INTERVIEW: Tomas Moniz by Nick O'Brien
All Friends Are Necessary
Tomas Moniz
Algonquin Books
Interview by
Nick O’Brien
It’s been a few weeks since I finished Tomas Moniz’s All Friends Are Necessary, and I miss it. I miss the characters, whom Moniz imbues with such earnestness, and who will be relatable to anyone young enough to embrace the social upheaval of the 2020s but old enough to have come of age under the norms being upheaved. I miss the Bay Area, where I used to live, where the book is set, and which Moniz presents in all its inimitable beauty, dysfunction, and eccentricity.
The novel’s themes – chosen family, the centrality of friendship to the process of emotional healing, the awkward adaptations of life under Covid – resonated with me intensely. All Friends Are Necessary is a dispatch from a culture addressing the notion that the “traditional” nuclear family is the only acceptable societal unit, or even a generally viable one, with a louder-than-ever “says who?”; it is a historical document, one that depicts life in our changing times through the eyes of someone changing with them. Mostly, it is a book that loves people – all kinds of them, in all their individuality, even the ones we might write off before even meeting them – and so in addition to future readers studying accounts of that crazy year when we had to keep six-foot Covid-safe buffer zones between ourselves and our friends, there are a lot of people in our current empathy-starved era who could benefit from the example this book sets.
As someone to whom this book spoke, I had a blast speaking to its author. Moniz and I chatted about expansive definitions of family, whether New Mexico green chiles belong in a Mission-style burrito, and the agony and the ecstasy of the one and only San Francisco Bay Area.
Nick O’Brien: This book has a really timely focus on the idea of chosen family. We read a lot these days about declines in marriage and birth rates, but I think that's part of a larger re-imagining of the ways that people structure households. Your book follows its protagonist on this journey: He’s working toward a more traditional nuclear family until life events set him on a different path. What does family mean to you when released from traditional confines? What makes family essential even under unconventional circumstances?
Tomas Moniz: We’re often given a template of what family looks like. And whether it's heteronormative or it's queer, it's still usually very couple-based and children-based, though less so in queer communities. But I've found family to be most powerful when chosen. Sometimes your chosen family follows, at least in part, the traditional blood-relative model, and sometimes it doesn’t, and that’s fine. It’s the ability to choose the people who play the role of family that, for many people, is the most powerful and necessary part of healing, of being able to be vulnerable and not having to be on your guard.
So for me, this book was a chance to normalize friendships as just as powerful as biological relationships. We often put things in a hierarchy where the apex is to be in a monogamous couple, but it doesn’t have to be that way. It certainly can. That's a choice many people make. But I wanted to explore that idea more.
And it’s not just our contemporaries. There’s an artist I know who used a phrase I had never considered but which hit me so profoundly, which was “chosen ancestors.” When I think of the people who came before me and inspired me, who feel like my mentors, who have hit me through their art or their actions, they're the ancestors I've chosen. It’s about building in multiple ways: chosen elders, chosen family, chosen partners.
NO: The novel almost has the feel of a memoir or an adaptation of journal entries stretching over several years. How long was this project in the works?
TM: This book was unlike my experience writing other manuscripts. It came in two different time periods and two different chunks, and I didn’t see them as connected at first. I wrote the initial part in the first year of the Trump presidency, and at the time I just wanted to write something dirty and playful. When I finished, I thought that was it.
Then, during the pandemic, I wrote what I thought, at the time, was just a really long short story. But a year or so later, I revisited these two pieces and realized, “These stories have kind of a similar voice and feel. I think I can make them connect.”
NO: You used the word “dirty” just now and I think a lot of your writing, both in this book and elsewhere, is simultaneously sensitive and visceral. The book has several sex scenes that embody both of these, and it creates a yin and yang that serve the writing well. If it was only tender and sensitive it would be too cutesy; if it was only dirty and visceral it would almost be gratuitous or obscene. That’s a hard balance to strike. Is that something that you think about or does it come naturally?
TM: Oh, it's definitely something I think about. It was very intentional, creating this intimacy and vulnerability. For me, and I think for most people, physical intimacy is messy, wonderful, and everything in between, and my goal in those scenes was to capture that. I feel, as a reader, that good sex scenes are few and far between. And to me, “good” means, as you say, striking that balance of just dirty enough to make it slightly uncomfortable, but true enough that it feels genuine.
NO: I think “genuine” is what really gets at it. I really felt, in those moments, that I was becoming much more familiar with the protagonist. Not all sex scenes actually advance the development of the characters involved.
TM: There’s a scene in the film Saltburn – and I won't ruin it for anyone who hasn’t seen it – but it made me think: “That is exactly what I hope to write every single time I write a dirty scene.” And it’s because the scene did what you mentioned: revealed more of the character.
