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At a virtual reading hosted by Books & Books in Coral Gables, Florida, moderated by writer Chantel Acevedo, David Sanchez is asked a question about the role of nature in his fiction, particularly the lush and gasping sort you find in South Florida, of which he often writes. Sanchez thinks about it for a minute and shrugs: “I don’t know. How could you see a sunset over the Gulf of Mexico, and not want to write about something that is gorgeous?”
Sanchez’s debut novel All Day is a Long Time is not about gorgeous sunsets, despite the one blasted on its cover; it is more about addiction, about the search for footing in a world which offers no gravity — at least, not the kind David’s character seeks. Sanchez’s protagonist is an addict reckoning with a universal desire to ascribe meaning to that which he can’t make sense of. On bender after bender, David communes with feelings that black out despair, then binges on books at the library, high out of his mind — an endless and destructive search for understanding. David, the character, would love to see the world from a perspective so removed he’d be able to articulate how so much wanting and desolation can be held within our gorgeous, ephemeral lives. Sanchez, I think, answers David’s question: what does good art provide, or what does it feel like it’s providing, if not exactly this, this sure footed gravity?
I interviewed my friend David about his book, the function of the novel, his flip phone, Twitter brain, his construction job, and what he plans to write next.
This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.
Christina Drill
When you were finishing the book, I remember that as spring semester of our third year, March 2020 right when COVID hit, what were you reading? Did any of it end up subconsciously influencing your book?
David Sanchez
I was reading… What I was reading… War and Peace; I was reading Name of the Rose, and I re-read A Hundred Years of Solitude while I was in Sarasota finishing the book. I read some other shit too. Updike’s Run Rabbit Run. I can’t remember what else, but yeah.
I think probably Run Rabbit Run [did]. Like, I hadn’t read it in a long time, but I had always liked it. The poetic asides in that book, where not much is going on but then he’ll just do a couple pages on a basketball going in a hoop or whatever… Maybe that was already there in my book, but like, it made me feel a little bit more confident [about doing it].
Christina Drill
I know in this essay you articulate your resistance against this book being read as another addiction memoir. Obviously the book is about a guy by the same name as you, who is an addict. I was thinking about what differentiates a memoir from an autofictive novel and to me, memoirs are far more concerned with honoring the past — or at least, like, honoring the reality of a person’s internal experience of the past. But All Day is Long Time… seems unconcerned with that, despite stemming from experience. What would you say is the relationship between this book and the reality of your lived experience?
David Sanchez
Yeah. It definitely isn’t [a memoir]. That’s a good way of saying what I’ve been trying to say and failing. All the events that look like the events that happened in the book, in my own life, happened a really long time ago. I got sober seven years before I started writing this book. Just the length of that time, and all the other shit I did within that time. And then on top of getting sober and telling everyone your life story over and over again [at AA meetings], it got me to the point where I could really just not give a shit. I didn’t feel the need to convey “this is how it was” or whatever, because I’d already conveyed that in a meaningful social sense many times.
Which allowed me to just fucking do whatever I wanted with the book. It’d be pretty sad if a memoir of my life was only 250 pages short, you know? It was one of those things where I felt like because of the time that had passed, I was able to write more about what I wanted to write about, and honestly… I feel like I used my own lived experience pretty smartly. Like I’m pretty happy with the way I did it — I used it as a crutch when I didn’t feel like making stuff up. I didn’t have to invent settings or whatever for a lot of this stuff, because I just had them already and could lean on that so that I could make up the other shit I wanted to make up.
