Author2Author: Helen Boyd and Kate Bornstein

When it comes to identity issues, Kate Bornstein has long been one of my favorite writers. So when Helen Boyd, the author of My Husband Betty, offered to talk with Bornstein about her new book, Hello Cruel World: 101 Alternatives to Suicide for Teens, Freaks and Other Outlaws, I didn’t need much persuading. (By the way, Boyd’s second memoir, She’s Not the Man I Married, continues her account of making a marriage work when one of the partners decides to pursue their transgendered identity; it comes out next spring.)

Helen Boyd: I’ve had people tell me my writing voice is very chatty—and I find yours is even more so. Does your voice as a writer come out of your experience with performance, or vice versa?

Kate Bornstein: My first editor, Bill Germano at Routledge, encouraged me to make the book performative because he recognized that as a strength of mine. So I have different fonts and typefaces representing different voices: the main text of the book, quotes from other people, and a third voice that’s me, usually arguing with something I’ve said in the main text. So the book reads like a conversation, one you’re listening to, one you can take part in. I like the performative nature of writing, can’t seem to write straight text. I try to imagine myself in the reader’s place, and when I sat down to write about alternatives to suicide, I quickly realized if I was having a really bad day, I’d want a book that would make me smile just by looking at it.

Yeah, our writing styles are chatty; but our work has more in common than that. I recently interviewed Betty Dodson who said that the strength of writers like you and me and her is that we write in the first person about our own lives. I’m curious to know what kind of response you’ve been getting from different areas of the publishing and literary and academic worlds to your subjective writing style; and while you’re at it, what do you think is the future of subjective writing?

Helen Boyd: One of the things that has bothered me is the pretense of objectivity in academia and journalism, which is kind of funny, because it’s hard to research and write about things you don’t have strong feelings about. Leaving aside how that might explain how boring some writing is, I wish more people would be clear about their biases. I love Mencken, who wrote a book called Prejudices. And while he held a lot of opinions people find shocking now—he described women’s bodies as looking like crooked $s—he was entertaining and educational and you knew what he thought. I’ve always found that kind of writing more useful in terms of understanding the world than anything that’s theoretically objective, because it isn’t usually, and so it’s just diffuse and inaccessible instead.

Kate Bornstein: There’s a favorite Mencken quote of mine that’s applicable. “As democracy is perfected, the office of president represents, more and more closely, the inner soul of the people. On some great and glorious day the plain folks of the land will reach their heart’s desire at last and the White House will be adorned by a downright moron.” What do you think about living here in our moron’s increasingly conservative country?

Helen Boyd: I’ve been kind of freaking out about how conservative the city seems to be getting, especially after the gaybashing of Kevin Aviance earlier this year. Where would you live, if not New York City?

Kate Bornstein: The heart of New York has always been great. Sometimes it beats for the millionaires, sometimes it’s all about us outlaws. Right now, it’s hard for the outlaws to live here. Hello, Cruel World is a survival guide for outlaws, and I’ve heard from some New York readers that it’s made life here easier.

I’ve been thinking about the Pacific Northwest but my grrlfriend, Barbara, wouldn’t be happy with that. She’s too much of a sun bunny, while I adore the mist and rain. I used to live on Capital Hill in Seattle, at that time the heart of the dyke community. You could walk around the corner or drive 5-10 minutes, and you could knock on someone’s door and talk about… well, anything really: dinner, the latest scandal, their sobriety… I miss that. New York doesn’t really encourage much social community beyond neighborhood, even in the face of political adversity.

Quid pro quo, Agent Starling. Of all the more objectionable/questionable alternatives to suicide (or just a bad day) that I present in my book, no one has objected to or questioned “Tell a Lie.” Writers use lies, as does everyone else. What do you do about truth and lies in your work?

Helen Boyd: I like myth-making, and that requires things that people might call lies. When I was thinking about romance, and gender roles, for She’s Not the Man I Married, I realized there aren’t any stories for us. I was reading a book called The Persistent Desire which is full of butch-femme stories, and that was really empowering, and it made me think that’s what we need to do, is tell stories for our kinds of romance. People want templates, and I think myths are part of romance, playing a role is. All of the fables are about men pursuing women, and I wanted stories where tomboys pursued sissies. They don’t exist. So I’m not so much lying as cheating on the final, because I feel like I’m going to have to make up those stories to fill in our blanks.

What are you telling lies about in your new work?

Kate Bornstein: What is this country’s obsession with the need to believe in the truth of some storyteller? Why can’t people just enjoy a good story? Well, I’m writing a solo performance piece and a memoir, both called Kate Bornstein Is A Queer and Pleasant Danger. One thing I can tell you about the book: It’s going to have an index of lies in the back, organized by chapter, and I promise I’ll tell you the truth there the best I can. That way if you really wanna know if I’m lying, you can check the index. Or not, if you don’t want to know. I think it would be more fun to wonder. I’m trying to talk my editor into printing the book so you have to break a seal to get into the index of lies. Wouldn’t that be fun?

1 October 2006 | author2author |