Read on Twitter
Morning! Welcome to @pjmendez_’s Twitter takeover. First of all, I want to talk about how #RainbowMilk came to be a novel. Are you sitting comfortably? Then I’ll begin
#RainbowMilk was made possible by @SharLovegrove’s emergence as a gatekeeper within the publishing industry. I dared to dream she might be sensitive to my status as a queer person from the black working class, dealing with intersectional subject matter
For years, I’d been writing about my upbringing as one of Jehovah’s Witnesses, my disfellowshipping and eventual sojourn into sex work. It had to be close to the truth so I could get my head around it, but I wasn’t able to achieve the distance I needed as a storyteller
I looked for guidance in such autofictions as Jeanette Winterson’s Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit and James Baldwin’s Go Tell It On the Mountain, but still made the mistake of trying too hard to remember and recreate situations from my own life, often painfully
Moreover, I was practically living hand-to-mouth, working fifty hours a week in restaurants to pay my rent and fund the bad habits – endemic in hospitality – I engaged in to avoid having to address the problems in my writing. I simply wasn’t spending enough time on it
I met @SharLovegrove at a party in 2012, when she was a literary scout, but didn’t pluck up the courage to send her any of my work until the Little, Brown imprint @dialoguebooks emerged with a commitment to putting underrepresented voices into print
She challenged me to turn the 300-page fragmented mess I sent her – more a moodboard than a memoir – into a novel, in seven months. I took a year longer, but the result is #RainbowMilk, a work of fiction developed from memory, observation and imagination
And here it is! 
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