We chat with author Brandi Wells about The Cleaner, which is an offbeat, darkly clever debut novel about a night cleaner who discovers a toxic secret about her company’s CEO – and decides to take matters into her own hands
Hi, Brandi! Can you tell our readers a bit about yourself?
I love this question because I’m trying to rethink how I introduce myself. Introductions are so often, “here’s my job and that’s who I am” and I want to get away from defining myself by my work or by what I produce. It’s easy for me to rethink introductions for friends. My friend E. is a perfect example of what I mean. I could tell you what E. is writing and studying, or what their work looks like. But what would be more interesting is to tell you that during the early days of the pandemic, E. traipsed around Los Angeles, stealing trimmings from plants in people’s yards so she could replant them in her own backyard. Now she has this tiny plot of soil that has more than 200 plants. It’s this magical, hidden garden. This illustrates E. so much better than her work or writing would, to me. But it’s hard to turn this eye on myself. I think that where I come from is what sets me most at odds with my surroundings.
I grew up in the rural south and neither of my parents graduated high school, so this trajectory (I’m a writer, have a doctorate, and teach creative writing as a professor) feels like some sort of accident. It’s easy to imagine a world where I made a few different choices and ended up somewhere quite different. I constantly feel lucky in my life: grateful for my apartment, my car, my job, the inherent safety of these things. It feels possible that with one slightly different choice, I wouldn’t be here. I think I worry that everyone can see that I’m an outsider, that I’ll be called out for not belonging, and asked to leave. I think this feeling of being an outsider is the lens through which I view everything.
When did you first discover your love for writing and stories?
I’ve always been a voracious reader. As a kid I got in trouble for reading books during class, rather than paying attention to what we were doing. I hid books in my lap or behind notebooks. This very naturally became an interest in storytelling as well. I played pretend for far longer than other children, walking around my yard, telling myself stories, inventing things, and probably looking quite odd to any neighbors or passersby. I didn’t really figure out storytelling until I was in college, but it was such a natural-feeling transition from reader to reader-writer. It was like falling into something I had already been doing.
Quick lightning round! Tell us:
- The first book you ever remember reading: This is so tough because I remember lots of childhood books with illustrations. But the first chapter book that I really remember is The Boxcar Children, a series I still appreciate. A friend and I have been trying to rewrite the series as something more adult and tinged with V.C. Andrews vibes.
- The one that made you want to become an author: Aimee Bender’s The Girl in the Flammable Skirt
- The one that you can’t stop thinking about: I cannot stop thinking about Meg Elison’s Number One Fan. It haunts my nightmares. It was so viscerally disturbing that I just can’t shake it. It’s a sort of retelling of Stephen King’s Misery but with the genders swapped so a man is holding a female author captive. It’s a truly visceral nightmare. I feel nauseated even thinking about it and I have a very strong stomach.
Your debut novel, The Cleaner, is out January 30th! If you could only describe it in five words, what would they be?
Save sad intern or else
What can readers expect?
The Cleaner is an exploration of what it’s like to make your job your entire identity. If someone were to get every bit of meaning and happiness from their work, what would their life look like? How would they behave? What idiosyncratic choices might they make? The book explores this to one of its natural endpoints. Along the way, other people are hurt or helped, but my real focus is on what changes or doesn’t change for the narrator. What does she figure out about herself? About her work? Her life?
Where did the inspiration for The Cleaner come from?
I loved the idea of a novel fully contained in the workplace with almost no hint of a life beyond the office. I wanted to see how I could build this character through her job, which is spent mostly alone. She interacts with these whispers of the daytime office workers, in the things they leave behind. But mostly she just cleans and thinks about how to be good at her job and how to help everyone else be good too.
Were there any moments or characters you really enjoyed writing or exploring?
I love storytelling so it was really fun to create a character who IS a storyteller. She looks at people’s desks and computers and begins to imagine and invent the people who work there. And then the things she imagines become real to her, concrete. I love meta-moments like this. I can remember watching The Muppet Babies cartoon as a child and being thrilled whenever the muppets imagined something and then it became real. So any moment I can do this in my own writing is a moment of joy. I think my favorite moments of the novel are the ones that juxtapose this kind of imagining with a sharply different reality. So the story the narrator is telling butts up against her reality. It feels unsettling in the best way.
This is your debut published novel! What was the road to becoming a published author like for you?
It felt long and slow! I’ve been writing for what feels like a long time now, trying to figure out the shape of a novel. The books I really love are the ones that focus on characters and unfold in weird directions, plot be damned.
What’s next for you?
I’m very quietly working on my next thing while trying to have some fun.
Lastly, are there any 2024 book releases that you’re looking forward to?
There are so many that I cannot list them all! Venita Blackburn’s Dead in Long Beach California, Rita Bullwinkel’s Headshot, Ciera Burch’s Something Kindred, Tasha Coryell’s Love Letters to a Serial Killer, Danny Goodman’s Amerikaland, Marissa Higgins’s A Good Happy Girl, Eunice Hong’s Memento Mori, Monika Kim’s The Eyes are the Best Part, R.O. Kwon’s Exhibit, Sara LaBrie’s No One Gets to Fall Apart, Ananda Lima’s Craft: Stories I Wrote for the Devil, Christine Ma-Kellams’s The Band, Sally Wen Mao’s Ninetail, Maggie Nye’s The Curators, Nicole Rivas’s Tender Hoof, Cherry Lou Sy’s Love Can’t Feed You, Asha Thanki’s A Thousand Times Before, Ledia Xhoga’s Misinterpretation, and Nicola Yoon’s One of Our Kind.
