"The emotional building blocks of being trans are available to everybody." — Torrey Peters
In the middle of an epic book tour, the acclaimed Torrey Peters talks craft and the trans experience with the Being Alive Book Club.
I’ll tell you a secret, I was pretty nervous before our book club hang with Torrey Peters last month. How could I possibly craft an hour-long conversation worthy of her esteemed writing? I read and re-read her books, listened to recent and old interviews, drafted pages of notes that I scattered around me before the call.
I shouldn’t have been so worried. Torrey is undeniably brilliant. That’s clear on the page. But in person, you get to experience her grace and kindness. She goes out of her way to make you (me, everyone) feel comfortable and welcome.
This is a long one, perhaps to read with your weekend coffee. We cover what it means to be trans (of course) but mostly about the process and craft of writing.
Two notes of housekeeping:
BABC regular Catherine is again offering up her well-loved copy of Stag Dance for another member. Raise your hand in the comments or DM me if you are interested.
We’re reading Oliver Radclyffe’s memoir this month. Details and RSVP for the Zoom link will post tomorrow. Save the Date for Wed May 28th!
Torrey Peters is the author of the bestselling novel Detransition, Baby, which won the PEN/Hemingway Award for debut novel and was named one of the best books of the 21st century by The New York Times. She rides a pink motorcycle and splits her time between Brooklyn and an off-grid cabin in Vermont, a combination that makes absolute sense.
This conversation has been edited and condensed for clarity. Book club members are identified with their first initial.
Kyle RW: I thought I was being helpful emailing out the link, but it seems I’ve made you all Torrey Peters.
C: I wasn't Torrey before this, and suddenly I became Torrey.
Torrey: Listen, that's a familiar experience.
Kyle RW: I apologize to anyone just joining who has been renamed Torrey Peters. Please take a moment in the chat to tell us where you are calling from, tell us all the places Torrey lives.
I normally host our book club from Brooklyn, but tonight I'm calling in from Emeryville, California. Tonight we are joined by the singular Torrey Peters. Beyond her publicist-approved bio, I want to intro Torrey tonight with her own words, from a lecture she gave in Oslo about Hemingway.
Torrey: How did you find that?
Kyle RW: Do you want to set it up?
Torrey: I barely remember what I said.
Kyle RW: Your talk answers the question of whether or not Hemingway wrote trans literature. Confession: I've never read more than a passage of Hemingway, but you make me want to. You said,
"To read Hemingway is to see how far the man traveled along a gender spectrum, and to see the gender spectrum collapse. To read Torrey Peters is to realize, 'Oh, trans people, they're just like me."
Torrey: That's good stuff. I wish I remember writing it.
Kyle RW: I've had the pleasure of hearing you read twice on this book tour. I was hoping you could read a pivotal scene from the second story in your collection, "The Chaser."
Torrey reads a memorable passage on two teenagers learning to ‘sleep like a baker.’
Kyle RW: I picked that passage because you read it in Brooklyn recently, and the person in front of me turned around and excitedly whispered, "That's my favorite part in the whole book!" The section really captures what I love about your writing—how you move between tenderness, humor, and these really precise observations about human connection.
Torrey: That's nice to hear! I've been reading from different sections during the tour. The book is four different pieces, each in a different genre. The first is speculative fiction/dystopian, the second is teen romance, the third is tall tale Americana about a lumberjack (the titular "Stag Dance"), and the last one is horror.
I've mostly been reading the lumberjack one, because I wrote the whole thing in "lumberjack voice." Maybe I can read just the first paragraph so people can hear what that sounds like?
Torrey reads again from the opening of "Stag Dance" in her lumberjack accent.
The language is intentionally a little bit dense right from the start. You're thrown into the lumberjack world and lumberjack language. You probably don't know what half those words are. I didn't either. And you're sort of not supposed to.
Kyle RW: How did you keep track of language? It is so incredible how you shift in voice, vocabulary, and style so dramatically between the stories. Sondheim used to keep lists of thematic words, I imagine you with little dictionaries for each of your stories.
