Torrey Peters and I went to dinner last year, and she was like, “I feel like you write about transness and also don’t write about transness at all.” It’s funny, because I was thinking about how in trans memoirs and sexual asssault memoirs, there’s often this point of fracture and then a sort of subsequent transformation that occurs. I didn’t feel like my experience was so stark or so recognizable or that there was this long exposition that led up to a crisis point and then afterwards I rebuilt from it. My girlhood was something that always seemed true to me, and likewise, I was facing sexual violence before I was facing my own sexuality. Sexual violence was my sexuality. The format of a rape memoir is often: I was living this very useful life, and then this horrible thing broke me, and I went into the depths of my darkness, and then I came out the other side, and I was a better, stronger person, right? But my experiences of going through sexual violences were formative from the outset in a way that I kind of struggled to look at and be honest about.
How did you care for yourself in the process of writing this book?
One of the most disorienting things about doing press for this book is how intellectually people want to tackle the book, almost across the board. When I talked to Rayne Fisher-Quann, she very much prioritized the body, which was very refreshing, but so many people are sort of like, This is an exercise in storytelling, and we’re going to tackle it on that level. I think that there is something important to me about sort of emphasizing that, yes, it is an intellectual and aesthetic enterprise, to write a book or to make an art object, but these are also things that did happen to my individual body.
In terms of preparing for that throughout the writing process, I don’t have a super-easy answer. I got into therapy, and that was incredibly important. I became insured after being uninsured for about 10 years, and in 2022 I essentially got on a waitlist for therapy and scheduled my surgery consultations and spent years waiting for everything to sort of pan out. In October of 2023, which is about the time that the sort of deep writing began, I was taken off the waitlist at my psychotherapy practice. I began having weekly sessions, and I don’t think that I would have been able to write the book if I hadn’t had serious therapy.
