Jackie Ess on her new book Darryl and trans literature
Jackie Ess’ debut novel Darryl has taken twitter by a storm. And for good reason, it’s a really funny story about a cuckold having an existential crisis. We sat down on riseup to hash out whether it’s a trans novel™.
Emma: Torrey Peter’s described your book as having a “trans lens.” But although you and Torrey both moved in similar circles in trans literature, it seems like you’ve taken a different approach than her. Her writing has a lot of trans characters while your writing doesn’t have that many trans people in it at all. Why did you decide to take that sort of approach to your writing, to sort of write through a lens v. writing about something directly?
Jackie: This was an area of more tension for me when I began writing the book because there was an idea of "trans literature" in the air that was a little bit brittle. The idea was that trans writers were being pushed to explain or justify transness, often in a memoir genre, in a way that always assumed that the audience was non-trans, to be educated and convinced. And there were dynamics that were hard to represent. There was an over-emphasis on the early moments of transition rather than trans life, inattention to the relationships between trans people, and to the more thorny materialistic problems that you can get into in a more social novel. The cost and difficulty of healthcare, trouble with prisons and police, sex work, etc. All of this stuff was falling out. So there was this well-meaning attempt at “trans literature with a trans audience in mind.” I can’t express how much I appreciate this and all the different stabs we were making at it at the time, including the reclamation of “t4t” as a category. But I’m doing something else.
I was coming in at the tail end of that and feeling like I needed a different space still. Because I didn’t want to address only trans people, and I didn’t want everything I said to be about transness. So I had to begin with someone that was very much outside. I wanted to write something that couldn’t be easily be reduced to my transness or taken to task as representation, some kind of easy statement that could be extracted from the story, the husk tossed aside.
I’m getting more comfortable with writing directly about transness, I think maybe my third book will have a trans protagonist. But I can’t think about that now.
Emma: Perhaps the funniest part of your book is in the first chapter, when Darryl comes out to the reader as a cuckold. But people don’t really seem very satisfied with his initial coming out monologue. He constantly gets asked if he’s gay, if he’s trans, if he’s borderline. Why is that the question that trips people up? Isn’t coming out as a cuckold enough?
Jackie: I expected that people would try to diagnose Darryl, Darryl tries to diagnose Darryl. Clive suggests he might be borderline, tells him to go and read Marsha Linehan, and he does. He’s trying to figure out his sexual identity as well, and it just won’t stay put. Is he trans? Is he Walt Whitman? Is he a "buckle up fuckos, time for a thread on why cuckolding actually isn’t racist [1/58]" guy? At some point he begins to question whether he belongs more to the world of day or dreams. In an intense moment of meditation he becomes Andrew Marvell’s dew drop,
Congealed on earth : but does, dissolving, run
Into the glories of th’ almighty sun.
So I would say that for readers to try to figure out what he really is, is very natural. But part of what the book is about for me is that he doesn’t resolve to a stable self. And actually, there’s something very right about that, he’s faithful to it, maybe at the cost of his dignity and moral soundness. Readers are searching for the same certainty that Darryl is searching for, and finding, but only ever holding onto for a few pages.
Emma: Certainly a lot of trans people feel something in common with Darryl, even if Darryl repeatedly says he isn’t trans. Was that your intention? Is this sense of identification enough to make Darryl a trans novel?
Jackie: I’m not very interested in whether it’s a trans novel. It’s possible that this is a category which belongs to marketing and awards. I don’t want to assume that everyone who takes the same pill takes up an identical quill. Certainly any definition should try to include the best work by trans people with trans subjects, so you tell me. But of course I’ll play ball.
Darryl certainly does have a lot of trans content. It doesn’t fit in neatly, because the main character is someone who thinks a lot about transitioning, and ultimately doesn’t. This isn’t exactly the kind of story that’s emphasized in a lot of trans literature because on the face of it it’s not very affirming. If you’re a trans person who identifies with Darryl, does that eat away at your identity somehow? He asks at some point, about trans women, “how to talk about what we have in common, without saying that they’re male or that I’m not?” It’s genuinely uncomfortable that Darryl has so much in common with trans people, including some experiences of dysphoria (he experiences masculinity as defilement, something which he is always trying to scrub or shave off, sometimes literally). He’s a challenging character that way, but one I like having around.