Torrey: Obviously, "Stag Dance" is the farthest from my own voice. I was developing this weird Americana cadence and the way they declared a lot more things in the 19th century. And then I found a glossary of logger lingo and started choosing the words that were most fun.
Their word for "hand" is "lunch hook" because you grab your lunch and scoop it to your mouth. A preacher is a "sky pilot" because he directs you towards heaven. There were just these rich, fun words, so I started with the ones I found most interesting to me. And then I did literally make a glossary at the beginning, then slowly just started saying whatever I wanted.
Kyle RW: They should make a tearaway logger dictionary zine for the paperback edition.
Torrey: The poor copy editors at Random House had to reverse-engineer the glossary because they needed to establish style guides for words that don't actually exist. Chewing tobacco in logger is ‘Scandihoovian dynamite.’ It’s funny, because when it's getting translated to other languages, they have to tell translators: "Here's a made-up logger word. Here's how we think this non-existent word should be styled when you translate it to German."
Kyle RW: That reminds me of how my father, who was a huge Star Trek fan, had a Klingon-to-English dictionary at home.
Torrey: Yeah, I knew Klingon was a fully developed language, as are the languages in The Lord of the Rings.
Kyle RW: Your book defies categorization in so many ways. I can’t possibly be the first person to say this, but you are both writing transgender literature and also writing transgenre. All of your pieces are so wildly divergent, even the fact that you came out with this collection as opposed to a second novel feels like a trans moment.
Torrey: Even that is hard to say. The cover says, “A novel and stories,” which is not true in any regard. It’s just marketing because people don't pick up collections as readily as novels. "A long novella and short novellas." would be more accurate, but that’s not a standard format. Which is why everyone’s having trouble deciding what to call it.
I kind of like that. Instead of writing stories to fit the publishing market, I got to ask: “What do these stories want to be? How do they resonate against each other? Can I stick them together and see what they produce?” I want to write the stories I want to write, and we’ll figure out what to call it afterwards.
I think more people should do that. More people should write the stories in the shape and length and size they want. There's this whole range of stories that can't find homes, even though shorter stories are actually a perfect length for our modern attention span. It's great to sit down and read something that takes about an hour and fifteen minutes to finish. I love that level of attention span, and it's a shame there isn't a publishing category that embraces it.
Kyle RW: Your work pushes readers to see trans broadly as an experience. I’ve heard you describe being trans as an invitation, not simply an identity. What’s your relationship to the identity of being a writer? Do you see writing as an identity? Is it an experience? Is it an invitation?
Torrey: That’s interesting. I don’t know. I don't necessarily think of writing as an identity. I think of it as a practice. I was reading Haruki Murakami’s Novelist as a Vocation, I like that idea. It is available to anybody. If you are a gardener and you have a story, you get to write a novel. If you are a skateboarder and you have a story, you get to write a novel. There's no limits, no guidelines, no gatekeeping.
If you want to be a heart surgeon, there are going to be people who ask, "What are your qualifications to be a heart surgeon?" But your qualifications to be a novelist? There aren't any. I don't want to make writer an identity, because I love that there are no qualifications to be a writer. You're a novelist so long as you are producing novels.
That's motivating to me. I want to be a novelist, and I’ve written like one, maybe one and a half. It’s an ongoing process of being a novelist.
I think this actually relates a lot to my general take on identity, which is that I'm much more interested in identity as a practice that you're doing.
I don't want to make writer an identity—you're a novelist so long as you are producing novels.
Being trans is interesting to me as something that I have chosen and do, much more than something that I am or that I'm stuck with, or that I cosmically or existentially got saddled with.
In the book, I'm not so interested in the binary between male and female. I am interested in the binary between cis and trans. I think that the emotional building blocks of being trans are available to everybody. What I identify in these stories are things like the difference between how you feel and how the world sees you. There's a gap there, and you're constantly trying to negotiate with the world to get it to see you as you see yourself.