Christina Drill
I feel like your book is concerned, not with taking the reader out of their current reality and giving them a story to preoccupy themselves with, but rather rearranging the reality of the reader, so that they return to their own life moved or changed. And it succeeds in doing that. Some novels feel like it’s a hand-hold, like, you’re going through a little haunted house… You’re going through a little tour of another world, and then you come back and you’re like ‘oh, that was a fun escape.’ But All Day is a Long Time doesn’t do that. For one, it’s intentionally unwieldy, kind of in the way that those like big old novels are, and it forces you to put yourself in it in some way. It’s also what’s happening to David in the book — he’s changed by reading. When I finished the book, I was like, this book feels like [it’s] honoring some older version of what a novel is or, historically, is considered. It also feels almost prehistorically new. I feel like this is all intentional. Can you talk about your decision to write this certain type of novel?
David Sanchez
I like what you’re saying. It seems in line with where my brain was. But I do think that some part of me feels robbed just by time and place of the ability to write, like, a really good novel. I just think that the way life is set up for a 30 year old guy in Tampa, Florida, like… Your brain just can’t think like that; you can’t write a Moby Dick or whatever. And I feel kind of pissed about that. I was talking with [writer] Carmen [Petaccio] about this. Where like, trying to write a novel, but being woefully ill-equipped in terms of the way in which your life has unfolded or whatever. The day in and day out of having a job, being aware of the president, and of everybody’s dumb ideas. And just the spew of constant media… What, there’s like three TV shows for every person now? And I have probably more friends than Herman Melville has, you know what I mean? It’s like you’re just pulled in a lot of different directions. It feels like no one really has figured out a good way to accurately portray life in 2022, in movies or books.
You see the text bubbles come up on TV. Like they haven’t figured out a way to synthesize what it means to have a fucking phone or have access to the internet into these art forms in a way that makes meaning of them. A lot of great novels of the past were written before there were movies, or TV or whatever. And so it seems kind of stupid to write a novel that just could be adapted to a movie like that. You know what I mean? Where it’s just like stage directions and dialogue between two covers. Because that could just be a movie, there’s a better way to do that. It’s like we cracked the code, we have the technology. I knew I wanted my book to be word or idea-centric so that it had a reason for being a book and not for being a screenplay or whatever.
Christina Drill
Obviously there have been good book-to-screen adaptations. If someone did attempt to take that on, would you want to be involved in the movie-making or would you want to just cash the check?
David Sanchez
I think I’d want to cash that check and use it to write the next book. It just seems like it would bring a lot more people into the mix. I have a hard enough time dealing with marketing the book itself. I feel like the book was my way of saying what I wanted to say in a way that satisfies me.
Christina Drill
Right. The prologue of the book starts with advice it doesn’t follow: “Compartmentalize your life.” And the next 256 pages are spent explaining how you can’t. To adapt it, someone would try to tidy up the book, plot-wise.
David Sanchez
Yeah. You can’t. Something that I always thought was like, addiction is a really fertile place where self-will and other stuff meet. Where the very notion of free will, or [learning] what the fuck is going on inside of a person, motivationally, intellectually, it gets really muddy and weird. And like, no one really has a very satisfactory way of telling you what the fuck is actually going on — they just tell you to go to a weird meeting that meets in the basements of churches across America. Or you learn to speak about it in a really weird way — in these, like, clinical medical terms, and so much is lost to the whiny language of psychotherapy.
Christina Drill
I think about tweets and how that’s affected our thinking, like the feeling of psychosis you get from being on Twitter too much, or being on when something big is happening and everyone’s just saying the same thing at the same time. It’s truly maddening, and I got a similar feeling reading the section of the book when David goes on an eight-day bender and days begin repeating and reason just bottoms out from under him. I feel like people need to know that you have a flip phone, so you couldn’t even be online all day if you wanted to. How else do you protect yourself from the dumbing down or compartmentalization of everything? Or how do you try to keep it away?
