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Kyle Dillon Hertz’s The Lookback Window starts in paradise. Or rather, it starts in a clothing-optional resort in South Florida. I found it apt to open the book here, a space of artificial beauty and peacefulness built directly on a foundation of unspoken terrors, all of which are fated to be erased by the natural forces of nature and time. Dylan, our narrator, allows a dissociative halcyon haze to settle over scenes only to abruptly sweep them away, revealing moments of sharp brutality and crystalline rage.
Hertz’s debut is a beautiful clenched fist of a book that follows Dylan, a young man forced to revisit his years as a sex-trafficked minor by the passage of the Child Victims Act. The new law affords him one year to sue his abusers despite a long and inconclusive police investigation and the passage of the statute of limitations for criminal acts perpetrated against him. This opportunity to grasp at justice, or some twisted version of it, disrupts Dylan’s delicately arranged life with his partner in the city. Hertz balances beautiful prose with painful moments from Dylan’s journey in a manner that confronts the reader with thorny truths about the difficult subject of sex trafficking while avoiding hollow, easy answers in a stunning debut that illustrates a mastery of tension, trauma, and tone.
I spoke with Hertz about how The Lookback Window took shape, the beauty of queer rage, and his own journey from trauma to healing, which is distinct from Dylan’s.
Stephen Patrick Bell
Dylan’s voice is so specific and speaks from a distance that keeps his trauma fresh, hot, and intense, but not too overwhelming for himself or the reader. From early on, it is clear that Dylan is speaking to us from some point in the future, though it takes some time to figure out where he is and how he got there. How did you arrive at the version of Dylan that we get in the book and what was the decision-making process like around how he tells his story?
Kyle Dillon Hertz
The novel is a roadmap for how to heal from violent trauma in the sense that I knew how to heal. When you have CPTSD, or PTSD, your sense of time is destroyed because your brain stashes memories in other parts of your brain. Disordered time. Part of healing is creating a linear narrative out of a disordered one. The other major aspect is learning how to be truthful. My therapist referred to what forms CPTSD as unbearable aloneness in the face of violent trauma. I found this to be true, and I learned how to be direct and honest in my own life as a result. In fact, when I left the final rehab it was due to the fact that I could speak freely about what had happened to me, and the other people were still barely able to address what happened. I realized, as did the therapist, that I was actually beyond where I thought I was. Dylan’s voice mimics this, too.
One of the shittiest aspects of the trauma novel is the reticence of the narrator to reveal what happened to them. In some cases, this might apply, but only for a brief period of time, or if the novel contains the sinister idea that you cannot heal from violent trauma. Can you ever fully heal? Can you erase time? No. But nobody is doomed if the right tools and therapy is given. There are programs in the United States dedicated to this. The Crime Victims Treatment Center is one. I did not want to perpetuate the lie that once you go through something violent you are going to kill yourself. I hate these books. I don’t understand them. Systems fail people, and there is a need in trauma literature to move beyond the personal violent tragedy as the path to suicide. Of course, this exists, but not as fate. It exists as a failure of the state to address the needs of its citizens.
The speaking from the future was always in the novel, but my agent and editor finessed the frequency to give greater room to breathe in a breathless novel.
Stephen Patrick Bell
Where the reader might expect trauma to look like tearful sobbing jags in cold showers, Dylan struggles against that, attempting to construct a cool controlled exterior and lay it over a raw nerve of person constantly roiling and wrestling with memory. What I like about TLW is how deeply unprecious it is. Dylan’s experience with trafficking is a heavy topic many have been trained to skirt around in conversation and, in the moments he chooses to discuss it, Dylan gilds nothing, makes no effort to shield the reader from what he’s experienced and deftly wields the truth against others like a cudgel. He knows how people have been trained to recoil from the truth and uses that to reinforce his isolation even as he dares them to look at and engage with him. How did your approach to Dylan shape the process of writing this book?
Kyle Dillon Hertz
I had thought about writing about what Dylan went through for years, but I didn’t have the proper constraints until I started receiving treatment at the Crime Victims Treatment Center and learned that the Child Victims Act would pass. Time is the great force in fiction, and without the brutality of the lookback window the book wouldn’t work. This was during grad school at NYU, but I kept the book mostly secret from others in my program. I wrote about half in my final year and half in the six months that followed. My life, while writing the book, included a divorce, my own journey with the Child Victims Act, and the fallout from my own search for justice—my heart faulting from an accidental overdose, living in a near constant state of traumatic vigilance, a benzo addiction and a seizure from getting off the pills, three rehabs for trauma (two of which I was kicked out of), and what I like to think of as a rebound relationship, not from my divorce, but from trying to heal from what happened to me when I was a teenager. And then, thank fucking god, once the book was finished and bought, a long period now of peace and stability. I do not wish to ever live again in the era that I wrote the book, but the novel gave me a structure to contain, explore, and order some ecstatically painful moments that would otherwise be jettisoned into parts of my brain that I fear would return. This novel is not autofiction, either. Dylan and I are very different, but we were in healing cahoots.
