Max Delsohn in conversation with Alayna Becker

Summer 2025

I’ve learned so much from being in friendship and creative community with my pal Max Delsohn. He’s hilarious. He’s smart. He’s ambitious as hell. He’s got a sharp edge and a soft heart. I admire him immensely as a thinker, writer, lover, and funny guy. His work has been featured in McSweeney’s Quarterly Concern, The Rumpus, VICE, and Joyland, and of course, his story “The Bubble” was published in Moss: Volume 7 in 2022. We met in 2016 as comedians and writers in Seattle, and have since both drifted to other parts of the country to become better writers. His first full-length story collection, Crawl, comes out from Graywolf Press in October 2025.  –AB

I read Crawl. I loved it. Obviously, I had read many of these stories already, and it was so fun to read them again, all together, collected with their family. But maybe let’s start with some more general questions. You moved to LA recently, right?

Yeah, we’re here in Santa Monica, California. In a way, it was an overcorrection after three years in Syracuse—we’re like, “please, just inject the sunlight directly into my veins.” That’s working. You’re in Iowa, right? Studying nonfiction? That’s like the program for nonfiction.

Yeah, people continue to say that, and it does seem that way. I just finished my first year of three. Did you like your program at Syracuse?

I loved it. I actually began at Ohio State, and I was there for creative nonfiction. I switched to fiction because I took a fiction workshop kind of on a lark, and I was like, “Oh, this is better. I didn’t even know that I was allowed to do this.” I had mostly gone to the Ohio State program to work with Elissa Washuta, so when I decided I wanted to do fiction, I figured maybe I should see if there’s a program that would be a better fit for that. And then Syracuse plucked me from obscurity and now, you know, I’m worldwide famous—hundreds of Marvel movies are coming out based on the stories as we speak.






And George Saunders is on the faculty there, right?






Yeah. And I mean, he’s worth the hype. It was already clear to me what an amazing writer he is, but he is an amazing teacher, too, and I feel like I learned so much about teaching from him. You do the third-year workshop with him, that’s all he does now. And his notes are so incredibly insightful and somehow manage to hold everything that the story wants to accomplish in terms of style, but also what he calls the ur-story, what the story is in its most basic form, if it was a myth or something, stripped down to those parts. He can see it on every level. I actually worked on my story, “The Bubble” with him. I gave him a version that’s pretty close to what’s in the book. But it was crazy. It was just this story that I sent you a few years ago for Moss and then George Saunders was marking it up.






I’m glad to hear that he’s worth all the hype. There’s so much emotional wisdom in his writing and it makes sense that there’s a whole ass man behind that.






Yeah, and I’ll tell you, in person, his eyes literally sparkle. He’s just an infinitely wise ass man. He’s also really nice. He was my assigned mentor, so I had a little extra talk time with him. And one of the things we discussed was sort of like, not getting big headed, but also not being ashamed to be ambitious and being forthright about wanting to write something great or be a great writer. I think that’s something that can be embraced while also not being a dickhead. And he is such an amazing example of that.






This is actually one of the things that I wanted to ask you about. Something I’ve always admired about you as a stand-up and as a writer is that you really do go for shit. And I’ve been so impressed both by your ability to pursue these goals and by how much of an excellent, loving community member you are. And on top of all this, I’ve always experienced you as really leaning back. I know that there’s all kinds of sides to every person, but I think that when you are in your power, you’re really kind of sitting back in a chair. I guess what I mean is that you’re really in your body and you are who you are. And I’ve wondered how you develop that embodiment along with that relationship to your ambition. How is it that you’re able to be all three of these things?






Wow. Well, first of all, that’s such an amazing series of compliments. Thank you so much. And how wonderful to be perceived so carefully. I mean, it’s so great that we know each other from stand-up because I was doing stand-up really hard in Seattle. And I was always writing—I had been a creative writing major in undergrad. But I kind of let it take a back seat. And then I think I did stand-up for about five years before doing the MFA and pivoting hard into writing.


