Taylor also deleted the manuscript files from his computer, attempting to scrub the book from his life. A few weeks later, he found out he had received a fellowship from the Tin House summer writing workshop. Encouraged, he went back to his novel, recovering it from one of his rejected queries. “That kind of seems like a sign, too,” he said.

Throughout his undergraduate years at Auburn University at Montgomery and graduate school in Wisconsin, he felt he had to choose between science or writing, and science often won. But when he received an acceptance letter from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, he decided that, this time, writing would win. “I could survive not having science, but I couldn’t survive not having writing,” he said.

“Real Life” follows one pivotal weekend in the life of Wallace, a black gay biochemistry Ph.D. student in the Midwest. Grappling with the death of his father, a nascent romance with a straight friend, the potential failure of his scientific work and a general sense that he doesn’t fit into the predominantly white cohort of his university campus, Wallace must figure out whether he wants to continue on his path as a student or chart a different course.

[ This book was one of our most anticipated titles of February. See the full list. ]

Taylor knows that Wallace sounds a lot like him. Both are black gay scientists. Both are migrants to the Midwest by way of Alabama. Both have had confusing trysts with straight men. (“My life, in some ways, is just a series of inappropriate encounters with heterosexual men,” Taylor joked.) And both have stood on the precipice of a scientific career and had to ask whether to walk back or leap.