Stephen Patrick Bell
Dylan’s major relationships seem to be defined by violations of consent and betrayals that mirror his relationship with Victor, his initial abuser. He also expresses pessimistic views on the nature of queer friendship, describing his relationship with his best friend, James, as “the great lie of best friendship between two gay men.” We see that he occasionally misreads people and there’s a critical misunderstanding that could have changed the course of his story if he’d interpreted things differently. What, if anything, do you think the Dylan we meet at the beginning of the novel is missing about the nature of queer friendship and community?
Kyle Dillon Hertz
Dylan is so young during this novel. Many of his relationships still come from an earlier part of his life, where he was a complete and total disaster. I think he’s a pretty good friend to James and Alexander. In queer friendships, especially those that grow out of a sexual relationship, it can be hard to maintain those people who want more of you than you can give. If you have sexual trauma, you can miss those signs easily too. You can easily become a service. A vessel. When he gets older, his relationships will get better. He was still in the phase of not knowing who you must let go.
Stephen Patrick Bell
I bristle a bit at the ways the autofiction label is affixed to writers from marginalized groups, positioning the writer to represent the experiences of their respective demographic groups to a largely white-cishet publishing industry with a focus on selling products to a specific audience that doesn’t always reflect the writer and often with the sense that this isn’t a narrative that was crafted but rather an experience that’s being relayed. TLW doesn’t feel like autofiction despite the similarities between Kyle Dillon the author and Dylan the character, but I do wonder how easily audiences will be able to make that distinction. What have reactions been like when reading this work in public?
Kyle Dillon Hertz
I used to believe that the best readings were either funny or sexy, but laughter is, occasionally, a fool’s echo. How many funny readings can I remember although they passed the time nicely? Few, if any. Recently, I read at Les Blues, and I didn’t tell my husband ahead of time what I was going to read—an angry confrontation with a rapist in a bathhouse. I didn’t want to be dissuaded from an intense reading. The responses ran the gamut—from the silent to the gushers to the people who asked more about the book. I’m especially not interested in being perpetually funny. We are familiar with the trope of the funny gay best friend, the clown, the mime. I will not be that. I am interested only in being someone who demands space, attention, and, yes, even silence. I owe it to my younger queer self to be the person who demanded, not supported other straight sensibilities.
Stephen Patrick Bell
You mention time being the great force in fiction. Throughout the novel, Dylan feels like he’s walking down a doomed hallway and the floor is lined with trap doors. A scent, a color, a word, can plummet him into the past at a moment’s notice. You play with time in a way that feels familiar to the beats that grief, loss, and trauma often play on our hearts and brains. How did Dylan’s relationship with trauma influence the way you paced the novel?
Kyle Dillon Hertz
In grad school, Zadie Smith frequently used the phrase “This sounds nice, but is it true?” I needed Dylan’s understanding of time to be true, and that meant aligning his sensory experience of the world to one with triggers and dissociation. For a long time, I didn’t understand dissociation as it’s represented—hovering above, seeing yourself from outside yourself. I’ve never experienced it. Dissociation can form as an inability to touch the world, a feeling of plummeting away from what exists in the nowness. It’s Traumatic Realness. You see Dylan learn how to deal with this with his therapist, and you see Dylan learn how to overcome triggers by coming into direct contact with them. You see him smoke his rapist’s cigarettes. You see time become more linear as the book moves forward. The novel also mentions Dylan’s previous barreling through time. He was far more traumatized before the start of the novel because he never let the past intrude. Or he tried his best to avoid it. In a way, living thoughtlessly, or, timelessly. He needed to be whacked around by time in order to not let it control him.
Stephen Patrick Bell
You mention your agent and editor having a hand in shaping TLW. I’m always curious about working relationships between the author and their team. What sort of shape was the book in when your agent and editor came on board respectively? How did they help and what did you have to push back on in order to tell Dylan’s story truthfully?
