The Demons Just Kept Coming as I Was Writing

I’m freelance writing. And that’s how I pay rent right now. So I still have deadlines I’m racing to meet. Other than that I’m kind of a homebody, but because my book is about to come out, I’ve been out and about more—at friend’s events, like your book event, or going to gay guy parties, chatting it up. My birthday just happened, so I had a celebratory martini. So I’ve been out of the house more, which is nice, but also exhausting.

I am very specific, and very conservative, with my drink orders. I really need it to be a classic martini, which to me means one thing: it’s gin, with an olive, and very little vermouth, and definitely not dirty. Everyone orders them with so much olive brine these days.

That’s how my boyfriend takes them too.

No. But I do feel strongly that drinks should be made the classic ways—the 1950s kind of ways. Very simple, very boozy, not too sweet.

Probably. I think I’m a bit of a workaholic. And I think I do sometimes draw strict lines around things. But I also like to experiment. The book that I wrote is in many ways an experiment for me. I thought I was going to write something much more traditional—more yearning, more literary fiction, more Sad Girl—about, like, God and the midwest and home. And in some sense that’s in there. But I ended up writing something much weirder, I think. Something with a lot more ketamine in it. It’s more of a tilted axis. I think there’s these two warring parts of me—there’s this left side of my brain that’s more creative and messy and has play and party in it, and then the other side is more Type A and Virgo. And I think my whole life is those two parts battling each other sometimes.

I think the weirdness came about sort of by accident, in this backdoor way. I was originally trying to write a memoir in 2020 about conversion therapy, and that ended up being expelled through a few different essays that are out there in the world. But then I had this feeling that I wanted to resist writing a traditional, trans memoir. I wanted to resist the impulse to do this autobiographical narrative that’s all about suffering and the display of that suffering. And simultaneously, I was writing some fiction, specifically short stories about people in the midwest. And in this fiction workshop I wrote what ended up being a lot of the first chapter of the book.

In that original short story, there weren’t a lot of demons—it was more an angry, internet girl, roaming around New York kind of thing. But it had this voice that felt like a possible narrative engine to explore these weirder things. And so then I started exploring the demons, the horror element, the fantastical element. So, to me, it always felt like this literary novel that ended up developing these genre characteristics.

I think at first there was a sleep paralysis demon. That was always there. And then I thought, “what if the demon comes back? What if it’s a recurring part of the book?” I don’t really plan out novels. I just don’t want to get bored as I write, so I can’t know what the end of the book is going to be. And the demons just kept coming as I was writing, and I realized this was going to be a large part of the plot and of the book. I always knew there was going to be the commune; I always knew I didn’t want to write a novel that wasn’t only set in New York City, but that was kind of all I knew. But it just felt right, as I kept going, for the demons to sort of become their own character.

I mean, I grew up in a community that believed in demons and believed in demonology. And I wrote a piece that was sort of about that a long time ago, before I began this novel. But I think a lot of the stuff that I wrote about in that piece ended up coming up in the novel because the novel is very much about belief and trauma and doubting your beliefs. I think because I grew up in a place where there was lore about demons that was believed to be true, I grew up feeling like it was very natural to think about and talk about and write about these things.

When I was growing up, I was terrified of demons, terrified of the idea of possession. Those all felt very real and very scary to me as a kid. So, sure, it’s a metaphor, but it’s also drawing on something that was very real to me—this biblical terminology and theology. I’m playing with my version of what writers often play with—Greek mythology, Buddhist mythology. Instead of those, I’m drawing on what I’m well-versed in, which is Christian theology. I wanted to a bit satirize it, take it to its extremes. At the core of the book is kind of the question of, "what if the worst thing for a conversion therapy survivor came true?” Like, “okay you grew up being told demons were real and that you were bad. What if you found out that the demons actually were real? How would you use that? How would you integrate that into your belief system about yourself?”

I don’t know. I have my doubts. There was a part of me when I started writing this book, I was like, “am I gonna wake up screaming in fear one night,” and be proven right that demons are real? I didn’t want to take this Dawkins or Hitchens approach—the idea that there is definitively nothing out there. I feel very in awe of people who do manage to have really strong spiritual convictions. And I think in some ways, the book takes an approach that neither says, “God is real” or “God isn’t real.” The only way out of that trap is to sort of walk away from it, to step back and think about other ways of moving through the world.

Oh yeah, absolutely. It felt really exciting and generative and almost taboo to play with the idea of demons and religion and communes, all these things that were very taboo to challenge where I grew up. Even tarot was very taboo. And so to then go to the extreme, it felt even wicked. There was this almost devilish glee to play with these tropes, even though it’s obviously fiction. I’m not becoming a practicing Satanist or pagan or anything. But nonetheless it felt really electric to work through these themes through fiction. And I realized I couldn’t work through any of those ideas about religion or politics or organized abandonment in a memoir. It required the friction of a novel to think through things in a way that felt more true than if I had just written about surviving conversion therapy.

Boy Erased is already out there. The Miseducation of Cameron Post is already out there. But I’m a Cheerleader is already out there. I wanted to write something that was a little more dark, about someone who’s much further along the process of thinking through their trauma, but still so haunted by those things, because there’s no clean break.

I think I felt pretty neutral to be honest. I felt almost cold and surgical about it. Almost like I was a journalist, mining material from my life. Writing it this way, as opposed to as a memoir, allowed me the space to approach it with a bit more remove, and maybe even a bit of whimsey. It felt vulnerable. But I didn’t feel pain.

That’s in a lot of ways what the whole book is about—that you recreate the same systems of oppression that you’re trying to run away from, because you didn’t fully dismantle what you were working through before. Like it’s kind of impossible—you can never fully get rid of the cop in your head or the fascist in your head. You can only become more aware of them, and become more aware of your tendency to use them. When you go out and try to create a life or a community, it’s not about trying to create something perfect, it’s about trying to create a place where you have the space to work through all of that together and vulnerably. People often think, as some characters do in the book, “well we can create this separately from the society we live in,” and then bringing everything society has imparted onto them to those groups.

If we’d figure out how to totally separate from any kind of fascist or oppressive tendencies and not pass them down then we’d be in a very different position on “the left” than we are now. But instead, we often end up making the same mistakes over and over again, because everyone’s isolating themselves and refusing to come together. It’s really important to make room for people to make mistakes, so that we’re not just recreating the traumas and oppressions we’re all trying to heal from. I can believe that people should be pro-trans, for example, while also not jettisoning community and connection if someone, say, messes up a trans person’s pronouns by accident.

There are so many people who want to only speak in absolutes. I think even a lot of leftist spaces have taken on this kind of religious purity and thinking, passing it down from their own childhoods and traumas. And I think this book is about in a lot of ways trying not to do that—trying to get past things being only good or only bad, trying to get past being dogmatic, trying to disentwine that kind of thinking.