As greater (negative) attention is paid to trans people, I fear that artists will feel the need to sand off the trans community’s edges; that people will harp on the ways that transsexuals of all stripes are good, “normal,” productive members of bourgeois society.
What a relief, then, to read a book like Grace Byron’s Herculine. When we first meet its nameless narrator, she is living in New York City, sleeping with all the wrong people, aspiring to be like the Hot Freelance Girls she sees around her. She is haunted by the conversion therapy of her youth and beset, occasionally, by demons that may or may not be symptoms of sleep paralysis. Her ex-girlfriend, Ash, keeps inviting her to leave the city and join her all-trans lesbian commune — the titular Herculine — in Indiana. After losing her job, the narrator gives in. But Herculine is no idyll; even before literal demons show up, she has to navigate all the messy dynamics of T4T polyamory, the social pressure to trauma-bond, and the “matrix of skill, likability, and fuckability” that determines one’s place in the transfem social hierarchy.
“Loving trans girls is hard,” the narrator reflects early on, “even when you are one.” In her brilliant exploration of this difficulty, Byron takes her place alongside authors like Torrey Peters and Gretchen Felker-Martin as one of our sharpest observers of the triumphs and defeats of trans community. I was lucky enough to speak with Byron about these things and about queer art, belief, and desire. —Katherine Packert Burke
KATHERINE PACKERT BURKE What was the genesis of Herculine?
GRACE BYRON In 2020 or 2021, I was dead set on trying to write a fragmented memoir, in the sort of traditional Maggie Nelson style, about conversion therapy. I was hitting my head against the wall. I had some friends read it and tell me: It’s just not working, it’s just not there. Then I read Manhunt, which was a big changing point for me in terms of possibilities for the trans novel. When I tried to write a book that was doing the traditional sad girl novel thing, I ended up feeling really angry, like: I can’t really write a Marilynne Robinson novel right now because I just feel vitriol toward these systems and toward religion and cisness. I felt bitterness, too, toward the calcification of trans culture that we’ve seen in the past few years.
KPB It’s interesting to hear that you started out working on a version of this story as a memoir. It moves pretty seamlessly between the literary realist Brooklyn trans novel and a more speculative mode, with demonic possession — was there any point at which you thought, Oh, I need to homogenize this and make it more one kind of thing? Or was it always reaching for that hybridity of genre?
GB When I first started writing it, I was thinking about the so-called Internet Novel — like Lauren Oyler’s Fake Accounts and Patricia Lockwood’s No One is Talking About This. That voiceiness and humor and precarity of labor and life in a city. Those elements were there at the start, along with the sleep paralysis demons and the lesbian ex. And the element of the commune came into it very quickly because the core of the book is working through T4T as a politic — the tribalism and nationalism in these microcosms. That scaffolding eventually gave way to: What if the sleep process demons kept coming back?
When I write, I have to reinvent to stay interested in what I’m working on. I really can’t know the end of a book while I’m writing it. So I didn’t know that the demons were going to take over. And when they started to come, it made so much sense.
KPB I want to circle back to the thing you were saying before about T4T as a politic. Obviously, the narrator has this toxic ex, Ash, with whom she becomes hyper-involved upon arriving at Herculine. There are all these other trans girls there who are hooking up with one another, which mediates a lot of their relationships: Who is hooking up with whom, who is interested in hooking up with whom, how your social position is determined by who wants to fuck you or who is fucking you.
GB Having a commune as the setting really lets you highlight how who wants to fuck whom affects people’s social and real capital. There’s a line in the book that’s like, “T4T is just choosing another kind of heartbreak.” And that is essentially how I feel about it. It is neither a perfect ideal nor the worst thing one can aspire to.
Your social position is determined by who wants to fuck you or who is fucking you.
Another influence for the book was Torrey Peters’ Infect Your Friends and Loved Ones, which is a little bit more optimistic about T4T than my book is. I think Infect Your Friends’ position is: We’re all crabs in a barrel, but eventually, we help each other up. And I don’t know if I think that that’s how it works. I think that the scarcity and the lack of resources all too often lead people to turn against each other: to cancel each other, or treat each other badly, or have really hypercompetitive ideas about who is worthy of getting their GoFundMe posted. All of these minutiae that seem kind of like daily gossip to us can have material effects on, say, who gets hired for a job. I think I feel a little bit cynical about that, and about the naivete that a lot of us enter into T4T with.
I should also make clear that to me there’s a big difference between being critical of groupthink or institutions and being critical of trans community as an ethic. I wouldn’t have been able to write this book about the downsides of trans love if I had not experienced the upsides. I wouldn’t have been able to write about the hard parts without also having and investing in trans friends. I’m critical of nonprofits and large dynamics, but on a small scale, I believe that we still have to choose one another. It’s similar to being a good neighbor — though the stakes are higher and more politicized.
KPB I’m curious about the book’s relationship to monogamy. The narrator says, “Monogamy was a shackle Ash toyed with, but her rules were never explicit. I did actually want to be someone’s possession though. Every new lover was an opportunity to be worn. But each time I was tried on, I was eventually discarded.” I think, similar to T4T relationships, there is a kind of vision for polyamory where it’s like: Okay, this is gonna solve all of the romantic problems that I have. And no life change — transition, T4T, or being poly — is going to solve all the problems in your life. But because it comes up a few times throughout the book, I’m curious if you saw monogamy/polyamory as tied in with the utopian ideal of building a commune.