Kyle Dillon Hertz
The book originally took place over a longer span of time, and Tim O’Connell and Chris Parris-Lamb rightfully shortened the span of the book. They wanted a lit fuse, something that once you started you would not stop. From what I’ve heard from readers, this was accomplished. Both of them are geniuses. I would also like to throw in the original influence of John Freeman, who pushed me to go there. Earlier versions of the book are useless to what it is now. They saw what I wanted to accomplish and got me there.
Stephen Patrick Bell
Dylan is a writer, but we don’t see him working or writing much. He does espouse on writers in writing programs and writing in general, stating at one point, “barely one writer in history had rendered a bar scene worth reading.” Do you think Dylan would be impressed by the bar scenes in The Lookback Window?
Kyle Dillon Hertz
I gave out the book to a few bartenders at Macri Park, Metropolitan, and Nowhere bar, and they all had great things to say about the book. I went to Macri Park one afternoon and a bartender I hadn’t met came up to me and said, I heard you wrote a great book about New York. If this man said this, if the bartenders were talking up the novel, I think I did what I set out to do.
Stephen Patrick Bell
Dylan is a striking character who seems to take some pleasure in the discomfort he can elicit in those around him. His tattoos tell a story that, early in the book, he chooses not to elaborate on. Given how Dylan armors himself in the final words of a character in a novel, did it occur to you that his final words in your novel may end up some real someone’s armor one day? What words of his do you think you might see etched on a spine?
Kyle Dillon Hertz
I don’t think he likes making anybody uncomfortable. I think when you live in an unjust world, and you walk around in a world full of ignorance, you want people to know that you exist. “I want you to know a person like me” is a line I think of when I think of Dylan and this novel and the people who I had in mind as my best reader. I am not an angry person, but I have learned that anger is my tool of freedom. Anger is the great tool of liberation when it is utilized in the same manner as love. I am so unbelievably angry at what happened to me, my friends, strangers, the people of this world, and I see no reason to pretend I am cool with any of it. Dylan comes from that place, too. He is angry. And he should be. More of us should be angry.
When people think of wonder and awe they’re usually limiting the emotions or experiences to just beauty or love. I am in awe of Dylan’s rage and anger, and I find it wonderful. I don’t understand why people limit their palettes.
I hope somebody gets a Lookback Window tattoo. I’ve been curious which lines stick out to people.
Stephen Patrick Bell
Anger. Yes, perhaps Dylan doesn’t enjoy causing discomfort as much as he is driven to draw attention to something that happened to him that makes people uncomfortable. His pain and his rage aren’t his fault so it isn’t fair to imply he takes any pleasure in the ways people react to his truth. Early on Dylan says something that stuck with me: “These days I spend my anger wisely, so I don’t waste it on places, but every now and then, when I talk to people in the rehabs or before last call, I sometimes wish I could hate a place as easily as other people instead of hating the people themselves.” I feel like anger and rage are cultivated, nursed, and manifested quite beautifully by oppressed peoples across the world. Rageful queers and people of color have catalyzed many of the great advances we’ve made in the quest for equality and justice. I wonder how Dylan does choose to direct and spend his anger and what you’d like readers to take away from the path he’s chosen.
Kyle Dillon Hertz
I wanted readers to experience an honest experience of trying to heal from violent trauma, and I think the honesty is the most important aspect. There aren’t really answers in the book, but ways of healing. Just to get the unsaid thoughts of a person like this, the failures of a person like this, the love of a person like this. The idea of the perfect victim is bullshit, and you see Dylan be funny, horny, rageful, sad, ignorant, loving, mean, etc. . . . I hope everybody is granted their full humanity, and I especially hope victims of sexual abuse get that even more.
Stephen Patrick Bell
Speaking of things that make me angry: interactions with law enforcement and the legal system, a system that has a history of open hostility towards queer people, especially queer people of color, is an unavoidable part of Dylan’s story. At one point, a detective tells Dylan, “There are cases you think about and cases you forget. I remember your case now, but I don’t think about it.” I get the sense that, because he is a white, middle-class, male child with two adoptive parents who seem at least not to be abusive (though they clearly miss signs of his abuse), readers may find Dylan’s abuse and trafficking more shocking than if it had happened to a child that fit into a different series of demographics.
Perhaps, because he was a boy, his parents expected him to be out and about messing around with girls. Boys will be boys. Or maybe, because he was a boy, a queer boy with queer traits that made them uncomfortable, they politely ignored the ways in which he appeared to be exploring queerness and queer relationships. Sometimes queer acceptance or tolerance from straight people takes the form of turning a blind eye to all things queer, compressing queerness into a blind spot. When straight people passively witness queer people experiencing abuse, abuse that would move them to act if it were happening to a little white girl, sometimes the thought is “That’s what those people are like. They must like that.” What do you think the disconnect was between Dylan and his parents, between Dylan and all the adults in his life who failed to act, and do you feel his queerness was a factor?
