Garth Greenwell on his debut novel: 'I've been cruising since I was 14'

What Belongs to You is a view of gay life far from the marriage-equality focused ‘PR vision’ – but even in public restrooms, he says, there’s warmth to be found

Garth Greenwell’s debut novel What Belongs to You, released last week, has already been described as “the great gay novel of our times”. The book follows a young, unnamed American narrator teaching in an American high school in Bulgaria, who is estranged from his father and who longs for a stable life with a steady boyfriend. Instead, he becomes obsessed with Mitko, a sex worker he meets cruising in a toilet. Greenwell wrote the novel while teaching in Bulgaria himself, though he says the book is fiction and “the narrator is not me”.

Greenwell is unabashedly a “queer writer”, one who is interested in articulating a specifically gay experience. But Greenwell’s novel is among a vanguard of books (including A Little Life by Hanya Yanagihara, Maggie Nelson’s The Argonauts and the rediscovery of Eileen Myles) concerned with the lives of LGBT people now being widely reviewed and discussed.

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