The academic setting is one that Taylor gravitates toward as a reader some of his favorite novels include The Idiot, by Elif Batuman; The Marriage Plot, by Jeffrey Eugenides; Harvard Square, by Andr Aciman; and Fates and Furies, by Lauren Groff but he rarely sees people like himself when he reads them. He hopes Real Life changes that. What I wanted to do was to take this genre and this milieu that I really respond to as a reader and to sort of write myself into it, Taylor said.

He channeled this desire into his first published piece of writing, the story Cold River, which appeared in 2015 in Jonathan, a literary journal published by Sibling Rivalry Press. He wrote the story as an undergraduate student, after he had gone to a bookstore in Montgomery but couldnt find the queer books he was looking for. When he asked the clerk if they had them, he said, the guy was like, Were a family store, we dont stock that kind of stuff here.

Taylor considers himself primarily a short-story writer, but the desire to see people like him represented in literature led him to make his book debut with a novel. I had this feeling no one was going to take me seriously until I write this novel, he said. Im going to write a novel so that people will let me write short stories in peace.

Stories are on the way. His next book is a collection, Filthy Animals, which will also be published with Riverhead.

But now that Taylor has made space for himself in the world of novels, maybe hell stick around, he said. Over the summer, I was like Oh, maybe I will write another novel.

Correction: Feb. 10, 2020An earlier version of this article misstated the publisher of the literary journal Jonathan. It is Sibling Rivalry Press, not Lambda Literary.

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For a Scientist Turned Novelist, an Experiment Pays Off - The New York Times