But I eventually came to realize that when stand-up was my main creative medium, that was really limiting for me. My beat was kind of like, “I’m a trans guy, it’s hard.” And there was a lot of awkwardness and a lot of trying to mine that for laughs. I still do that. But what I love about prose and short stories is the beauty of the sentence, the beauty of the well-written sentence with lyrical flourishes. I think with those different tonal registers I can more fully say what I’m trying to say. And I think I was able to come into some of the things that I didn’t know how to say confidently as a stand-up. I can say these things, as a writer, because I have more of those tools. When I’m fully embodied, I think I’m just more comfortable going to those places. I’m more comfortable on the page than I am standing up there with a mic.


I think a lot about being ambitious as a writer. Because I think a lot of writers struggle with this. I have so many friends who do. Honestly, there are probably very few who don’t struggle with this. I guess the stereotype is the “Guy in your MFA” Twitter account, where it’s like, “you’re just a dickhead,” you know? But it’s another thing to be like, “I have something cool and meaningful to say and I’m working hard and I enjoy thinking about these things and I’m gonna put something out there and I think it’s valuable and I hope other people think it’s valuable, too. Sometimes when I’m talking to other writers, I find myself thinking, “You all need to do stand-up for a little while.” I tell this story all the time: I was doing a festival in Chicago, and I did a set at this event at the Laugh Factory. And you know, because of the festival, there were all these important people there, all these bookers. And the Tonight Show booker was there and I was talking to him—he came up to me, and was like, “I really loved your set” and we were talking about it.


And then, there was this other stand-up, this guy who’s just a very large man, so much taller than me. And he came over and just physically stepped in front of me and started talking to the booker. And it ended up being very effective for that man. Now he’s very successful. I saw he had a 5-minute spot, not on the Tonight Show, but on one of the other late-night shows. And I was like, “good for you man.” But that’s the kind of ambition that I really don’t identify with. Part of my ethos—and I think it’s part of where my confidence as a writer comes from, too—is community. I think being part of a network of writers and creative people and hyping them up makes me feel more confident.






I’m interested in what you were saying about the limits of stand-up, because for me, one marked difference between stand-up and writing is that, when you’re doing stand-up, you sort of have to flatten yourself into a character, and that character needs to be consumable for an audience. You have remove the complications from your life to become a consumable. And so in this book, I was wondering about how you came to the decision to have so many different character vantages. You have Jack and Eli and Taylor and Simon and a few others who are the eyes through which you are experiencing these stories. And I also happen to know from knowing you that they each have certain biographical details that they share with you. And all with the Levis 501s. So I guess I’m just wondering about how you came to that decision to sort of fracture yourself into all these different beings rather than choosing one doppelganger.






Yeah, totally. Yeah, actually, this is something I talked about with George Saunders a lot, and something I was anxious about. I was like, “I’m worried these characters are all basically the same guy.” But we talked about how there are a lot of different ways to do a story collection. And after having read a crazy number of story collections, you realize that, basically anything is allowed. If the writing is good, you can get away with it. Some story collections are like, we’re gonna like, go across time or we’re going to have like, you know, a grandma, then like a baby, and then like the tree or whatever. And that’s great, if that’s your skill and your gift. But that has never been my strength. I really rely on my voice and style.


George and I talked about the collection a little bit as variations on a theme. One of the main books that I kept around to remind myself, “It’s OK, you’re allowed to do this,” was Bad Behavior by Mary Gaitskill. Because those characters are different from each other—they’re a little bit more different than each other than my characters are. Although it’s hard to say because it’s that thing of like, “am I just internalizing transphobia, and they’re all the same because they’re trans?” But when you read Bad Behavior, it’s like, “this is the same person.” There are these different situations and of course, there’s so much taken from Mary Gaitskill’s life too. But that collection bangs. Why is it good? It’s because of the language and the insights. I just want to live in that language. So I kind of just let myself prioritize that, prioritize the situations I wanted to write about and the language. And listen, I would have loved to make it into a novel—you know, it would’ve been way easier to sell, I’d have loved that. But when I tried, the characters were too different after all. I think there are a lot of reasons for that. I didn’t want to write a continuous story because I didn’t want the things that happened to these different characters to be related to each other. I wanted them to be fresh, and I didn’t want to have to deal with the cause and effect. I wanted each of them to stand on their own.


