📚 A Bookish Chat with 'No Good About Goodbye' Author CT Liotta #AuthorInterview #BlogTour #Interview @ctliotta

CT Liotta was born and raised in West Virginia before moving to Ohio for college, where he majored in Biology. He now uses Philadelphia as his base of operations. You can find him backpacking all over the world.

Liotta takes interest in writing, travel, personal finance, and sociology. He likes vintage airlines and aircraft, politics, news, foreign affairs, '40s pulp and film noir. He doesn't fear math or science, and is always up for Indian food. His favorite candy bar used to be Snickers, but lately it's been 3 Musketeers. He isn't sure why.

He is author of Relic of the Damned!, Death in the City of Dreams and Treason on the Barbary Coast!

No Good About Goodbye is his latest book.

Visit him on the web at https://www.ctliotta.com.

Sign up for Liotta’s newsletter at https://ctliotta.substack.com.

TWL: Welcome to The Writer’s Life!  How did you come up with the idea to write your book?

CT Liotta: During a period of heartbreak in 2015, I started a story to my 14-year-old self. I didn’t see it as an mm highschool romance, a LGBT YA book, or even a young adult espionage novel. I was a sharp, precocious 14-year-old with surprisingly little self-doubt, a tasteless sense of humor and a love of old paperback potboilers from authors like Arthur Hailey and Peter Benchley. 

While coming to grips with being gay, I saw James Bond as a role model. Like Captain Kirk or Indiana Jones, he was a middle-aged man whom nobody expected to marry or have kids. People didn’t question Bond or ask if he had a wife and kids. You’d never believe how reassuring heroes like that were. I needed heroes who validated me if I didn’t settle down with a traditional family.

Still, I would have benefitted from a story that spoke to my hopes and fears. The fear of falling for another guy or coming out in 1994 rural West Virginia made the worst Bond villain seem like an easy defeat. Spy novels are a great place to explore moral and character issues against the backdrop of an unfair world, so I outlined some ideas for LGBT young adult spy novels, one of which became No Good About Goodbye.

TWL: Can you give us a short excerpt?

CT: On a Tuesday night in late August—four hours and fifty-eight minutes after the sun fell beneath Raïs Hamidou and Pointe Pascade in Algiers, Algeria—a battered, white SUV swerved from an access road and tore through an otherwise quiet olive grove near Houari Boumediene Airport. Branches snapped and scraped against dented fenders and fell under tires that upended the earth. Cracks of gunfire followed. The driver, a fifteen-year-old boy, wore a black Pittsburgh Pirates baseball cap, and a weathered pair of Adidas Sambas. 

He shifted into fourth gear and stomped the accelerator. His brother had been teaching him to drive, and he did not have a feel for the clutch. At five-foot-three, he was short for his age and had difficulty reaching the pedals. 

He calculated the likelihood of a calamitous encounter with a tractor or irrigation wheel and turned his lights off. With luck, the ordered rows of trees would continue to the horizon. The suspension protested against the uneven terrain. 

Beside the boy sat his mother, unconscious, unmistakable in resemblance. The night air caught her hair, and with it, lingering notes of Shalimar and vodka. In the cup holder between them was a SIG Sauer P226. The boy eyed it and pressed the de-cocker, fearful it might discharge in the shaking vehicle.

The rear bumper fell off. “Cosa facciamo ora, Deena?” asked the boy, filled with uncertainty. “What now?” He liked to call her by her first name because it irritated her.

The rearview mirror reflected the pinpoint headlamps of a pursuing Jeep. There were three rapid flashes of gunfire. “Flash-to-bang,” he muttered, remembering what his brother had said. He counted the seconds until the distant report of the guns sounded over the engine. Three seconds. Three seconds times 330 meters per second put the Jeep a kilometer away. Given wind direction and velocity, terrain, elevation, circular error probable, and handicap while firing from a moving vehicle, he knew he was beyond range.

A bullet ripped through the back window with a startling crack. The glass fell from its frame and the remains of the rearview mirror spun onto the dashboard. Air rushed in.

“This was a terrible idea,” said the boy.

The grove ended near a traffic cloverleaf. He steered onto National Highway 5 and pointed the vehicle toward the city. The engine light flickered. He shifted into fifth gear.

TWL: What part of the book was the most fun to write?

CT: The villains in this book are my favorite. Besides wanting to assassinate a 15-year-old boy, they dislike one another. They’re petty, and undone by fragile egos and health problems. One villain, for example, has a gold plate that replaces a third of his skull. When villains like him arise in spy novels for teens, nobody ever questions how a head plate might affect his ability to work. So, the gold plate gives him migraine headaches for which he takes aspirin. The aspirin, in turn, has given him a stomach ulcer. He’s either cutting throats or totally dysfunctional.

TWL: What’s one fact about your book that would surprise people?