GB I think that the narrator is dealing with a lot of frustration and butting up against not having monogamy or feeling locked out of monogamy. She has these ex-boyfriends, who were clearly fucking her over, and then she has this other thing with Ash, which is supposed to be monogamous but is in practice kind of poly. There’s a lack of boundaries, or lack of discussion around it, which is always a danger in open relationships or polyamory. I think plenty of people use poetic lyricism about connection and community to paper over hurting each other without being accountable to each other. And the narrator has all of these dreams about white picket fences; she isn’t sure if she really wants to be in a commune. She feels like she’s too fucked up. She might prefer to do her political project with a little bit more bumper space between her and the next person.
KPB Belief is very much at the core of the book — there’s a sense that the narrator doesn’t want to leave one cult for another. What’s the book’s relationship to belief in general or Christianity in particular?
GB A lot of the things that I write start by thinking, What if the worst thing that I can think of was real? I wrote a short story recently called “Pity,” which is about this trans girl who becomes obsessed with the death of another trans girl and does some really fucked up stuff. I wrote a short story called “Validity,” which is about a trans girl who makes an insane app to help people transition. And so in the novel, that question is: What if Christianity weren’t real but demons were? What if the thing that you had spent your life convincing yourself wasn’t real was real, and you had to figure out how to negotiate belief in that way?
On the way to the commune, the narrator is reading Herculine’s rules and joking about them. She’s ambivalent about being there, but it lets her be with Ash — the person whom she has always wanted to be with, who has always, in the back of her head, been the person who will fix her life. That’s her belief. I don’t think she believes in institutions, but she believes in people, and she’s forced to reckon with that when the person she believes in doesn’t believe in her.
KPB People in Herculine expose themselves to demons through the sharing of trauma, but the narrator is resistant to sharing hers, and in fact, when she shares her own big traumatic story, it’s struck through in the text. So there’s this way that the book works against the idea of: Oh, this is how you bond with trans women. In terms of metaphor, how does that intersect with demonic possession or demonic dealmaking?
GB The demons are a way of thinking through the more negative values that can come up with trauma. I think trauma bonding can be a double-edged sword: You’re opening yourself up to both connection and hurt, and in that way, it could open a portal to something, potentially demons. And I think that the demons feed on that longing for connection or longing for community and say: Well, I can offer you that. Those demons could be anything; those demons could be fame, those demons could be love, those demons could be attention, money, power. In the book, the demons offer those different things to the women. And in some cases, some of the girls are like: That is actually fine for me — that mutually beneficial/destructive connection is great, and they get what they want out of it.
KPB I think that there’s always an expectation that trans art is influenced by trans art, sometimes at the exclusion of thinking about it in conversation with non-trans art. What other writers do you see Herculine as in lineage with?
GB Ursula LeGuin and Carmen Maria Machado, for sure. Fake Accounts by Lauren Oyler. Priestdaddy by Patricia Lockwood — such a funny, funny book, also thinking through religion with a mix of bewilderment, and humor, and anger. I love Tolkien. I think Toni Morrison is our best American novelist. I’m a big Vonnegut fan. I really like Jenny Diski. And maybe Annie Dillard, for the more nature-y and reflective passages.
KPB The visual artist Greer Lankton is a consistent presence throughout the book, too. The narrator tries and fails to go to the Greer Lankton Archive when she’s driving from New York to Indiana. And then there’s this passage, almost at the very end of the book: “Love has always been a structured politic for queer artists and hopefuls. Arthur Russell, Félix González-Torres, David Wojnarowicz, Derek Jarman. But the girls. The girls did not get their white lace tied together with a smile. Not Greer Lankton or Candy Darling. Not even cis queen Joni Mitchell found a lasting love to buy her a dishwasher and a coffee percolator.”
GB I wrote an article about Greer in 2022, and there’s a lot of really great scholarship on her by writers like Harron Walker and Zefyr Lisowski; I think we’re all fascinated by her. A lot of writing about Greer is about the self and legacy, as is the case with many trans artists. In this book, there’s a little bit of romanticization by the narrator of Greer and Greer’s life. But also a lot of jokes, right? One of the other main characters, Hazel, wants to be an artist and makes these derivative dolls, and the narrator is like: I don’t know what to tell her because it’s kind of bad and it’s just like Greer’s work, but she’s not Greer Lankton.
That line at the end was from something I’d been working on that never came out, and at the time, I think I was single and had been most of my life, and I was like: Well, what if I die alone? The narrator is also confronting that question, thinking through all of these women who did. Even Joni Mitchell, while she has had — God bless her — many lovers, is single. The line about the dishwasher and coffee percolator there references her song “The Last Time I Saw Richard,” which is about watching the man you love have a suburban life with someone else.
I’ll tell a story. Toward the end of her life, Candy Darling was in the hospital, and she’d never had a great relationship with men, never had a real boyfriend for very long. And she kept asking Andy Warhol (who, yes, is gay; I recognize that): Will you come? Will you come to the hospital? I want to see you again. And he didn’t come. Instead, he sent her a black and white TV, and she sent it back. She was like: I don’t want a black and white TV. The subtext was essentially: If you’re not going to come, send me a fucking color TV. And so he sent her a color TV for her hospital room. But there’s something about that — the refusal in those gendered relations, even if not with a lover. There’s something touching about that.
Katherine Packert Burke is the author of the novels All Us Saints and Still Life. She lives in Minneapolis.
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