When Eric Jerome Dickey moved to Los Angeles from his native Tennessee to start a career in software development, he also started exploring creative outlets he'd never had a chance to pursue before, including acting and standup comedy. Then, in 1991, as his firm was starting to lay people off, he started writing short stories. A friend who was studying journalism at a nearby junior college suggested he join a writing class with her. "She'd read some of my stuff around the house," he recalls over breakfast in his hotel room, "and said I should take the class with her. She ended up dropping, and I stayed." He cheerfully admits that his first assignments "sucked," because "I was trying to write like a writer likes, and that was just bullshit. But then I turned in something in my own voice, and people started telling me how good it was." He continued to take classes, not quite sure where this was all headed, until he was forced to choose between pursuing a graduate degree in computer science or accepting a scholarship for more writing classes at UCLA. Although he's had tremendous success as a writer in the decade since, I wondered if he ever felt like he missed out on the tech boom of the '90s. "I'm just no longer a part of that," he says. "Going in evey day wondering how long your job's going to last, watching people bail all around you, while other people stay loyal to a company that isn't going to be loyal to them...I remember being in the unemployment line next to a guy with a Ph.D."

Dickey's latest novel, Between Lovers, is a highly charged love triangle between an unnamed bestselling African-American novelist, Nicole, the woman who left him standing at the altar, and Ayanna, the woman Nicole moved in with. When the narrator visits Oakland on a tour to promote his latest book, Nicole insists on introducing him to Ayanna -- and on bringing about a very intimate acquaintance between all three parties. The emotional power struggles that ensue are fierce, and made even more powerful by the fact that they're crammed into a single weekend. This is easily Dickey's darkest novel yet, but even so, it still has plenty of room for his trademark sense of humor...

Beatrice.com: You've probably gotten a lot of questions over the years about how much of your fiction is based on your life. Now you've really blurred the lines...

Eric Jerome Dickey: I know. [Smiles] But about the only thing that the narrator and I have in common is that he's a writer. That just makes it a little bit easier for me when I'm writing about the guy and the job -- and the stuff that the writer goes through on the tour is so general. At first I was thinking about having him live in Oakland, too, but I don't know the city, so it was easier for me to write it from an outsider's point of view. I was going to make him an engineer, and send him there on a business trip, but that didn't work for me. Then, for a while, all three characters were going to be writers, but that didn't work out for me, either.

In Cheaters, I had a character, Darnell, who wanted to be a writer, and now I wanted to write about somebody who had been in the business for a while. So I thought about making the narrator Darnell, but that would mean that the woman who'd left him would have to be Tammy, and getting those two characters to this place just wasn't going to work.

That's one reason I really don't do sequels. You're limited, because the characters are already so defined. It's easier for me to make up new people and drop them into situations instead of trying to justify how characters from two years ago ended up doing this.

Because there's no reason Tammy would run off with some other woman.

Yeah, yeah, it just doesn't work...and then I start thinking, are all the other people from Cheaters going to be in the story? And it gets to be too much.

One of the reasons Between Lovers is the way it is is because of Cheaters. I had about twenty characters in that novel, which is a huge production, moving all these people and their personalities around. So I really tried to do this whole book with just the three characters. Of course, it got to the point where I had to bring some more people on stage, but I still tried to keep it to a minimum. And without names -- Nicole's mom doesn't have a name, the writer's dad doesn't have a name; I tried not to give his friend Andre a name, but it was really hard to get this guy in and have the two of them call each other "friend" and "brother" all the time.

Andre actually came from something else I was working on. I took the scene I'd written of him doing his standup routine, dropped it in here, reworked his personality a little bit, and brought Toyomi in from Cheaters. When I first wrote that scene, he'd met someone, and it was okay, kinda cool, but I felt it would be a better dynamic if he met someone from another book, connected those universes.

And people who've been reading your stuff see Toyomi and they've got a good idea what's going on.

Sure, but it's a false step, too, because people see her and they think maybe the story's going to be about Toyomi now, and it's not. And she's different -- this is something like three years after Cheaters; any character I've written, three years down the line, who knows what's happened in their life, what they're like now?

In addition to the small cast, you also have a really tight timeframe. The book basically takes place during a three-day weekend.

Michael Crichton's Disclosure takes place over something like three, four days. I'd seen the movie first, then I went back and read the book, and I was impressed by how he starts in the middle and everything just keeps moving. Things just keep falling into place one after the other, and that's what I wanted to do. I wanted to feel the intensity as the characters get burned out by the situation, but then I got to the end...and that's not the ending I originally intended to write.