NO: On the subject of your characters: There are people in the book who also appear in other things you've written. What makes a person character-worthy? What kinds of personalities are the best to immortalize or explore in writing, sometimes to the point that they become recurring fixtures in your work?
TM: I was obsessed with William Faulker back in the day. He always had this community of characters – and LeGuin does the same thing – who come back and forth. And all of my novels tend to have some secret little scene where characters from other books make an appearance. 90% of readers won't notice, but I like knowing it's there. And the characters who appear in multiple works are the ones who I find I keep thinking about: what they offer, what they say.
NO: Call it the Moniz Cinematic Universe. I think of Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying, where you’ll have one character narrating a chapter, and then in another chapter that person will wander into someone else’s narration as a secondary character.
TM: Right, exactly. For me, situations reveal good characters. If you put people in a situation where they have to interact and be vulnerable with each other – sometimes that's relationships, sometimes that's mourning a death – and it feels real or stands out, then those are the characters I’ll keep coming back to.
There’s a scene in this book about traveling to a funeral, and that scene had actually previously existed as its own standalone story. I made it fit into the book because I felt that these characters who I love did so well in that scene. Whether it’s running through the desert or running down the beach naked, characters can do strange and memorable things. And if they do those things, I want them to be in more and more scenes and more and more stories.
NO: The book reflects San Francisco the way I've often experienced it, which is while it feels in a lot of ways like this playground, there are people experiencing enormously difficult things right under the surface or right out in the open. How do you think about this duality of San Francisco as both this magic land and an extremely difficult place where so much suffering has happened?
TM: I didn't want to sensationalize, which is definitely a danger when writing about an area that's got such an unhoused crisis going on. There’s a scene that takes place at an SRO, and I had to write that with an absence of knowledge, having never experienced living in a place like that. So you want to honor the beauty, diversity, and vibrancy of these communities, and you want to avoid caricature, but you also don't want to sugarcoat things. And I think that's a struggle that all writers who write site-based fiction need to address. You hope you do a good enough job, but it’s hard to know.
NO: It’s about humanizing rather than playing to type, right? In that scene, you bring in one or two people who are residents of the SRO and present them in ways that don't label them as this wretched person or a one-dimensional picture of destitution, but just a person who engages and bounces off other people in dialogue and has their own personality. I think that’s really humanizing.
TM: On the flip side, there are other characters who are more upper-middle-class, and I had people telling me to make them more of a Bay Area tech worker stereotype, but I didn’t want to do that either. It felt like a cop out. Yes, there are people who drop into Oakland and San Francisco because they're making lots of money and the second things go bad, they're gone. And you want to address those issues and some of the problematic elements they may be a part of, but that's not the whole of who they are, and it felt too easy to indulge that stereotype.
NO: San Francisco has a really socially-oriented literary community, with tons of reading series where people perform their work live and engage with writing together. Can you talk about writing as a social pursuit and being a writer in the Bay Area?
TM: I am the writer I am because of the community of writers that I've known over the course of 15-plus years here. Some of these great writers have never been published by mainstream presses, but they keep writing. That kind of resiliency and commitment to the process of writing has been instrumental in allowing me to deal with failure. You put yourself out there as a writer, and 90% of what we do is get rejected, and so if you can’t find community or, to tie it back to earlier in this conversation, chosen family in that world, you're going to stop writing real quick.
There’s a middle section of my book consisting of a bunch of very short pieces, and all of that was originally written for reading series that had no connection to the book. Someone asked me to read, and I thought, “should I read a middle excerpt of a longer story? No, I'm going to write some juicy little thing about my dad showing me how a record player works, and that's enough.” So when I was putting together that middle section, I had all these things I'd written for different reading series in the Bay Area, and some of it worked for the characters in the novel, so I put it in. Participating in these readings gives you so much material – I never throw anything away.
NO: So you're from New Mexico and now you live in the Bay Area. I lived in the Bay for many years, and now I'm in Albuquerque. I can't stop imagining a Mission-style burrito, maybe from Taqueria Cancun, but with New Mexico green chilies in it. Is this something we should make happen, or would it be so powerful that it would destroy the universe?
TM: It would destroy the universe, unfortunately. The problem is that you need to have reasons to go places. There’s a place in New Mexico which is my favorite place to get sopapillas, and I don’t want to get sopapillas, or anything they have at that place, in the Bay Area. One of the many things the internet is destroying is geographic and cultural specificity, and we need that. I like to actually go to a place and discover, “Oh, wow, they dress different here” or “they eat different food here.”
NO: So what are you working on now? What’s on the horizon?
TM: Once the book comes out, I’ll be heading out on a book tour, mostly up and down the West Coast but with dates in Albuquerque and New York as well. I also just sent my agent the first 50 pages of a new manuscript I’m working on. This one is going to be a literary erotic thriller – think Fatal Attraction meets January 6 insurrection.
NO: I’m sold, just from that brief synopsis. Thanks so much, Tomas.