I’m working on a novel right now and it’s kind of a slog in some ways compared to the stories. Trans fiction has this unique problem, which is like, the reader will want to know, “Why are you trans? Why did you transition?” You know, like they’re looking for the trans origin story, even if that’s not what you’re writing about. And I feel defensive about that a little bit. When I’m writing, I just want to just write about the thing I want to write about. I don’t want to have to be like, “and here’s how this person came to be trans or why they transitioned.” That’s not interesting to me. And I think keeping the book as stories and having all different characters with different life experiences allows me to not have to deal with that.






Well, it’s interesting—I feel that in this work. It makes me think about the very first story, set at Steamworks, where the line is, “...mirrors all over Steamworks—a transsexual man’s worst nightmare. You peer around the corner in search of hot guys but you only run into yourself.” And it sort of feels like that mirror kind of multiplies Jack right there, and sends all the rest of the characters off into the collection.






That’s awesome that you picked up on that, because that line was added really late. If you look at the original version of the story, that line isn’t there. That image of the mirror was actually something that I talked about with my editor, Yuka. Actually, doppelgangers was something I thought about a lot with this book. And that’s part of why, in “Same Old,” the last story, you’ve got this older trans guy, Simon—he’s the only character in the book, the only main character, who’s over 30. And then Harold is this younger trans guy. So it’s kind of meant to be looking at, you know, this assimilating into functional adulthood and into all these cis-coded ways. And then there’s Harold, who like, is really not able to do that. So yeah, I’m really excited you picked up on that. Yuka wanted to bring out the mirror image to kind of prime the collection, because it is a thing that echoes throughout the book. I also wanted to say about the 501s, there’s a couple things like that, where some element keeps showing up in multiple stories.






Yeah, I noticed that several characters talk about a school photo.






Yeah, there’s a couple things. It’s so funny, when I was showing George “The Bubble,” there are three different French Bulldogs. And the first time he saw it, he was like, “OK,” and the second time he was, like, “Do you know that there’s two French Bulldogs?” And the third time, he was like, “Oh, I see.” The 501s are kind of like that too. And I wanted that to be almost a “take the reader out of it” kind of moment where you can feel how constructed it is. I wanted to make a point about these things, because the trans community is so small and there are so few resources for just how to live and how to do stuff and, like, what pants fit. When I was first transitioning, everyone wore 501s—or maybe it was just that that’s what everyone was telling me to buy. I was like, this is the only thing that works. And with the French Bulldogs, a purebred French Bulldog is so different than getting like a mutt from the rescue. And it’s Seattle—that story is so much about gentrification and all the things that are encroaching on the queer people in Seattle. I wanted the French Bulldog to almost kind of haunt the action. And yeah the school photo thing. I always like when you see the author’s obsessions that just kind of poke through, where you’re like, “Oh, something happened to this guy with a fucking school photo,” you know? So I left that stuff in. You know, and yeah, it’s a choice. There’s pros and cons to it, but I feel good about it.






Since you mentioned gentrification in “The Bubble,” that made me think about the whole fight over Denny Blaine Park.* I guess, you know, that whole situation was just such a stark instance of this “queers who code” kind of assimilative queerness taking over queer Seattle—well, Seattle and queer Seattle. What are your feelings about Denny Blaine right now and all that relates to it?