Obviously, that's pertinent for trans people, because it's like, I want to be seen as a woman, so here's the things that I'm gonna do. “I'm gonna have long hair, I'm gonna wear lipstick, or whatever.” But all sorts of people who aren't necessarily crossing genders are also negotiating in similar ways. “I want to be seen as a rugged man, so let me drive a pickup truck and make sure I know what I'm doing with a drill."
You don't even have to cross genders to have that desire, that shame, that insecurity. It's stuff that I feel as a trans person. So if you feel these emotional things, the only question is what you're doing about it. For me, I feel these transition feelings, and I've decided to take estrogen and declare a thing. But somebody else might decide to take a class in woodworking.
And why is one the trans thing? Why is one not? Both feelings are driving you to take an action in the world. I don't really think that I own trans and can say, "Only if you cross some binary that I've decided arbitrarily is important do you qualify as trans."
If we look at transness in this way, maybe we can find some common ground, some solidarity. Maybe we can stand together in this world. I'm much more interested in standing with other people, however they happen to get here.
Kyle RW: It makes so much sense. In order to get healthcare, to get access to other assistance, we often have to check boxes, fill out forms, take specific steps, follow set rules. You have to go to this government official after seeing another government official after seeing a therapist for X amount of time. It’s a liberating mindshift to imagine just existing and moving through the world as you like.
Torrey: And I think it's a defense against this current era. Next year, I have to get my passport renewed, and they're gonna put an M on my passport. That sucks for reasons of safety, but in terms of feeling some sort of validation or affirmation, I don't give a fuck what Marco Rubio thinks my gender is. I don't need the State Department to give me a hug and tell me I'm doing great.
I care only about the practice of doing what I'm doing, and I don't really care who approves of it, or if it's made real with something like an M or an F, or makes it valid in the eyes of the State. That is all just negotiation with the world.
Kyle RW: I think we share a similar frame. It is no wonder we're so offensive to the State in so many ways, because we call it all into question. Of course, not everyone who identifies as trans agrees with us.
Torrey: Which is also nice about being trans, right? It's not monolithic. It's a bunch of cats all kind of wandering in different directions and batting each other on the face. That's what it's like to hang out with trans people. It's great. I like it.
Kyle RW: After reading “Infect Your Friends and Loved Ones,” I revisited Detransition, Baby and noticed that they both bounce back and forth through time. I want to hear why this is a useful device for you.
Torrey: That time structure is simply Pulp Fiction. The timelines match with the narrative arc of rising action, climax, and denouement that's nested there and then cut into sections, alternating back and forth, and the end of one loops back to the beginning of the other.
This is the same time structure that's in Westworld. It's a trendy way of managing time. People sometimes say, "Oh, you've done an interesting innovation in time." No, actually, I've done the most common, popular prestige television way of doing time. That's not to denigrate myself, that's on purpose. It offers some possibilities, but as somebody who's writing novels right now, I'm constantly competing with television and all these other types of media.
Borrowing forms and ways of managing time from movies and other popular media, where readers are already attuned to this way things move, means that I'm not trying to teach the reader how to read my book.
This is like the equivalent of how in the 19th century, writers like Melville were constantly referencing the Bible in Moby Dick because that was a popular medium of that era. I'm just trying to meet my readers where they're at, and give them something that moves in ways that can compete with other popular culture.
B: I'm teaching Detransition, Baby right now, for the second time. The last assignment I give them is to write an idea for the next chapter. Who would be the perspective? Where would it be set? I do that partly to get us to talk about the open-ended ending. What made you decide to have that ending be at this moment where it feels like it's tilting in one direction, but it's definitely not closed?
Torrey: I think for me, Detransition, Baby is a better loop than "Infect Your Friends and Loved Ones."
Detransition, Baby starts with these characters asking themselves, "Can we have a baby?" The story ends with these characters in a room saying, "Can we have a baby?" You might say, well, we've just spent 400 pages and nothing has happened because they're exactly where they started.
