Well, unfortunately, not while I was writing, because I hadn’t read her yet; I’ll get to her in a second. My lineage for my work is predominantly cis women, and it’s one that includes Jamaica Kincaid, Arundhati Roy, Marguerite Duras, Clarice Lispector, Sylvia Plath, Ingeborg Bachmann; these are the people I’ve been in communion with as I formed my own voice, so to speak. What I did finally read, though, because it came out in Swedish in 2021, is Bad Girls, or Las Malas, by Camila Sosa Villada. Just as I like to call my book “magical brutalist,” I would call hers the same, because we’re both working with these more fantastical, lyrical, ecstatic, poetic elements and putting them into reality whilst being very, very brutal about how violent that reality can be. I think Bad Girls is a masterpiece; it’s different from mine in the subjects that it tackles and the perspective that it tackles them from, but I felt that what she wrote is such a masterpiece in what it’s trying to depict. I have had several experiences that are closer to what it depicts, which is this community between trans sex workers, but I felt that she did it so well that I don’t have to do it. [Laughs.]
Love the World or Get Killed Trying is less about trans community than the soul-search of a woman who happens to be trans, and that means that a lot of those experiences and thoughts are filtered through that lens, but in general, it’s more about exploring universal introspective themes of longing and love and death; these kinds of themes that are common in literature, but that trans women have not been given the right to explore because we’re always pigeonholed into talking about trans issues.
Is there anything you particularly hope people take away from this book?
The first thing is the literary craft. I really want people to see it as a work of literature and see my talent as a writer, instead of just saying, “Oh, it’s important that a trans woman wrote this work.” That’s the first and foremost important thing, and so far, reactions I’ve gotten have brought me a lot of joy, because I was afraid it wouldn’t be so. The second thing is the relationship between straight men and straight trans women, because it’s one that is so infected and there’s so much heartbreak and so much violence and misunderstanding and misconception. The desire is everywhere in a trans woman’s life, but publicly it’s almost nowhere. This hypocrisy and this discrepancy needs to end, and I hope my book can be a part of that, not necessarily in the way that a nonfiction book would be, but through the way a fiction book can do that, which is to be so brutally vulnerable and emotional and true that a bridge is formed between different humans with vastly different structural positions. I haven’t compromised with anything that I’ve written in the book; I have been extremely true to my own vulnerable humanity, and I think that’s why I’ve had many straight, male readers of the book who actually loved it. I think they maybe would not have accessed a nonfiction book in the same way, because nonfiction doesn’t do that amount of emotional building of bridges, which I think is ultimately what has to be done in order for structural bridges to be built.