* Denny Blaine Park, also known as Dykekiki, is a queer-dominated swimming hole on Lake Washington, in Seattle, with breathtaking views of Mount Rainier. In my opinion, it’s an absolute haven of people being people, safe to be in their bodies, to swim and socialize. In 2023, Stuart Sloan, a grocery store magnate and the owner of a 8,310-square-foot waterfront mansion that neighbors the park, began sending text messages to the personal cell phone number of Seattle Mayor Bruce Harrell, complaining about the nude sunbathers at Denny Blaine Park. To many, this felt more like some rich guy using his influence against working-class queer people than an earnest attempt at community safety. Recently, a judge ruled that nudity at Dykekiki is a public nuisance. For more, see friendsofdennyblaine.org. –AB






I’m still processing a lot of it, honestly. I mean, I’ll say a couple of things. So my story, “Moon Over Denny-Blaine” came out in Passages North and originally it was just out in the print form. And after, like, a year I was talking to Corinne Manning—dear, dear friend and Seattle writer—and I was like, “I really wish more Seattle people had read that story.” And they said, “you should just ask and see if they’ll publish it online.” And I did ask, and Passages North agreed. And that was so cool. And then it kind of made the rounds in Seattle. The first legal action restricting nudity at Denny Blaine was starting. When was that? Was that last summer?






Or the summer before, or the summer before. But I know Bruce Harrell was involved.






Yes, right, right. Yeah, but there was also that guy, that one guy. Why do I feel like his name is Stuart? You know that guy. We knew it was the mansions, the neighbors, or whatever who were like, “it’s drugs, it’s heathens.” But when the organizing body, Friends of Denny Blaine Park came together, they reached out to me just to say that, “I hope you know that a lot of folks who were organizing around this read and were moved by your work!”—which was just my wildest dream come true. It was like, Top Three Most Meaningful Moments of My Life as a Writer to know that these people who are trying to keep the beach were reading the story and seeing something true in it. I wrote something for Real Change back during the first organizing push that was just about why the beach is special. And now it seems like there are some compromises that people are prepared to make in order to keep the beach and fight this fight. Listen, I’m not there, I’m not super educated on what’s going on now, so I’m a little hesitant to say too much about it.


I guess that’s sort of an extended disclaimer. But yeah, I mean, it feels hard to even imagine the beach not being there. I spent three days a week there most summers, you know? And in general I think it’s really amazing that so many people are organizing for it. I got the idea to write my story because I was listening to an interview with Matilda Bernstein-Sycamore on Conner Habib’s podcast, “Against Everyone,” and they were talking about straight people in queer spaces, the issue of straight people in queer spaces. And Matilda was saying something along the lines of, “I get so tired of that conversation because if queer people just did things that straight people didn’t like, or found too queer, they wouldn’t be there.” And I think she gave a couple of examples—like if we were organizing against war, or if we were all fucking or whatever, they would just leave. And so the idea for Denny Blaine was kind of like, “What would it take to get the straight people out of Denny Blaine?” And so, in the story, I kind of thought of the silly answer to that.


And I think a lot about all these things that are now potentially going to change and have already changed. Like I know there's an effort to install park rangers, and to try to calm these fears that people are masturbating and doing drugs. I never saw anybody masturbating at Denny Blaine. I do have a reference in the story to the straight guys who are sort of like, semi-hard walking around harassing the femmes on the beach. And like, obviously that’s bad and I don’t want that. But also, I don’t think it’s in the spirit of the beach for it to become this sort of hyper controlled place, either. It’s just really complicated. And I want to protect the beach and keep it as a queer space. And yeah, it just seems like a really hard, bad situation. I hope that there’s some kind of good outcome and that the beach can stay some kind of version of what it’s been. But I don’t know. I’ve been surprised at the intensity of the people going after it.






Yeah, and swimming topless just rules. That was the first place I ever got up the confidence to be naked outside. Which maybe sounds trite, but is actually an incredibly healing and powerful thing to offer to myself.






Yeah, same. The day we left Seattle, we woke up extra early just to go to Denny Blaine and jump in the water one last time. It was fucking cold, but we did it… The book overall is kind of a bummer. But “Moon Over Denny-Blaine” is, in many ways, the brightest spot—that story is meant as a rapturous love letter to the city. The other stories aren’t necessarily like that. Because that is how special Denny Blaine is and was to me when I was there, and to so many other people. So yeah, we’ll see how things go. Sometimes I want to reach back out to the organizers to ask if I can be helpful, but I’m also worried that they’ll be really trying to work with the city and I’ll be too, like, “Let’s all have sex and do drugs.”