But the journey is not the plot journey of what they have decided. The journey is a stripping away of compulsive patterns, the ways that we lie to ourselves, the ways that we deceive each other. When they ask that question at the beginning of Detransition, Baby that question is freighted with lies and illusions and deceptions and self-deception. When they ask that question at the end, they're asking it for the first time honestly.
Then it's up to the readers to do exactly what you've done. If we're taking on this question with actual honesty, what actually might work to make a family? I don't have the answer, because I don't want to be prescriptive. The process is to turn to the readers and basically ask, "What if you stop lying to yourself? What makes a family that might work for you? What makes a structure that might work for you?"
You have to do the same work that the characters have gone through, of stripping away your illusions, your deceptions, your patterns, your compulsivities, to actually be like, "What do I actually want? And how might I do it for me?" Not for everybody, but for me.
That's the Detransition, Baby loop, and I'm quite proud of how that works.
"Infect Your Friends and Loved Ones," which I wrote before Detransition, Baby, has the same structure, but it's much more plot-based. You're returning to the origin of the plot rather than the origin of the emotional truth. The narrator spends the entire time looking down on Lexi for being too radical, too emotional, essentially too trans, wanting to be more respectable. At the end, she’s quite angry and knows the consequences of what she’s gonna do. And she cough's in that guy’s face. The person who wanted to burn the world down turns out to be the narrator, not Lexi.
I know many people don't like the end of Detransition, Baby because it doesn't solve for plot, but for me, the Detransition, Baby move is more sophisticated than simply solving for plot.
Thank you for that question and for teaching the book. I'm honored you spend time with your students thinking about the stuff that I've thought about.
K: When you're writing your stories or your novel, does it come to you in a linear way, and then you chop it up? How do you approach that craft-wise?
Torrey: It's not usually linear. I'll have a beginning and an end in my head, and then I'll start writing scenes. I'm trying to get more linear just because I think it's a more efficient process.
Years ago, I started writing with Scrivener, where you can put scenes on note cards and rearrange them. I wrote a lot of “Stag Dance” scene by scene, it was very messy in early drafts. The ending was going to be totally different. I had this idea that he was going to get arrested and go to prison and think about what it means to be a woman while alone in prison. That was my intended ending, but it structurally wasn't working.
When I had enough scenes, I was talking to my friend, and we realized the structure of this story is actually just a high school dance movie. It's Carrie, it's 10 Things I Hate About You where there's going to be a big dance, who's going to the dance together, then you go to the dance, and everything goes wrong. I didn't know that until literally months before I finished it, when I had enough scenes to look at it that way.
I did something similar with Detransition, Baby, but that was big enough that it needed to be more organized earlier in the process. I don't think I could have broken up Detransition, Baby and rearranged it so late in the game as I did with "Stag Dance."
Kyle RW: I actually tried to map it out in my notebook because I was trying to keep track of how you bounce through time, and I'm not going to spoil it, but the way that you do it in "Stag Dance" had my jaw drop.
Torrey: If you want to get nerdy about it, "Stag Dance" is interesting structurally because I was reading the George Saunders book on Russian short stories and writers. I was thinking about what forms older books use, and many Tolstoy stories are almost like fairy tales, where something happens three times. The old lady has logs, second time she has less logs, then she has no logs. I was thinking about these older structures where someone knocks on the door three times.
That became the structure for the book where the Agropelter [mythical, possessed axeman] comes three times—the first time they're out in a storm, the second time it turns out to be the timber inspector, and the last time is the ending where, not to give it away, but the ways of the Agropelter and queerness and the lumberjack merge.
On one hand, sometimes I want to do the most modern Pulp Fiction thing, but on the other hand, what if I just went back to Russian Fables and the mysterious thing appears three times?
Similarly, there are double beats in the story that I would cut out if I was writing a screenplay. There's almost two dances because first he goes to a blanket toss, that goes badly midway through. And then there's the ending dance. In a movie you would say, we've already seen this scene. But in older forms of storytelling, the repetition is the part that people like. The first time he goes to the party and fails, the second time he goes and succeeds. The contrasts were interesting to me.