I think we cut a lot of corners intellectually when talking about trans identity, but let me make one thing very clear: that’s a good thing. The simplification is often necessary in a world that is hostile, or where you are only gong to get one chance to establish a legal precedent. But in art I think you can be much free-er. One of the things that Darryl is free with that’s sort of difficult is that it presents a character who plainly could transition, if he said to you tomorrow that he was going to you would say “yes, ok. maybe that will help. I’m happy to help you with that.” But he doesn’t. To acknowledge that there are people who can but won’t, is to acknowledge that there are people who have but could have not. So it eats away at a sense of urgency, I think that’s part of the discomfort of the character. He *is* relatable to many trans people. Yet he isn’t trans. What can you do? On the one hand this might threaten the sense of ownership of our experience, by suggesting that we aren’t the only voice on it, on the other, it suggests that maybe our experience is an analytic lens on much more of the world than we thought.
Emma: I guess a lot of people feel like once the matter of your gender identity is cleared up, a lot of the other problems in your life also start to make more sense. So I suppose it’s only natural that people would want to apply that to Darryl.
Jackie: Everybody believes that about the big difficult thing they’ve got to do, and it isn’t for me to insult the credences of youth. A leap of faith is very difficult, so perhaps we’d better let that belief alone. Maturity takes a different view, simply the view that trans people are human and no human has an easy go of it. But I think for many of us it was at least true that transitioning allowed us to stand ten toes down. So then whatever those problems were, we started to take them on.
Emma: As a character, there’s something about Darryl that makes him easy to root for. But is he a good person? For someone so mild mannered his actions have a tendency to lead, directly or indirectly, towards extraordinarily violence. And he’s somewhat nonchalant about it all, I suppose because he often (but not always) is shielded from the consequences.
Jackie: I think Darryl is a good person who’s capable of doing profound damage to the people around him. And he does. So maybe it doesn’t matter very much to call him a good person. He’s dogged by a sense of unreality, and seems to forget from scene to scene who he really is. At any given moment he’s imprinting like a baby bird on his next lover, saying “are you my mommy?” or maybe “are you Jesus?” but he has very little continuity or agency. He doesn’t see the consequences of his actions, and he sees consequential action as very much something that belongs to others. It’s something which belongs to the virile, to the coarse, to the working man, to the athlete, or to the villain. So even as he’s producing these tremendous effects in people’s lives and can't quite own them. He's a dangerous man to know.
Outside of this tremendous blind spot in the area of his own agency, I think he’s a very good person. He seems very capable of loving people, endlessly curious about others, willing to take on their point of view. So willing that at times he seems to lose hold of his own. That’s a wonderful thing, and he’s able to have compassionate encounters, he desires to help people and animals, and he really tries to.
Emma: We all know how important authentic representation is. What sort of research did you do to ensure that Darryl was a faithful and accurate portrayal of the cuckolding community?
Jackie: I read your diary. And I consulted the many men who’ve paid me (with gifts and company) to be with their wives.
Emma: a lot of your writing has been under pseudonyms. It seems like everyone knows about your time as Cliff Cannon, for example, but also I barely know anything about some of the older zines you wrote even though I feel like I know you pretty well. Why did you spend so much of your career writing under a pseudonym and is that something you’ll return to, or are we going to hear more from Jackie Ess in the future?
Jackie: I’ve enjoyed pseudonymity but feel for the moment pretty tired of it. I think what I’ve discovered about it is that people admire the supposedly daring irreverence of it, but in the manner of giggling and trying to get me to “say the line.” I seem to be a cat’s-paw for people’s anxious relationship to the discourse, in this case the academic trans discourse, which I poked a little fun at and also I think made some serious replies to. But basically you should all get the nerve to speak in your own voices.
So yes, my next books will all be by Jackie Ess. Partly just for the cynical reason that I wouldn’t mind selling them. I wouldn’t mind staying in touch with my audience. Upright and in the light. Or trying at least.
You can follow Jackie on twitter and you can also buy Darryl.
