I became an opera singer because I failed ninth-grade English. I was a terrible student, lazy and without any apparent gifts, and my mark fell further because shortly before semester’s end my father discovered I was gay and kicked me out. My parents were divorced, and though my mother would have her own long journey when it came to accepting a gay son, she took me in. Even with a bed to sleep in, though, the change in my situation, and the sudden separation from my father, left little room for study. A guidance counsellor sat me down to explain that as a communications student I wouldn’t be able to graduate on time with a missed semester of English; her suggestion was that I change the focus of my studies. I remember looking over the brochure she handed me and being surprised to see that one possibility was choir – the school had the city’s only high-school performing arts programme. I had never been musical but I had sung in church choir and I remember thinking that, of the choices available, choir would surely be the easiest.



It frightens me a little, to think of all that followed from that choice. The choral director, David Brown, heard something promising in my voice. He started giving me lessons after school, for free – and at a cost to himself I wouldn’t understand until decades later when I worked as a teacher and realised how precious that time must have been. He worked with me on scales and exercises and finally simple songs. He taught me about breath and support, and I felt my voice take on a power and spaciousness that surprised and thrilled me. It was my voice, I felt as I sang, but grander than my voice; it suggested I had unsuspected dimensions. He also introduced me to opera, lending me recordings and video tapes, and in doing so gave me my first real experience of art.



‘I strive to feel the energy of a sentence in the way a singer feels breath’ … US opera singer Jessye Norman. Photograph: Sean Gallup/Getty Images

I listened to those recordings in my room, alone, with headphones, as if listening were something illicit, as I suppose it was. Opera was foreign to my father’s world, as I felt myself to be. This had very little to do with the actual foreignness of opera, the fact that it came from Europe, a continent I had never dreamed of seeing, or that it spoke in languages that felt hopelessly exotic. It had to do with opera as a system of values radically opposed to the values of the world I grew up in.



The system of values that is manhood in the American south held up as its virtues firmness, reserve, self-containment, reticence, mastery of emotion. I longed to adhere to this system, but however hard I tried, I failed. I felt too much. I was prone to sudden rushes of emotion, to enthusiasms, affections, to tears. Queer kids learn early that gender is a discipline, sometimes a cruel one. As a boy, I tried to police myself, to move in the ways I was told were manly, to check gestures that were effeminate or overly expressive, to control the way my hands moved when I talked, to keep my voice in its proper range. But effeminacy, my faggy gestures, felt natural to my body. How often my father told me to be a man; how often I felt his embarrassment, his anger and shame, when I failed.



But when I sang opera, the same things that had been sources of shame were sources of value. The gestures that embarrassed me in life made sense when I was on stage: they were justified by singing, by the expressiveness and size of my voice. What I mean to say is that I had an operatic body before I discovered opera; opera made it intelligible. The whole essence of opera is excess; the point of it, its necessary condition, is emotion too powerful for speech, emotion that has to explode in song, and so my outsized feeling was in proper scale. Opera gave me a way to take stigma – my effeminate, over-expressive body, my too-feeling heart – and turn it into style.



It was also, in a more literal way, my escape. I received a scholarship to attend a school in Michigan dedicated to the arts, and at 16 I left Kentucky, determined never to return, or never for long. There I found myself in a community of people devoted to art-making, and I had teachers who modelled for me a passionate life of the mind. It was like someone flipping a switch: my laziness disappeared; I became a model student. It’s because of those teachers that the boy who failed ninth-grade English grew up to be a novelist.



Writing is different from other arts because our medium isn’t paint or clay or marble or pitched sound, but words, something we use every day, and use unthinkingly. Words feel transparent to us; speaking is as natural to me as breathing. But to make art with words means first of all to break that transparency, to become aware that words are objects, as material and concrete as bricks, as something to build with.



‘As a boy, I tried to police myself, to move in the ways I was told were manly’ … Garth Greenwell, right, in 1998 with his accompanist. Photograph: Courtesy: Garth Greenwell

I’m not sure any activity could establish this awareness more powerfully than singing. Opera singers are not always athletic, but classical singing is a strenuous activity: it uses the whole body. (One of my teachers performed in bare feet, so that she could grip the stage with her toes.) A singer understands the physicality of words, how consonants are formed, how a shift in the shape of a vowel can have disastrous effects. Singing, I felt my body quite literally filled with language; nothing could be better training for a writer interested in the music that words can make.

And not just words, but sentences. The long melodic lines of operatic singing are a kind of training in the emotional potential of suspending language in time, something that I think is responsible for the kinds of sentences I write, my fascination for the expansive possibilities of English syntax. I never think of other writers’ sentences when I’m writing my own, but sometimes I feel that I’m writing into the shape made by a musical phrase, Jessye Norman singing Richard Strauss’s Four Last Songs, maybe, or Lorraine Hunt Lieberson singing John Adams. I always read what I write out loud, and I often strive to feel the energy of a sentence in the same way a singer feels breath.

I think of structure, too, in musical terms. My novel, What Belongs to You, is in three parts, and they make a kind of ABA structure, like a sonata. When I think about the shape of what I want to write, I think less of the cause and consequence of linear plot than of the musical development of material, the management of tension and emotional intensity. All of which is to say I think of novelistic drama in the terms of the art I know best: I think of it operatically.

I studied opera for seven years, but I didn’t, in the end, make singing my life. Another great teacher – this one at university, in a class on poetry – redirected me toward literature.

But the most wonderful thing about being an artist is that there’s no such thing as wasted time: no experience is ever truly wasted, and it’s clear to me now that in the time I spent studying voice I was actually training to be a writer. And anyway, opera and novel writing have the same aim, finally, or so it seems to me. It’s what opera gave me as a 14-year-old in Kentucky, and it’s the sound I try to catch in my own work: that human music that is sense-making, the act of seeking, in the chaos of experience, a momentary coherence. That’s the work of all art, I think, or part of its work. It’s the reason art can move us so profoundly, the source of its deepest consolation.