Well, that’s interesting, thinking about the people who want to work with the city and get everybody on the same page. It’s kind of like the line from “The Bubble,” “Seattle was still Seattle and we were never ever talking about shit that didn’t matter.” It reminds me that one theme I felt so much in this collection was embarrassment—the narrators, the main characters are constantly finding themselves in at least mildly embarrassing situations. People are trying to figure stuff out and then there are the straight cis people, and the queers who code—like, everybody is embarrassing. And the embarrassment comes in different ways. Some characters are so hotly pursuing the thing that they’re pursuing, and the stakes are so high. Like in the story, “Sex Is a Leisure Activity”—just how embarrassing the bad sex is in that story. And anyway, I guess I’m curious about your relationship to embarrassment and what role it plays in your work.






Yeah, I’ve been thinking a lot recently about how there’s something so uniquely degrading about being a trans person. Maybe that seems obvious, but when you think of a trans person—and obviously, as a trans person myself, I’m not only a trans person, right? There’s so much more to all of us than just our identities and identifiers and blah, blah, blah—but a trans person, by definition, when you think of a trans person, you think about, like, their genitals or their sex characteristics. And I think one could argue that there is something inherently degrading about that, you know? And I think that’s true for a lot of marginalized groups, there’s a degrading quality in being reduced to any part of your body, or aspect of your physical body—gender, race, disability, all these things. And there’s something unique, I think, about being reduced to your genitalia. Like, okay, when most people who meet me, I pass or whatever, and am afforded a certain privilege. But if they saw me naked, they would see that I have a vagina and then they’d be like, “Wait, that’s a trans guy.”


And I think that structural degradation is something that I really found a lot of different ways to highlight in the stories. And that was part of the hope with highlighting that tension in Seattle specifically—it was important to me to keep the whole collection in Seattle because Seattle is, you know, one of our bluest, leftist-y, liberal cities. And I think people don’t think of that reality for trans and/or queer people. Even in a very blue city like Seattle, that prides itself on being super accepting, tolerant, whatever, it’s still the same structure as anywhere. It’s got cis guys being terrible, it’s got job situations that have terrible, girlboss, cis women, it’s got sexual assault. This was something that felt really immediate and hard to me in Seattle. And like, we’re comedians—we make sense of these things and we process these things through humor. The other part of it is like, there’s an absurdity to it, where at every turn, in all these ways that you can’t expect, you’re gonna be thwarted. Like, you really want a bunch of stuff, because people really want a bunch of stuff, but then, like you’re a trans person. You’re inherently limited. There are some people that aren’t going to date you or want to have sex with you or want to be your friend or want to hire you because you’re trans. And there’s a way in which it just makes you want all that stuff even more. And yeah, I mean, the attempts, the sort of complicated routes that we take to get those things in spite of those obstacles is embarrassing and funny.


And you know, it’s not lost on me that this book took some time. It was sold a couple of years ago. So it was on sub when I was more squarely in my twenties, and I’ll be 32 when the book comes out. And yeah, it’s a lot easier to laugh about a lot of that stuff now. In my early twenties, when it was actually happening, which is like 10 years ago now, it was harder to see the absurdity of it. Something I thought about a lot with this book is striking the right tone—I wanted to present it in all of its complexity. I think my first instinct is to be sort of defensive when people say, “Oh, trans people, all they care about is their pronouns, they’re gonna cry and be a snowflake about their pronouns.” So part of this is that I was trying to be like, “No, I can also laugh at this stuff.” I can laugh at, like, misgendering. That was part of it. But ultimately, where I hope the stories have landed is also keeping track of the actual suffering and injustice, too. And I think that all has to be there to arrive at an authentic depiction of these things. So, yeah, there’s a lot of shame. There’s a lot of embarrassment. There’s humor and there’s laughter at it and with it. But I also know the embarrassment, the feeling of shame. It’s not just this person going around and doing embarrassing stuff. There’s an entire system of values like surrounding this person that is putting them in a situation where they are constantly denied dignity. And that’s a bummer, you know? Trying to get each of these mishaps and these hijinks, you know?






