The author of Letters to Montgomery Clift discusses faith, death and how life imitated art while writing his new novel Talking to the Moon.

By Christopher Cappiello

“I love this book. I don't regret a minute of working on it and changing it. But I'm so glad it's over!” author Noel Alumit says about his new novel, Talking to the Moon, before breaking into the joyful laughter that punctuates his conversation easily and often. Chatting at a café in his Silver Lake neighborhood, the Filipino- American writer and actor talks freely about the long, somewhat circuitous path to the final draft of his new book, a moving and magical tale of one family's struggle to come together in the wake of a shooting that seriously wounds the father.

Alumit has been working on Talking to the Moon discontinuously since the 1999 incident that inspired it. “It was a shooting in the Valley,” he shares. After a racially motivated gunman shot at a Jewish day care center, “he went looking for a person of color, in this case specifically an Asian or a Latino,” Alumit explains. “And he found one in the guise of a postal worker.” The writer followed the case—even while he completed his acclaimed first novel, Letters to Montgomery Clift—interviewing the prosecuting attorney and attending the sentencing for the shooter. “It somehow came out that at one point the family had lived in my neighborhood, in Filipino Town, and it became even closer to me.”

Talking to the Moon begins with the seemingly random shooting of Jory Lalaban, a Filipino-born postal worker who lives quietly with his wife, Belen, in their Los Angeles home of nearly 30 years. The incident is actually a hate crime, tied to a spree of shootings. For much of the novel, Jory is hospitalized in critical condition.

The couple has a somewhat strained relationship with their 30-year-old gay son, Emerson. An older son, Jun-Jun, the apple of the parents' eyes, was killed by a hit-and-run driver when he was 10. Belen, the daughter of an aristocratic family in the Philippines, met Jory when he was a seminarian. The ensuing scandal of their relationship led Jory to abandon his Catholic faith and embrace the indigenous spiritual traditions of the Igorots, the “mountain people” of the remote Benquet Province of his native country. As a holy man in those traditions, Jory speaks to the moon. Belen, ever the devoted Catholic, converses regularly with the Virgin Mary. Emerson, meanwhile, the decidedly nonreligious gay son, gets phone calls from his long-dead brother.

Do these touches constitute magical realism? “I think those relationships with the Virgin Mary or the moon or his [dead] brother are as real as the conversation that you and I are having right now for these people,” he explains. “And I think that part [of the story] is more a portrait of a culture, of a kind of belief system that many of us believe but don't want to cop to, frankly. I mean, my mother has a pin of the Virgin Mary on her body, attached to her clothes, that is just her way of life. She spends her time talking to the Virgin Mary and praying all the time. I don't necessarily think that that's a tool of fiction.” Later, he adds, “For all the characters, the people they communicate best with are not human beings. We seem to know the best things to say with deities of some kind that we don't know how to say to each other.”

Call them what you will, the devices make for dramatic, compelling reading. When you add Alumit's choice to tell the story from a variety of character's viewpoints, seamlessly blending flashbacks with more contemporary scenes, the reader has a roller coaster of imagery and emotion to relish. “It started off as being this nonlinear novel, [where] time would be secondary,” he explains, laughing at his grandiosity. Then, in the middle of writing a book about a young gay man dealing with his father's mortality, Alumit's own father became seriously ill. “When my father was passing, I thought, 'You know what, I'm going to do this for my Dad.' And that changed the structure. If I'm doing this for my Dad, he would put this down at page 10,” he says, laughing hard. “He would not appreciate this at all, and he would not understand what I was trying to do ... I had to put it in a structure that he would appreciate somehow.”

That simplification and focus on an audience of one seemed to free Alumit to find the story within a more prescribed structure, while also adding elements of truth he couldn't have conjured earlier. Before his father fell ill, he admits, “I wrote scenes in the hospital where the son is dealing with his father's death, and I thought, 'I think it can pass.' And when my father was eventually dying, I thought, 'Oh, my God, I knew nothing about what I was writing about before!'”

One of the novel's more rewarding threads is Emerson's relationship with his boyfriend Michael, a Chinese flight attendant who spends much of the book not returning Emerson's calls over a communication breakdown. Their realistically avoidable tiff will ring true for many gay men, and their reunion is that much more satisfying as a result.

Now that this powerful, personal story is finished, the single writer is enjoying a little respite. “The past two or three years I was so engulfed in this book that I denied myself a lot of things, including dating and relationships,” he shares. “I do work [full time], so there's only so much time. I can choose to date someone or I can choose to write my book. And there were lots of times that I chose to write my book because I felt I had to get it out of me. And I think now I'm sort of at this point where I can relax, and I find myself going back out in the world. I'm going now to parties that I want to go to, that aren't work related. And I'm going to hang out with people, and that's the nice part about [finishing] this book. At least until I get absorbed in my next book.”

Noel Alumit signs copies of Talking to the Moon on Saturday, Feb. 24, at 7:30 p.m. at Skylight Books (1818 N. Vermont Ave., Los Feliz), Friday, March 2, at 7 p.m. at Vroman's Bookstore (695 E. Colorado Blvd, Pasadena) and Saturday, March 3, at 5 p.m. at Book Soup (8818 Sunset Blvd., West Hollywood).