David Sanchez
I have very little self control. I was born that way. If I have something that feels good, I follow it. You know what I mean? And for whatever perverted reason, scrolling on Twitter feels good. Like, it does something to you. And then you close the screen, and you feel a horrible hangover. I just feel a sense of shame at consuming and not questioning and just gobbling it up. And I will find myself agreeing with things that are just wrong. Like, the best tweets live in something like “the second thought” is how I would describe it. Your first thought is one thing. This “second thought” is contrary to that. And it seems right, because it’s contrary. And then on the third thought you go, no, that’s stupid as hell. I got off Twitter because I could feel the little word packages worming their way into my brain. You just start thinking that way or whatever. Our brains are weak. I think if one thing is shown to be true, it’s easy for it to influence not just your ideas, but the form in which you get to ideas. I feel like now that I’ve written a book, I might take a little less shit for having a flip phone. Like people will think I’m less of a weirdo. Now I can be like, well, I just want to. I value my attention span.
Christina Drill
What are you thinking about compartmentalizing next in a book? Or what do you imagine finding yourself drawn to trying to compartmentalize?
David Sanchez
I’ve just been working an insane amount the past year and change. I’ve been trying to jot down realizations, just things that come to me. And I think [my next book] would have to be something construction-related. I just feel like the act and process of building something is so separate from everything else in life in a way. Like, nothing else I do is as clean or as clear, it almost feels like an anomaly to build something. But also to be of the realization that everywhere you look, things are getting built. Like right now there’s real boom in real estate and all this shit, like there’s constant buildings coming up, all kinds —
Christina Drill
Yeah. Selling Tampa.
David Sanchez
Selling Tampa. Coming from grad school and the MFA, it feels really anachronistic to be [working on construction] but it’s also almost anachronistic to be trying to write a novel. You think about the feeling of lack of progress in your actual life, or your personal life, or your dealings with others, and the way in which you can really hammer through at a job and do something that’s very real, and it’s done. But then you’re still in the same spot as when you walk away as when you walked up to it. Me and my buddy that I work with, we’re building this company and building these houses. And after work, he and I both go to the casino all the time, which is like the definition of futility and non-progress. Like, we just go power through building a wall or an addition, a house, and then we just like go sit in the same seats, lose some money, win some money, hand it back to them. There, there is no progress.
Christina Drill
What else have you been inspired by recently?
David Sanchez
I did just start reading Lonesome Dove. I don’t even know if inspired is the word, but it’s like one of those things that just swallows you up, and I feel really good when I’m reading it. It’s like a literary cigarette. Other than that I saw Licorice Pizza, which I hated. I wish I had picked up a shift at the AMC and torn tickets for a couple of hours [instead of watching]. Like, I would have had a better time.
Christina Drill
Anything else?
David Sanchez
Yeah. Going back to building — we had to do the craziest shit like a couple of weeks ago. We’re doing this condo on Bay Shore, which is on the water. It’s a really nice neighborhood, but it’s an older building. I guess when they built it in the eighties, when you pour concrete like that for a building, you’re supposed to put plywood on these shoring jacks, you jack them all up even, and then you pour the concrete on top. And like, one guy [who was working] towards the bottom of the building must not have hammered his jack up high enough. And so every floor is just concave all the way up.
We’re working up there on the 16th floor. The [owner] wants to put in hardwood, but like, you can’t do that if it’s concave. It’s only six inch slabs. So we had to hire engineers to be like, how much weight can you put on this to even it out? And they were like, “you can put seven pounds per square foot.”
Concrete [weighs] more than that. It’s like 20. Lightweight concrete is like 14. So we had to map out the contours that this guy fucked up in 1984 and scribe pieces of wood and screw them into the concrete, and then like, put plywood over them to level everything out.
My buddy and I thought about it for days. We went back up with a little compass, you know, like the compass with the pencil you use in elementary school. We set a laser line, and laid out all these studs on the ground and then screwed them together, and then used the compass to trace on the wood, the contour of the floor, to jigsaw it out so that when we put it down, it would all be flat. And, Christina, know what? It worked.
FICTION
All Day is a Long Time
By David Sanchez
Harper
Published January 18, 2022
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