“Brat” Author Gabriel Smith on Giancarlo DiTrapano & the Drone of Grief

Open Book: An interview with the London-based author on his highly-anticipated, bittersweet debut.

A week after Gabriel Smith’s debut novel Brat was published, Charli XCX released an album of the same name. That morning, Smith did an interview with SSENSE about Brat and Brat (one of the many examples of the handshake between pop culture, fashion, and literature this summer) before meeting up with Language Arts in Park Slope to discuss the novel. Two months later, we may be getting a little Brat fatigued – but Smith’s novel has the staying power to outlast any trend cycle. 

Brat follows a young novelist named Gabriel who, after the death of his father, moves back into his decaying childhood home to clean it out before it sells. It’s a gothic horror novel with a tightly compressed plot, where every strange string Smith pulls is tied up by the end. And there are some strange strings: Gabriel’s skin falls off in sheets, mysterious strangers appear on old video tapes, manuscripts change their text, there is a man in a deer mask watching him. At its best, Brat is a moving, surreal, and entirely engrossing meditation on grief. 

The debut is not, as some have incorrectly positioned it, an internet novel. Born in 1995, Smith is on the cusp between Gen Z and Millennial but doesn’t really identify with the former. “I don't have the same shoes as them. I don't want their shoes,” he says. In fact, it takes cues from old school horror. Daphne Du Maurier’s Rebecca comes to mind, as does the snarky, privileged youth of J.D. Salinger. 

“All great mystery fiction is all about setting up questions that seem impossible because that drives the plot forward,” Smith says. “In Brat there's closure across everything. But I really like that as an idea: Apply as much pressure to the reader as possible.”

But in case you are wondering, Smith isn’t a brat, though “brat” is the word the late Giancarlo DiTrapano dubbed Smith’s narrator during the editing process. Smith was a mentee of DiTrapano, and Brat was originally going to be published on Tyrant before DiTrapano’s death in 2021. 

In person, Smith is giggly and generous, with a dry sense of humor and the vocabulary of someone who doesn’t need to prove their intelligence. “It’s nice to just hang out? You know?” He says as we toast our second beers. He loves corny books about plot structure and storytelling, and at more than one point, offers to help figure out plot level problems in my novel. He loves William Shakespeare and F. Scott Fitzgerald. He loves his fiancé Sarah, a striking model, who later joined us at the bar. And while he has been embraced by the NYC literary community, he prefers London. “I like writing from outside it all,” he says. “I can't stay out as long as you guys stay out. I'd be super depressed.” 

Like the pop star version of Brat, there’s a lot of anticipation around the literary Brat, as there was similar anticipation around DiTrapano mentee Honor Levy’s My First Book, which was published in May.  

“It’s a huge amount of pressure. When I was young, Gian was my hero and Tyrant got me into books. It was absolutely my only literary aspiration to have a book out with Gian. When he passed away, I desk drawed this thing for fucking ages,” Smith says. “None of this is how I wanted it to happen. It's a bittersweet thing.” 

In accordance with Tyrant, the most striking part of Brat is the voice – a singular, ambient drone that feels not unlike how grief feels. 

“It’s just so haunting in its repetitive nature, which I guess grief is as well,” Smith says. “That repetition, that kind of mental state you get in where you can't break out, but you get little shots of light that you can lose yourself for a minute in.”

Smith listened to electronic music during the writing process to try to inject the narrator’s voice with the same slinky, melancholic drone. Since moving to London at the age of 18, Smith has loved going out dancing. He loves artists like Fatima Yamaha and New Jackson, the latter of which samples Frank O’Hara reading his poem “Having a Coke with You,” in a particularly literary example. 

One night in the year before writing Brat, Smith was stoned on a night bus listening to “XTC” by DJ Koze, and became obsessed with listening to where the high hats fell in a specific track, and the spiraling nature of the music. 

“The story that that was told in the track, I was just like, damn,” Smith says. “I want to read a book that sounds like that.”