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The pandemic is already underway when Emerson Whitney calls me from their quarantine digs up in Maine, a little one-room building they describe as a “shack.” Days after kicking off their book tour for Heaven, a new theory-influenced memoir about gender, family, and trans identity (out today from McSweeney’s), the coronavirus outbreak put everything on hold.
For Whitney, it was terrible timing. Here was yet another person whose life and livelihood were disrupted by our government’s catastrophic mishandling of the pandemic. But when we talk, their steady optimism is infectious. In contrast to Heaven’s meditations on gender nonconformity, childhood abuse, and Whitney’s complex relationship with their mother — laid stark against a backdrop of violence and marginalization, and interwoven with observations from writers like Saidiya Hartman, Johanna Hedva, and C. Riley Snorton — their almost bubbly demeanor brims through my phone.
In its interrogation of binary thinking, Heaven lines up such contrasts only to knock them down again: poetry and theory, memory and imaginary, nature and nurture. “Really, I can't explain myself without making a mess,” they write, inviting us to join them in questioning what we know, and what we think we know, to be true.
Referencing the book’s structure — the way it weaves memory with theory, disclosure with criticism — as well as your friendship with Maggie Nelson, many have already compared Heaven to The Argonauts. Are there other authors that have informed your work as a memoirist?
It’s true that this book goes back and forth between being poetry and being autobiography, like Nelson’s. I love the work of Gloria Anzaldúa, who also does this. It's just such a cool place to live in, that hybrid. I believe so much in the subjective "I" and its possibilities for makership, especially for marginalized people. I get really turned on by books that use the "I” as a way to make room for other people's "I"s. I think it's really great when autobiography can function as a web to hold a variety of ideas and subject positions.
I'm sure so many things in Heaven are misremembered or hyper-remembered. I was a journalist for a while and really it became super obvious to me that truth was moving all around. I love that Heaven is my life, but it's certainly a broken mirror in a way, because that's what memory seems to be, for me at least.
Heaven is far from Gender 101, but it does explain conditions and experiences that other queer and trans people already understand. Who were you thinking about when you wrote this book?
When I started writing, I put socks in my ears and covered my eyes and held my nose and was like, “Alright, we're going in! I'm writing whatever I want!” I think in the book I say, “I'm trying to write the scariest book,” without a lot of explanations for other people. I promised myself I wouldn't worry about who was reading it while I was writing it.
In the editing process, I allowed myself to consider others. I was thinking about queer and trans people, specifically those who are the most marginalized, and thinking about what it means to function as someone in the world who ends up as a spokesperson for an entire community or multiple communities. At the same time, I really just tried to do the thing. I promised writing, I promised the craft of writing, I promised the world of writing that I was gonna do my best to show up for the gift of this, which to me is a huge risk.
How have you talked with your mom and other family members about Heaven?
When I was editing it, that's when I allowed myself to think about my family. I offered the book to them all to read and they all said, "No," which in a way was really cool — they were just like, “Dude, whatever, I trust you.” It’s definitely a nerve-wracking process for me because I would really have liked to have some eyes on it from them prior to publication.
I love them so much and I hope that shows in the book. I hope the complexity and the love are all mingling, because that is my real experience, and I hope I honor them all in this text. I also hope that I show up honorably in that way, as well.
There’s often the expectation that trans memoir, like trans people, be cis-palatable and linear, with a resolution, like a math problem. Heaven doesn’t conform to that, but I’m wondering if it helped you understand yourself more as a trans person, as an artist, as a trauma survivor?
I couldn't really write anything else until I wrote this story. As someone who thinks a lot about what it means to operate in the world as a transmasculine person who is racialized as white, regardless of more complexity in my background, I feel all sorts of ways about making a book using my subjective "I.” At the same time, I literally could not figure out how to do anything else for the longest time. I couldn't roll the boulder of this story away from the rest of my life until I actually made this thing.
I think Heaven is also about not passing and what it means to live in that place. I think gender variance is bigger than transness and hopefully this book makes that clear, too. I have people in my life who struggle with gender as cis people and as people of different gender experiences. I'm also curious about a world in which gender variance isn't a death sentence, particularly for the most marginalized of us.
You refer to the “titanic childishness” of your mom in the book. Is it possible to get closure for a stolen childhood? How do you resolve trauma alone, even when you’re in contact with the person who traumatized you?
I think what I recognize when I'm interacting with this work and this portrait — because I think of this as a screenshot of my thinking at the time — is that the older I get, the more I show up for this story, the better my childhood looks to me in a lot of ways. Who knows how I'll feel later, but now I think about all the larger forces impacting my parents and my grandparents and all these people who were my caregivers and also my current self, my adult self, how all those factors were contributing to what you're talking about. I wonder about womanness and the way womanness was passed to me and how my family was really struggling with what it meant to be women. I guess I just look at the complexity of it, rather than putting it on anyone particularly.
For some reason I lean away from the word trauma, I don't know why. I think about it a lot also, as there are instances that were not ever in the book that were life-threatening moments in my life, and those were more private. This book is art now, and so when it veers into territory of what happened, how are you, what do you do, I do like talking about that, because I imagine that someone else might experience whatever we're calling this and want tools. And there are amazing tools out there. I hope people contact me and I will talk about tools.
I don't know if the tools are in the art. I don't know if the tools are in making the art. But I do think there is something happening there in tandem.
Would you prefer I didn't use the word trauma?
I think you can do whatever you want. Maybe it's reflective in the text, but I guess I try to interrogate all the labels. Trauma is a very real thing. I do think words are extremely powerful. They're spells, they're magic, so whatever ones I use, I really do try to be conscious of it, which drives some of the people around me kind of bananas, but they put up with it. You can do it however you want.
This book is for you — this book is for everyone, so, do whatever. If it helps someone to think of it as trauma, I'm down. I just try to wear it loosely.
What are you reading right now? What artists are you excited about?
I'm super into Juliana Delgado Lopera's new book, Fiebre Tropical. It's so good, it's right here in my hand. I'm here in quarantine like everyone else and I only have two books: that one and Donna Haraway's When Species Meet.
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