The Desire Not to Be: The Millions Interviews Garth Greenwell

In Cleanness, Garth Greenwell’s follow-up to his critically acclaimed debut What Belongs to You, the author brings readers into an intimate and explicit relationship between an unnamed narrator and a student named R. Greenwell’s first and second books aren’t necessarily a pair. One does not need to be read before the other, but they both do revolve around the same characters, location, and time.

Cleanness expands on what Greenwell built in his first book. Long passages explore the queer body and the love and sex that comes with it. The narrator and R. live in Sofia, Bulgaria, where they are happy together, but there is a sense of end looming over their heads. The book begins and ends with explicit scenes of sex—more than the fleeting moments in his first book. Greenwell delivers these moments with such beauty and frankness, without shying away from the sadomasochism and voyeurism that fill these men’s relationships.

I spoke with the author about the relationship between his first two books, his approach to crafting his novels, and why Cleanness needed explicit sex scenes.

The Millions: What Belongs to You Came out three years ago. When did you start thinking about Cleanness?

I started writing the earliest sections of in 2011. I wrote several of the chapters at the same time as I would finish scenes for that book and turn and write scenes I knew would be for a different book. By the time was published in 2016, I probably had about half the book written. The other half was written in