Well, I think you do that so beautifully. And that’s something that I admired in “The Bubble” the first time I read it—that there is space for the shittiness, the infighting, the trans-on-trans judgment, the judging of name choices and gatekeeping transness—but then the story resolves with this very tender moment between Dayton and the narrator. And you know, so much of this book makes me nostalgic for the time that you and I knew each other. That part is so sweet, but then, it was such a particular era of the correctness and the accountability posts on social media and the like, brutal calling people out on Jeff Bezos’s internet. And in the end, a lot of it felt so fruitless. And I think that this story—and the whole collection—really thoughtfully deconstructs a lot of that stuff.






I’m really glad you got that from the end of that story. I actually pulled some of that stuff out a little bit working with Yuka. There’s all this like, the Seattle thing of talking about shit that didn’t matter. And I think, bringing out more and saying more plainly that the real enemy here—if it can be said to be an enemy or the antagonist of the story—is sort of crystallized in the queer coder girlfriend and the Jared guy, the guy who yells at Dayton. And the story as it appears in the book now makes this distinction—like, the Jareds of the world are to be expected, but what’s really hurtful is the cis girlfriend, who’s gonna try to be like, “Oh, but it’s okay that I embarrassed you, because I love you.” Even though the character at the end of that story is like, Hunson sucks, that’s part of what the story is about, obviously, is Hunson and what you do with somebody like Hunson in your community. But there’s also a bigger thing here, which is that a lot of trans people and queer people are able to connect because we’re all suffering with these people in this same nightmare.






This book is sexy, but it’s also, like, really unsexy. That is, a lot of the sex is unsexy. But the anticipation is super hot. I’m just curious about how your sex life relates to your art-making practice.






I think this is one of those things where gender and sex are different but not that much, you know? So many of these stories in this book were written from a place of trying to figure out my sexuality as a man when I had previously been a woman, kind of. And a lesbian or whatever, yeah. And then when I started testosterone, I was like, “I like men now.” And as I’m sure I’ve mentioned to you before, I went to an all-girls Catholic school. I was a lesbian. I was having a great time. I mean, like it was also not a good time in so many ways because I was a lesbian at an all-girls Catholic school, but you know, I had girlfriends and stuff. I like, you know, certainly it was not like Stone Butch Blues. I was having lots of fun sexually. That was all really good, pretty much.


And that’s still true. You know, I’m famously married to a cis woman. We’re going to have our seven-year wedding anniversary in a couple of weeks, which is crazy. She’s awesome and we’re very happy—but it was around when we got together, actually, that I was like, “I like men now,” because that was something that I didn’t even question when I was in high school—I was like, “Men are the worst. We hate men.” And then I was suddenly being forced by my body to sort of be like, “I guess I’m attracted to men.” So some of these stories are working through that. And it’s a shock when your sexuality changes. And I’ve since learned that people’s sexuality changes all the time for all kinds of reasons—and not just trans guys and becoming gay on testosterone, as the meme goes.


So I’ve had a lot of very interesting experiences as I’ve pursued developing this part of my sexuality. And I think like there’s so much—it feels cringy to say, but it’s almost like I’ve learned so much about myself when I’ve had sex with men. I’ve learned so much about, like, what it means to be a man, having sex with men and—you know, I identify as a bi or queer man, I’m attracted to lots of different kinds of people. And I don’t know, it’s like, I was such a—I don’t know what the right term is. Like a wife guy, but a lesbian. Like a worshipful butch. You know what I mean? I really have mostly dated very like, femme-y femme femmes. And that kind of dynamic is definitely the root of my marriage. I’ve always been a serial monogamist, that has always sort of been a dynamic in my life. With men, I don’t know. At first, it was just like, “I want to have sex with them” and then I started to get some crushes on men. And I was like, “What? Oh, no.” But in a way, that’s why it was so important to me that the first sentence of the book be, “There, in the bright, near-empty sports bar, Jack decided that this would be the year he loved men.” Because so much of writing this book was a journey in figuring that love out.


