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?

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1 October 2006 | author2author |