You flip through so many vernaculars and patois and mind frames in the book. How were you able to code-switch so seamlessly between different characters?

It got so crazy that the way I got through it was that I drew a chart on the wall with each character and what happened to them. Plot charts. Rows and columns. Each column was a different character, each row a different time of day, so I knew what everybody was doing at a certain time of day even if they weren’t in the story at that point. At this point, these characters became living, breathing people. I needed to know where they were even in the off time. Are they in bed right now? What is everybody doing at 2:00 p.m.?

I want to ask you about the piece you wrote for the Times in which you describe leaving Jamaica so you could more fully step into your gay life. Is it hard to focus your literary attention on a place that you felt you needed to, in some ways, abandon?

Yeah, but that’s part of it. I can’t write about something that I don’t have complicated feelings about. Half of my writing is figuring that out. One of the complicated things about Jamaica is it’s not like I narrowly escaped death by running away. All of my struggles were so deeply internal that a lot of people didn’t even know I was going through it. But at the same time, leaving Jamaica did free up a lot of that book—particularly the second half of that book, which I don’t think I could have written in Jamaica. The explicit sex, certainly. In the realm of Jamaican macho archetypes, the gunman sits at number one, sits at the top, so a gunman like Weeper who is not just gay but a bottom? All the people who are now going to read the book because it won the Booker Prize are going to be screaming obscenities when they get to that scene. Then I’ll know if I can go back to Jamaica or not.

What I was going through was far more insidious. It would be far more simple if I was escaping a mob. It’s different when there is no mob but you’re still scared. With me, I just kept building these walls and walls and walls around myself and I just didn’t know who the hell I was. I told another reporter, to be persecuted for being gay in Jamaica, I would have had to be gay, wouldn’t I? It’s certainly not something I had admitted or explored—I’m sure a lot of people knew—but it wasn’t something I explored. At one point, I just ran to the church. So I became this big Bible-beating Christian for a few years to escape that, because I knew if I was seen as this devoted worshiper of the Lord, no one would ask, “Why doesn’t he have a girlfriend?” because all my energy was going into Jesus. I was also protected by class. I lived on a posh street called Lady Musgrave Road. I would never have been on the front lines of Jamaican homophobia. But it’s something that seeps on you like a cancer. I have friends who live in Jamaica and their lives are pretty uneventful and stable, but I still go, “Who are you kidding, though? You might not be on the street in downtown and somebody’s about to beat you, but every single time you move to so much as hold your partner’s hand, you have to make sure all the doors are locked. Make sure the shades are down, but are the shades translucent?” You go through all the rituals of secrecy to just be yourself. And I realized I just couldn’t do that. And my conclusion for a long time was to simply not do it. Not be a person, not have a life, not have love, not express myself in any way that’s even human. And if I keep this up, I’m going to be dead for real because I’m already kind of dead.