As I was finishing the book and thinking about querying, and comps and so on, I was like, “OK, what do we got? We got Detransition, Baby.” Woo, okay. There are so few books in literary fiction—or, I should say, traditionally published literary fiction—about trans guys. About gay trans guys, there’s almost nothing. And that was what I desperately needed. I was like, “What is happening? I was a lesbian, now I’m a gay guy, too? How do I have fun having sex with cis men? How do I relate to cis men?” I went to Catholic school with girls. I only talked to girls. All men were enemies up until very recently. So I was really working through that in a lot of these stories—I was thinking through experiences that I’d already had as well as experiences I hoped I would have. And part of that was thinking about what it means being a gay trans guy who’s into other trans guys. The story “The Geeks” is sort of based on romantic experiences I’ve had with trans guys and also an idealization of those experiences. Even though there are lots of messy things that happen in that story, ultimately it has this sort of romantic ending. So yeah, I think the book ended up being a space to sort of suss out a lot of that and to dream and sort of look at it confusedly and critique myself.






I also want to ask you about Gabby. Recently, I’ve been thinking a lot about committed partnership And I’ve just always so admired your and Gabby’s relationship. The way you talk about her is so loving and you have this openness with each other that is like… I don’t know. I just really admire your relationship. So I wonder if you could talk about love a little, and about Gabby and just reflect on committed relationships.






Yeah, for sure. I mean, it’s funny, because she’s really not in this book, you know. Except the dedication says “For Gabby” and I signed it for her. So that’s where she is in the book—in the dedication—and I wrote a nice thing for her in the acknowledgements, too. But she’s really not in this book—there were a couple of stories where I have some Gabby-like avatars, but I mostly took those out. There are really no stories about Gabby. There are lots of stories about, like, relationships and stuff. There’s even, with “The Geeks,” this kind of romantic beat there. At this point in my life, we’ve been married for seven years and together for about nine years. And it’s not like I’ve never written about her, but I haven’t really published that much about her.


Part of it is, I just don’t want to turn it into fiction. I just want to live it. She is very different from me. She’s a very... embodied person. She’s very straightforward in a way that I’m not, as perhaps evidenced by this interview—my brain kind of works like this [wiggly hand gesture], and she’s more like a straight line. She’s very, very intelligent and creative but the ways that our brains work and the ways we get to that creative place are very different. She is not a writer, which… I can’t recommend it enough, not being with a writer. But she is a great reader. She reads everything. She’s my first reader. She read all of these stories, like, an upsetting number of times. And she gives me notes and she’s extremely fucking honest and tough. But something else is that she’s really good at big picture things. And it was really helpful, especially as I was finishing the book and trying to figure out how to talk about its themes, as a whole—she’s so good at zooming out and seeing that stuff.


In the collection, there’s this story, “Maude,” where this character is like, “should I transition or not?”—and then, in that state of indecision, just being kind of frozen. That story is taken from when I was trying to transition—and now that I’ve been living as a man for about 10 years, I feel the joys of it in a way that I never could have imagined. And part of that is embracing the limitations of it and just being like, “As a man, I’m not a lesbian anymore.” And there are a lot of things I really loved and cherished about being a lesbian. It wasn’t a straightforward decision for me at all. But I made this commitment and there are things I lost and there are things I gained and I’m happy with this decision I made. And I’m so grateful.


I think marriage is the same way. You commit to somebody—I can’t just, like, fuck a million guys every day, one after another. I can’t go out all night and not tell anybody where I am and just do whatever the next morning. I have a person who will be like, “Where are you?” We have little dogs that need to be fed. But the joys of it are so much greater than the limitations for me. It’s a choice and there are things lost and things gained. I think keeping track of those things and that dynamic is part of it. You’re not like, “I’m married to the person that I wanna be with and I’m so happy and therefore nothing is lost.” That’s just like not how it works.


