JUANA SUMMERS, HOST:
This next story is about love. Cat and Jay, together for six years after falling for each other in college. They open their relationship at Cat's insistence, and Jay is reluctant. And that love story quickly becomes love stories, plural. Haili Blassingame's new novel "They All Fall In Love At The End" takes on questions of polyamory from the point of view of a woman who can't be tied down to one person. Blassingame mined her own story of nonmonogamy for the novel. It's a story she told years ago in an essay for the New York Times' modern love column.
HAILI BLASSINGAME: When it was published, I got a lot of hate...
SUMMERS: Interesting.
BLASSINGAME: ...Particularly from men on the internet. And I was warned of this by the editor. Like, you will get hate. And so Cat is - she's not me, but we share a lot of traits, and I think she's very rude in the tradition of doing what she wants. Some might call her unlikable. I don't necessarily see her as unlikable, but she's certainly concerned about self-actualization with a kind of bravado that I don't know if we always see from young Black women, which is why I wanted to write that type of character. And I think it makes a lot of people deeply uncomfortable, particularly men.
SUMMERS: OK, give me one example of a way that you are like Cat or identify with her and one example of a way that maybe you guys aren't so much alike.
BLASSINGAME: OK, so I did give her a lot of my demographic details. She's a young Black woman. She is a D.C. native. Her mom is a federal worker. She worked in a kind of crappy restaurant. I did that, too (laughter). And it was in an open relationship. So, like, those biographical details are the same. But, like, the events of the story are not my life. So I definitely did not, like, get with my boyfriend's best friend and his girlfriend. Like, that never happened, just to put that on the record. And, you know, my parents are divorced. So I just sort of - it's like an alternative version of my life. I wanted to, like, use characters as, like, dolls and play around. Like, what if this had happened though?
SUMMERS: I mean, as listeners of ALL THINGS CONSIDERED know, I love reading romance novels. I love reading a literary romance. But I have to say, I think, if I'm remembering correctly, this is the first time I've ever encountered a Black woman who's polyamorous on the page. And I wonder if that's your experience, too?
BLASSINGAME: Yes, absolutely. I mean, as a writer, I find myself and search for myself in stories...
SUMMERS: Yeah.
BLASSINGAME: ...And movies and shows. And that was what I was doing. I was trying to find a map to figure out, how do I do this thing that I have not seen anyone like me really doing?
SUMMERS: Now, when we meet Cat, she and her partner, Jay, they're about six months into opening up their relationship, and it's clear that they're still in the messy middle of trying to figure out how all of this works, if all of this works. And early in the book, Cat says that even though they've opened things up, she still feels as lost as ever. I wonder, was there something specific about polyamory that you wanted to crack open or explore or unpack with your book?
BLASSINGAME: Yeah. I mean, to return to this question of, like, the types of stories that get told around polyamory, I wanted to see someone wrestling with it as a paradigm and as, like, a relationship modality, not simply as, hey, girl, there's this crazy thing I'm doing. And I think we typically talk about it as being antagonist to monogamy or an answer to monogamy rather than just simply a different way of loving. And I think you almost have to - you have to unlearn and then relearn in order to practice it in the way that - I mean, I don't want to say should practice it 'cause you can practice it in many different ways.
SUMMERS: Right.
BLASSINGAME: But, like, you know, if you have zero models or zero examples of it, I mean - and you find this a lot in the queer community, too. It's like you're building something from scratch. And I wanted to get into that piece of it, not just as a salacious plot point, but actually as, like, a philosophical relationship paradigm.
SUMMERS: Now, as you've said, you are not Cat. Cat is not you. But I do wonder, given some of the parallels between your life and her fictional life, did writing this book change at all the way you think about your own romantic life or even how we think about or talk about polyamory?
BLASSINGAME: The funny thing about writing a book is it takes so long. So I started this when I was 25. I'm 30 now, which doesn't sound like a huge gap, but 30 really is...
SUMMERS: A lot of life happens in between 25 and 35.
BLASSINGAME: Listen, I'm, like, a different person. I'm, like, having health issues, back problems. Like, I'm like, I don't even know what I was talking - like, the idea that I was going to have three boyfriends, (laughter) I can't even find one boyfriend. I mean, so that's the funny thing about having to talk about this book now...
SUMMERS: Yeah.
BLASSINGAME: ...After having changed so much. Like, the material conditions of my life are not the same as they were at 25. And so I can respect this book for what it is and the person I was when I wrote it. I'm not practicing polyamory anymore. I've been single for like three years. I'm dealing with, like I said, health issues. So, like, my vision for love has changed dramatically, but I still am that grasping girl. And I think now it's like I'm at the second leg of the race, right? The 30s grasping of like, what am I going to do about kids? Is that going to happen? You know, those questions, which I think is a natural progression of aging. So I don't really see it as invalidating any of the questions I was asking at 25, but I got some answers, and now different questions are niggling at me.
SUMMERS: Yeah. Now, this book takes place here in Washington, D.C. You're a D.C. native. We both work here in the district. And through Cat's eyes, we experience a lot of what all of us went through together in 2024. There was the election of President Trump for a second term, on-campus protests, fears of immigration enforcement rates. What did you want people to feel and experience about the way things felt in our nation's capital at that time?
BLASSINGAME: Oh, I love this question because I do see this book more than just about narrative, but archival work. And I think D.C. was really, I would say, ground zero for the second Trump administration for - we saw what was going to happen before other parts of the country in many ways. And I wanted to capture that sense of, one, lived history, but also it was a frenetic energy. It was - something was happening every day. I mean, a plane crashed into the Potomac. I mean, it was after decades that hadn't happened. And it was a certain feeling of, like, the ground shifting beneath your feet and everyone you know.
SUMMERS: I can't have this conversation with you without mentioning that you were also a part of our public radio family. You're a producer for our member station, WAMU, here in D.C. And I get to work with some really cool producers, so I know how busy that job is. And I wonder, were there parts of your day job that you brought along with you as you were writing this book, or was it maybe sort of more of a reprieve or a step back from the daily news grind that we both know?
BLASSINGAME: I mean, that was part of the problem was I couldn't step back. And so I was trying to write, and I don't know if I've had this experience writing fiction before, but in this time, I was trying to write a novel, and I could not turn my brain off. And so it seeped into the book. And that's part of what happened. I was like, I just can't pivot in the way that I'm used to pivoting. And so, you know, it is a privilege to be apart from politics. You know, people are pulled into politics every day because of who they are, whether they're following the news or not. And so I think that was also part of it as a journalist. I mean, it was just like, baking in my head every day. And that was my outlet because I have to be a certain way in the newsroom, but in the novel, I could engage with the news in a different light, in a different way.
SUMMERS: Haili Blassingame is the author of "They All Fall In Love At The End." Thank you so much for stopping by.
BLASSINGAME: Thank you so much.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "LOVIN IS EASY")
CARSIE BLANTON: (Singing) I'm in love with you. But it's OK. I fall in love almost every day. I'm in love with the boys in the band down my street. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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