Author Robbie Couch Opens Up About His New Book “Bloom,” That Deals With Grief And Dying Plants

When I first saw the pitch for your book, I skimmed it quickly and thought it was about two plant gays meeting. So I was pleasantly surprised to realize the story actually centers on a gay man in his 70s. What made you want to explore the life of a much older character, especially since people his age are so rarely the main characters in gay novels?

Originally, the book came from an idea I’d had — I want to say at least a year before this version really took shape — about a character from a different story that will probably never see the light of day. In that story, I wanted to take a slight comedic approach to make mental health, depression, and anxiety feel more accessible by focusing on this character’s houseplants and how many new ones she was buying. So if you saw, like, her front window just crammed and they were like dying, then it’s, “Oh yeah, Sarah must be going through it.” I like the idea of having this more lighthearted way as an entry point to a more serious topic. So that was the original idea that landed in my ideas document that developed into the story for Bloom. 

I also really like the idea of someone struggling with a death and having that grief sort of manifest in their not being able to kind of keep up with, you know, housework and the normal routine of stuff. And so this houseplant was suffering because of that. And to your point, I do think that older LGBTQ people are not represented as much as they probably should be in our stories, and oftentimes, they’re depicted in ways that can be overly stereotypical or sort of caricatured. To be honest, I don’t know where the exact inspiration came from, other than I was aware of that and wanted to kind of write a story that included the perspective or the POV of an older gay man. So it just sort of worked out to kind of combine that original idea with what Morris was experiencing.