When we first meet Damani, the protagonist of Priya Guns’s debut novel, Your Driver Is Waiting, she’s behind the wheel of the car she uses as a driver for an unnamed ride-share app, rattling off the list of implements and makeshift weapons she relies on to protect herself. Damani’s sense of safety—on the streets at night alone, but also in her familial and romantic relationships—is constantly under threat as she does her best to eke out a living from meager tips in a city besieged by protests, but a steamy romance with a woman named Jolene soon spurs her to consider a life beyond mere survival. (That is, until Jolene does something both unforgivable and extremely recognizable to anyone who’s spent time in majority-white organizing spaces…but you’ll have to read the book to get all the details.)
Vogue recently spoke to Guns about telling the story of a working-class woman of color trying to get by and the system of “Method writing” that helped her to reimagine the 1976 film Taxi Driver for the era of Lyft and Uber. Read the full interview below.
__Vogue: __Can you tell me a little bit about the writing process for Your Driver Is Waiting?**
Priya Guns: In total, from the planning stages to actually finishing that final draft, I would say it [took] about a year and a half. To be honest, I finished my own personal first draft in about four weeks, and then I gave that to my editor, who polished it for about three months, and then we had a proper draft that we submitted to the publisher in about eight or nine months.
The backdrop of protests in the book is so striking; were you inspired at all by the uprisings we saw happen across the U.S. in 2020?
There was so much going on in 2020 that was right in our faces, but I was inspired by a history of us being very angry. In terms of visually thinking about the city, I thought a lot about Beirut, where I lived from 2018 to 2020; they had an uprising in October of 2019, and overnight the city looked different. The glass of bank windows was smashed, people were out, everything they felt in their heart and soul was plastered on the walls, and it was incredible to see. It’s unfair to say that protesting is a recent occurrence, because people have been fighting for their rights for how long, right? It felt almost impossible, at the time of writing, to write about a driver and not include that. I was thinking about what Taxi Driver could look like today; Travis Bickle was fixated on Senator Palantine, but my thought was, if I’m writing this, it’s not going to be a fixation on a person—it’s going to be something bigger, which was also my way of showing the wider systemic foundations and structures that we live among.
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