Kyle Dillon Hertz
Yes, you’re exactly right—the blind eye, the lack of oversight. That’s the unfortunate failure of the parents in this novel. Dylan is obviously not telling them what is happening, not that he would ever have the proper vocabulary for it at his age, and, also, he is being threatened by a violent person. Of course, he is not going to be able to render his experience as a teenager in real time. It’s a sad aspect of the story, and it’s simple. He needed more oversight, and he didn’t get it. His parents aren’t to blame; that’s on Vincent.
Still people do not think men can be raped, and especially when it comes to boys it sometimes feels as if people cannot process this. I don’t understand why the culture fails to easily categorize this horrible thing. Anybody can be a victim. And the more you are marginalized the less society cares, and they already care very little. It’s pathetic.
Stephen Patrick Bell
And to shift violently into queer joy, congrats on your recent marriage! I read that The Lookback Window’s cover was based on a photo of you and your husband, which is such a sweet intimacy to share with your reading public. Early in the novel, Dylan marries Moans in a ceremony that feels powerfully queer. I remember realizing, when my husband and I eloped, there aren’t really any “rules” for queer weddings. The jewelers, the tailors, everyone basically said, “We’re making it up as we go along!” Did Dylan’s wedding inform yours at all? What’ve you found you might like to add to the canons of queer wedding traditions?
Kyle Dillon Hertz
Thank you! I love my husband, who is an amazing poet, and yes that is a photo of us dancing at Paragon in Brooklyn. We had a brief ceremony at Gertie in Williamsburg, and we threw a rave in the basement of Talon Bar. I’ve never been so happy in my life. Isn’t that strange to say? I have a full life. I’m grateful.
Dylan’s wedding was awful, and a failure, and, yes, very queer. The reading of a strange story, how people were upset by it—I imagine it would have been a success had Dylan and Moans truly been a good couple, but they were not.
Stephen Patrick Bell
There’s a moment when Dylan’s father-in-law calls unexpectedly that underlines how our ghosts rarely haunt us on our schedules. The moment could have been incredibly disruptive and triggering for Moans, Dylan’s husband, and it presents an opportunity to share, but we just watch the moment wash over them before they move on. Understandably, Dylan is focused on his own trauma and the pressures around it created by the window though he can sometimes be clearer and more direct about Moan’s abuse than his own. As Dylan makes progress in therapy and brings his trauma to the fore, it repulses Moans, who is struggling with his own issues and finds it painful to watch Dylan re-experience his own. It can be difficult to walk down a path to your own healing and closure when you’re yoked to a person unwilling to look at the uncomfortable things you stir up along the way. In what ways does the Dylan-Moans dynamic speak to readers partnered with people who’ve experienced similar traumas?
Kyle Dillon Hertz
People need to be able to be honest with their partners, especially when you have a history of violent trauma. Dylan is an awful partner in some ways, and so is Moans. I hope that Moans gets his time to deal with his own history, but the ways we learn to deal with our problems early in life often dictate the ways we deal with them later. Moans came from a family who pretended everything was fine, and we see Moans do the same. That might work, sometimes, but rarely for a whole long life. This question comes close to the other societal issue in the novel. Dylan is able to get treatment at the Crime Victims Treatment Center, which should be an organization that exists everywhere.
Stephen Patrick Bell
Thank you for writing a novel that brings our collective attention to an issue that impacts about a quarter of the population at large while still being largely invisible. I’m glad you brought up the role of the Crime Victims Treatment Center in Dylan’s healing. Given the prevalence of trafficking and abuse, the number of survivors, it is startling to think that such resources aren’t more widely available. What does Dylan’s story look like without the Crime Victims Treatment Center? Where do people like him go for care and how do they ask for it before they acquire the language to articulate their experiences? How do we, as a society, advocate for more programs like this?
Kyle Dillon Hertz
I only know the effect of the Crime Victims Treatment Center on Dylan—he gets the help he needs, and he gets it for free through the state. This is a great question that I’m unprepared for.
I spoke with one of the counselors at the Crime Victims Treatment Center, and they said that in every state there are victims organizations that are funded by VOCA, the Victims of Crime Act. Each state should have a place where victims of crime can go to and hopefully get their needs met.
FICTION
The Lookback Window
By Kyle Dillon Hertz
Simon & Schuster
Published August 1, 2023
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