CT: My main character’s mother and brother are diplomats with the State Department. I went through the State Department hiring process twice—a battery of tests, essays, and a day-long interview in Washington, DC. Both times I got a provisional offer of employment, which triggered intensive medical and security reviews. The 2016 election scuttled Foggy Bottom and sank my mid-life career change, but it gave a rich background to my characters and the basis for a teen & young adult spy story—even if things don’t really work like I write.

TWL: What other books are you working on and when will they be published?

CT: Prior to the pandemic, I was an avid world traveler. I hope to get back to it, and write about my experiences in my new newsletter and blog, The Bag May Not Inflate.

I’m outlining some short stories that aren’t YA spy books, as well as a sequel to No Good About Goodbye. I have a busy day job in the medical field, too, so I can’t always write like I want. 

TWL: Finally, what message are you trying to get across with your book?

CT: I’m cynical about the American conversation, such that it is, and our capacity to change. For all our outrage about the way things are, people burn hot for ten minutes, then move on to the next outrage before lunch. Gore Vidal called us The United States of Amnesia. 

Contemporary teen lit seeks to telegraph to young people that they are valuable and can change the world with their voices. I sometimes think the best we can do is teach kids they’re smart enough to adapt to deteriorating circumstances. Maybe we can’t save the world—but if we can share our loaf of bread with our family of misfits, pull a friend from a different background into a lifeboat with us, and use what privilege we can muster to make the lives of the people next door a little more manageable, we’ve done okay.

Maybe, too, I want to stress the importance of grace. We need more of it. The late Marcus Borg once said, “grace with conditions is not grace at all.” That sticks with me. There are people I can’t stand to read from on social media. Would I feel that way if we sat down over a gin and tonic? Can I accept them if they never change? Can the world stop telling me I’m an asshole if I forgive them?

TWL: Do you have any final words?

CT: I understand my book won’t be for everyone. I don’t write LGBT books for tweens or jump through hoops to make certain I’m innocuous to as many readers as possible. I doubt my story will fit in with other LGBTQ+ YA books from thoughtful writers like the magnificent Benjamin Alire Sáenz or people who write at various intersections like Emery Lee and Kacen Callender. Becky Albertalli, who wrote Simon vs. the Homo Sapiens Agenda, was a child psychologist. A child psychologist! I’m a wrecking ball, comparatively. But, hey. Life is a messy affair. Sometimes it’s fun to smash the pottery, and sometimes it’s fun to read from the guy who’s smashing it.

Smoke ‘em if you got ‘em.

 

Fifteen-year-old Ian Racalmuto’s life is in ruins after an embassy raid in Algiers. His mother, a vodka-drunk spy, is dead. His brother, a diplomat, has vanished. And, he’s lost a cremation urn containing a smartphone that could destroy the world.

Forced to live with his cantankerous grandfather in Philadelphia, Ian has seven days to find his brother and secure the phone—all while adjusting to life in a troubled urban school and dodging assassins sent to kill him.

Ian finds an ally in William Xiang, an undocumented immigrant grappling with poverty, a strict family, and abusive classmates. They make a formidable team, but when Ian’s feelings toward Will grow, bombs, bullets and crazed bounty hunters don’t hold a candle to his fear of his friend finding out. Will it wreck their relationship, roll up their mission, and derail a heist they’ve planned at the State Department?

Like a dime store pulp adventure of the past, No Good About Goodbye is an incautious, funny, coming-of-age tale for mature teens and adult readers. 308p.

PRAISE

“So many treats are in store for the discerning reader of CT Liotta’s brilliant YA novel NO GOOD ABOUT GOODBYE. There’s a diverse array of multi-racial/cultural characters, organized criminals with complex political goals underway, and keystone-cop humor/blunders often sparking from the evergreen enchantment of a push-pull romance between two young people, neither of whom have yet decided to identify as ‘gay.’ Rich with often realistically crude boy lingo, NO GOOD ABOUT GOODBYE is an utterly charming teenage LGBTQ falling-in-love adventure while simultaneously rocking an international crime storyline.” – C.S. Holmes, IndieReader

★★★★★ “Sharply observed and sarcastic as hell, CT Liotta’s debut is the gay teenage spy thriller we have long needed.” -Matt Harry, author of Superkid and Sorcery for Beginners.

★★★★★ I found this YA spy novel to be an utter delight! Fast-paced and witty, we traverse the globe with Ian, who just lost his mother and is charged with stopping a war with China. All the while he’s 15, enrolled in a High School from hell in Philadelphia and struggling with his identity. The author offers his own particular take on the importance of friendship and found family. He also very cleverly features different viewpoints, so the reading experience never feels stale. Honestly, I did not know what to expect going into this story – I however finished it converted into a fan! – Thomas S., Netgalley

BUYING INFORMATION

is available at:

ALSO AVAILABLE AT:

B&N: https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/no-good-about-goodbye-ct-liotta/1140173005?ean=9781955394024

Bookshop: https://bookshop.org/books/no-good-about-goodbye/9781955394024

The Writer’s Life

Thank you for visiting and reading!

Feel inspired? Have you read this book? Let us know your thoughts!