of views and context.
Preety: You’ve published four novels, you’re working on a fifth, and you’ve also taught creative writing for decades in many different settings. What closing thoughts do you have on where the concept of “emotional superstructure” is likely to be the most useful — as a writer, a teacher, or anywhere in the publishing process?
Christopher: As you know, one thing I’ve said to you a bunch of times as you’ve been talking with me about your Substack and superstructure, is how much novel writing is about half knowing. As you’re dreaming up characters and putting them in certain situations, you have to know enough about them to get them to do interesting, dynamic things and have rich emotional lives. But you can’t know so much about them that you flatten them out, have them doing things in ways that aren’t surprising.
So I was initially resistant to the idea of even thinking about a book idea in one sentence, or a book in one sentence, because it felt reductive.
But the more I’ve thought about it, as one is “half knowing” and drafting a novel, one has versions of the emotional superstructure in one’s head. And it keeps changing, right? It keeps shifting, it keeps expanding and contracting. The verbs change and the nouns change, as the novel comes into being.
Ultimately, I do think it can settle into one thing. But at least for me, it’s not useful to think of that as a thing you’re trying to stick to. It’s a thing you want to think about as flexible, as you’re writing.
Once you’ve finished a good, polished draft, then the idea of whatever emotional superstructure you’ve come up with is an incredibly useful tool to think about. Like, now I have to look at this manuscript clinically and think: is it cohering around my sense of the superstructure? And where I’m seeing it creak, how can I address that? Does it need to be cut? Does it need to be tweaked? Does that exception mean that my idea of the superstructure is wrong? Do I now have to reevaluate that, to fit it?
I think it’s incredibly useful in revision, as a tool to evaluate how the novel is put together. I think it’s equally useful in talking about the story once it’s out in the world, and for say a book club conversation or marketing materials.
I wish I could give the superstructure sentence and your analysis of it to the people making the film. A film also is often going for this kind of unity of effect. Part of the problem with a lot of films, especially adaptations of novels, is that it’s trying to do a bunch of different things. In certain ways it’s faithful to the novel, but then it deviates in other ways, and it doesn’t always have a true north. Getting filmmakers to do the thought exercise of answering to the superstructure sentence would be an incredibly useful artistic endeavor for them.
Also teaching a novel to my creative writing students, having them come up with their own superstructure sentence and then debating that, having that be a way of analysis, would be incredibly useful.
Preety: Did you have any final thoughts?
Christopher: There was an epigraph from my second novel that fits perfectly with this and resonates with what we said about Frank as a character. And about the ways in which we’re always writing about kind of the same thing, versions of ourselves that show up in our books.
There’s this very short quote from Emerson: “Every man supposes himself not to be fully understood; and if there is any truth in him, I see not how it can be otherwise. The last chamber, the last closet, he must feel was never opened; there is always a residuum unknown, unanalyzable. That is, every man believes he has a greater possibility.”
I remembered that I used that as a quote for a different character, who actually shares lots of Frank’s qualities. It’s getting me to really think about the patterns in my own characters, so thank you for that. I’m super excited for this project.
Join the Conversation
One of the funnest promises of Substack is that you’re not just passively consuming interviews like you might elsewhere. You can join the conversation too! Do you have questions for Christopher or me? Drop them in the comments below and we’ll answer you.
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Christopher Castellani is the author of five books, most recently the novel Leading Men, for which he received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the Massachusetts Cultural Council, and The Art of Perspective (Graywolf, 2016), a collection of essays on narration in fiction. He is currently the writer-in-residence at Brandeis University, on the faculty and academic board of the Warren Wilson MFA Program, and a 2024 NEA Fellow in fiction. He lives in Boston and Provincetown.
Preety Sidhu is an associate editor at Electric Literature and writes Lit in One Sentence on Substack. For two years, she led a national writing conference that hosted over 600 manuscript consultations with literary agents and editors annually. She earned her MFA in fiction from Louisiana State University, where she served on the editorial team at The Southern Review. Before that, she taught math at independent schools in the New York and Boston areas for many years.