Against the Identity-Misery Novel

For years, the very act of writing fiction was something I undertook as a means of understanding what exactly was going on with me. I found it much easier to address my struggles with the mind-body problem through a story about body-snatching aliens, or to begin to nurse wounds from a doomed-to-fail relationship via a novella about tetchy lesbian behaviorists. Of course I’m not alone in this: catharsis and mimesis are the glue that sticks the fractured psyche back together, and we are all storytelling animals. Joan Didion keeps reminding us from beyond the grave that “we tell ourselves stories in order to live.” 

As I was using my fiction to peer askance at my own life, there were political and cultural changes of tectonic proportions happening in the world around me. I published my first novel two years into Trump’s first presidency, and then in 2021 I transitioned. In 2023, when I should have been celebrating the publication of a second novel, I was instead being drained of resources financial and social by an ostensible member of my gender-defecting community. In 2024, I’m reckoning with it all: the massive shifts in the American political landscape, the evolution of my identity and philosophical beliefs, the I-could-not-have-predicted-this-on-even-my-most-mentally-askew-day state of our world.