I was researching stag dances in this book called Re-dressing America's Frontier Past and the way that lumberjacks would indicate they wanted to go to the dance as a woman was that they would cut out a triangle from brown fabric yay big [guestures] and pin it over their crotch. That meant, "I'm a woman," which is vulgar and on the nose, but I liked it as a symbol.
Kyle RW: A little "on the crotch."
Torrey: Hah. Well, in Russian storytelling the nose and the penis... kidding. I was very interested in what happens if we reduce transition to the barest of symbols, if we repeat things in the oldest of ways, and just play around with that. That's a lot of what entertained me while writing "Stag Dance."
Kyle RW: To stay in the realm of craft, I know you are deep in the vocabulary and structure of these different forms. Each of your stories is also a different take on trans life. How do you marry your idea with the genre? Which comes first?
Torrey: They are kind of interdependently colorized, to say it in a Buddhist way. When I was touring on Detransition, Baby someone asked me, "Why don't you ever write ugly characters?" They kind of asked me if I was obsessed with pretty people. I don't necessarily think that all of the characters in Detransition are pretty, but I get what they were saying. So I got in my head that I wanted to write an ugly character. I want to write about bodies that are inconvenient or don't lend themselves to transition. And the ways that, in the trans community, there's a lot of unspoken tension and resentment about who gets to transition. And how easy it is for certain people to transition versus other people. And the way that can divide us.
I think the root of the question for me is, "Well, it's easy for you to write about transition!" because people perceived that I was having an easy time. Even though I was perceiving that I was having a hard time, and other people were having easy times.
So I wanted to write an ugly character, and wondered, "What's the setting for that character?" I don't necessarily want to write that ugly character in Brooklyn. I didn't want to take that on. And I always wanted to write something set in Montana. I'd written something that didn't work out a long time ago, but I really liked the setting. And there was so much pressure to follow up Detransition, Baby and write stuff that was witty, urbane relationship stuff. I kept trying to do it and feeling the pressure. Whereas when I started writing in lumberjack cadence, I felt free. It felt like nobody asked for a lumberjack follow-up to Detransition, Baby, so now I get to do what I want and be freed from expectations. I started to research, and it all started to come together.
I feel like a lot of times, the prep for writing a story is pulling a rubber band back. You pull back, not exactly sure where it's gonna go or what it is, but then you have it. And then you see your target and all that time and effort that you spent thinking about it. You can just release it. I spent 2-3 years aimlessly thinking about this stuff and then when I found the voice it came together.
Kyle RW: For anyone who hasn't read yet, Babe [the ugly axeman] represents some of the best interior writing explaining what it is like to look in the mirror and be failed by your reflection. By the sight of yourself. It's stunning to be in that headspace.
Torrey: Meanwhile, the reader knows that actually this guy is incredibly strong and competent. Other people would desire him just as he is. Bthat that's not how he desires to feel himself, you know. The ugliness is contextual to what you want to be.
There are these hegemonic conventions around beauty. But he wanted to feel differently. Someone else might have said, “Look, you're the strongest, tallest, most manly axman around, and all I want to do is tumble into bed with you." But, he didn't feel it. He couldn't feel it, and to him, all of those things made him feel ugly.
Kyle RW: Torrey, you are such a delight we could keep talking all night. I love every month going deep on the writings and words of our guest authors. Thank you for everything you are putting out into the world. And I will definitely follow up with you later about that Hemingway essay.
Torrey: Well, thank you. Thank you all for coming out on a Thursday night. I really appreciate it. And thank you, Kyle, for putting this together, especially in dark times. It's nice to be here for this.
More Torrey Peters:
Read: The Myths and Moves of “Stag Dance” (Max Schlenker, Chicago Review of Books)
Read: Think Gender Is Messy? Wait Until You Read These Stories (Hugh Ryan, New York Times)
Listen: Did Hemingway Write Transgender Literature? Lecture by Torrey Peters
Follow: @torreyadora (instagram)