At first, I was thinking to myself, not maliciously, you understand, "You know, I've never killed off a female character before." But when I got down to it, as much as I'd wanted to write a situation where nobody wins, when I got there, it didn't work for me anymore.

There's a lot of great moments in the story, the confrontations between some of the characters.

The way this story's told -- first person, present tense -- was something I hadn't done before. And since I only have one narrator, he's got to be in every scene. I've read some books that are written in the first person, and stuff happens when the narrator's not there, so somebody has to come and tell him what's happened. I want the narrator to be there, so the reader's still a fly on the wall.

Take the scene between Nicole and her mom. I could have them go off, then Nicole comes back upset and tells the narrator what happened, or he could be in the room and we go through that experience as it happens. He's there, he's interpreting the experience for us. But it's just his point of view; he's not perfect, he's unreliable. He can paint the picture, but that's how he sees it.

The narrator seems like a fairly liberal guy, the sort of guy you can imagine saying he doesn't have any problem with gay people. Until one of them takes his woman from him, and his religious upbringing kicks back in again...

...then it's a whole 'nother other, sure. [Laughs] He wants his woman back, that's his biggest thing. You have this guy whose girlfriend has left him for another woman. He could come into this situation and throw around a lot of homophobic terms, and some people probably would do it that way, but I think it's too easy. So my guy romanticises everything, even the other woman. When he sees Ayanna, sees how intelligent and good-looking he is, he thinks he can understand why Nicole would be attracted to her, because he could be, too.

The sex isn't just about the sex. It's a power struggle between the guy and Ayanna. When I first started writing the book, Nicole gave him her address, and he goes over to their house and watches Ayanna coming out. But that steals the thunder from their meeting in the restaurant. So I took that out, because every character has to have a real entrance. They don't just appear on stage. So she gets to come in and the spotlight hits her, I've described her, we know what she looks like, what happens now? What would be the first thing she'd say? Because that's going to define her character. I decided to get right to the point. I needed the two of them to be alone at that moment, because if Nicole's there, it's a different thing. This way, they're sitting together, but they're adversaries, they're testing each other, going back and forth. Sometimes it's intellectual, sometimes it's crude. But they lay their cards out on the table right away. And when they see Nicole seeing them, they change their personalities right away.

African-American relationship movies have been very successful in the last few years. Has Hollywood been trying to get its hands on your books?

I've been to a few meetings, but in reality, I don't see it happening. Studios will tell me they've already done their African-American movie for the year. And it's all within that same Best Man/Brothers genre. There's nothing too extreme, all the characters are so politically correct as far as the target audience is concerned, and that's African-American women. You look at Brothers, you have a guy going out with somebody white, and all three of his friends are against it. You look at that as a writer, and it's like, "OK, that's what you have to do to keep the audience liking these other three guys." The minute one of those guys has a real opinion says, "That's his business," they don't like him anymore. With the people I know, if one of them is dating interracially, that's not the reaction three people in a room will have. It's contrived, and it's the sort of thing they'll do over and over again.

Anyway, Between Lovers isn't something that a studio would really want to touch. With the lesbian and the bisexual characters, you're looking at an art house movie. Throw in the African-American angle, and there's all sorts of layers in there people just don't want to touch. You don't really see African-Americans and sexuality in the movies that often. I mean the romantic, sensual kind of sexuality. You can see bangin', but you hardly ever see the sort of slow, sensual lovemaking that's in this story.

So writers like you and E. Lynn Harris can get away with a lot more by sticking to books.

And Anais Nin, Henry Miller, John Irving -- you look at them, and a whole bunch of people, they write a whole range of stuff and "get away with it." And it's some great stuff. I read John Irving's The 158-Pound Marriage, which was one of the biggest inspirations for writing this book... It wasn't so much the couple swapping, but the mentality and the motivation that leads up to it. A lot of people just see the action, but I'm looking at the whole setup. You start peeling away the layers, and you start seeing why these things are really going on.

I read his scenes with couples and then with a threesome, and I wondered what I could do to write a situation like that without it coming off as bullshit. And I just kept moving things really fast; I saw something come up, and instead of spending ten chapters dealing with it, I said let's just move through that and see what's on the other side.

Originally from Memphis, Tennessee, Eric Jerome Dickey worked as a computer programmer, a middle school teacher, an actor, and a stand-up comic before becoming a full-time novelist.

Ron Hogan is the editor and publisher of Beatrice.com, a collection of interviews with authors of contemporary literary fiction and nonfiction.

Further Reading

Nalo Hopkinson
John Irving
Sarah Waters
Thisbe Nissen