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About the project
Gentlemen Prefer Silence: The Intimate Diary of All That’s Left Unsaid is a serialized work of literary fiction by Susannah Rodriguez Drissi.
First published in June 2025 and now in its second season, the approximately 154,000-word project moves between autofiction, epistolary fiction, literary theory, performance, music, self-portraiture, and psychological fiction to explore desire, spectatorship, authorship, and the dangerous intimacy of unexpected correspondence.
Originally conceived as a transmedia work, Gentlemen Prefer Silence refuses to remain on the page. Its world unfolds through fiction, original music, short films, photographs, drawings, fashion, performance—and now, merchandise. Images, objects, and phrases that begin inside the narrative cross into the physical world, becoming things that can be worn, carried, kept, given away, or left behind.
At the center of the project is the relationship between writer and reader: the strange, intimate contract created when one person writes and another agrees to keep reading.
And then the reading stops.
There ought to be a word for that particular rupture—the breaking of a contract no one remembers signing. The writer keeps writing and the Reader... well, the Reader goes interstellar. And then tragedy strikes: literature becomes content, and metaphor, having nowhere left to land, becomes merchandise.
What was intimate becomes merchandise, slips into a digital shopping cart, acquires shipping fees, and arrives, neatly packaged, on someone’s doorstep.
Intimacy, apparently, ships.
Experience the project at gentlemenprefersilence.substack.com
About the Author
Susannah Rodriguez Drissi, Ph.D., is an award-winning Cuban-born writer, poet, lyricist, playwright, director, translator, and scholar whose work crosses literature, music, theater, film, and performance.
She is the author of The Latin Poet’s Guide to the Cosmos, Rey y Atenea / Rey and Atenea, and the award-winning novel Until We’re Fish. Her writing has appeared in Publishers Weekly, Los Angeles Review of Books, Miami Herald, El Nuevo Herald, Diario de Cuba, and numerous journals and anthologies. She is faculty in UCLA’s Writing Programs.
Her creative practice increasingly moves between the literary and the musical. She has written more than 150 original songs in English and Spanish, drawing from bolero, nueva trova, alternative folk, pop, rock, salsa, and experimental forms while remaining grounded in the language and musical traditions of Cuba.
Her two-track release Falso camino opens with the haunting spoken-word prologue “Si llegas, pensé,” a cinematic piece that returns Rodriguez Drissi to her origins as a poet before giving way to the music itself. Both tracks inhabit the emotional world of Gentlemen Prefer Silence: longing, memory, rupture, desire, and everything that remains unsaid. Produced by Angelique Calvillo, with guitar and bass by Furkan Barut, the release serves as an aural companion to the literary project and the opening chapter of a larger musical universe.
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