We got married very fast. We moved in after six months and then we got married a year later, I think. I was 24 and she was 23. And I think all our friends were like, “OK, let’s hope this lasts, because we’re all babies here.” We laugh about it now. It is crazy that we got married that young. But always, from the jump, the plan was to be together. There have been things to weather and conflicts to resolve and whatever. But I think, in both the short term and the long term, when we ask ourselves, “Is this good? Are we having fun? Is this the best possible person for me?” we both continue to think yes, which is so great. I feel very lucky. When we first started dating, I was like, “She’s so out of my league. She’s so hot and cool.” But now, I think that stuff about myself, too. And now as we’re in our thirties, we’re feeling powerful and happy in our relationship and like, vibes are good. So that’s a little bit of me waxing poetic about my fucking marriage. I don’t know if that’s what you were looking for.






I wasn’t looking for anything in particular. That’s great. OK, I’ve got a couple dumb questions and then we can wrap up. Do you dream regularly?






Do I dream regularly? Yes.






Have you had a significant dream recently?






Yeah, I have a lot of dreams. Sometimes I will lose a dream, but sometimes I can wake up in the dream and do stuff. Oh gosh, what can I share that’s not really embarrassing? But I guess maybe embarrassing is in line with what we’ve been discussing. Okay, let me say this. I keep having dreams about this one girl who I went to high school with. She was my friend. And in the dream, we end up, like dating, basically. Or there’s—it’s very romantic, not necessarily a wet dream. Like it’s not sexy. It’s more G-Rated or PG-Rated. And this is a person who I was in touch with and then, when I transitioned, in a very non-exciting way, just kind of vanished. And I think I still have some hangups about that, but in the dream, we’re always in weird situations and I’m kind of following her around in all of these weird places. And I’m just like, “Why do you keep showing up?” I don’t talk to this person at all. There’s no reason for me to think about her really. I don’t know. I started reading stuff about dreams because of this actually, like Carl Jung. Do you know about dreams?






To a degree.






Can you help me with this dream? I really can’t figure out why this person is there. I suppose sometimes it’s not meant to be literally that person. It’s what that person represents, or something. What do you think? Like, they’re just a person from my past who I haven’t talked to in years.






This happens to me all the time. I don’t have recurring dreams about people from the past, but people do pop up. I think it’s interesting that they drifted away from you and that you are following them.






I just thought of this other dream I’ve been having. It’s a recurring dream, and I’ve been having the same exact dream since I was 10. Can I tell it to you? So here’s the dream. It’s the fucking same every time. So what happens is, I’m living in the White House. My house is the White House, but it’s not in Washington, DC—it’s in a barren landscape. And I leave my White House, I’m riding my bike that I had when I was 10, which was a blue Schwinn. I have my helmet on and I’m just riding around in the barren ass landscape, and it’s kind of foggy. Then, when I’m done riding, I try to get back in my house and all the doors are locked. Someone has locked me out of the house. And meanwhile, it’s getting foggier. I walk my bike away from the house because I see something in the distance. I see a mountain, which maybe was always there, maybe not. I don’t really remember now, but much closer to me on the ground, is like a booth—like, Lucy’s therapist booth in Peanuts, you know, it’s a wooden booth, or a lemonade stand, something like that. But in the booth is an alien, its got the shape, like the classic alien head shape. And so I start riding my bike towards it to be like, “What the fuck?” But then I wipe out, like I crash the bike terribly. I’ve run over something. It’s my white comforter that was on my bed when I was this age, when I was 10, this big white down comforter. The alien from the booth comes up to me while I’m still on the ground. He has a giant button, also like a cartoon, a big square with a red button in the middle. And he says to me, “press the button.” When I press the bottom, the mountain in the background, it becomes a volcano and there’s lava. The lava starts coming down and I’m riding my bike away from the lava. The lava hits my bike and I launch into the air—and then I wake up.






And you’ve had this more than once.






I’ve had this many times. The same exact sequence. The last time I had it was probably like two years ago. The first time I was 10 years old.






What the fuck is that?






You’re the dream expert in this call. Can you help me?






I gotta think on this one. I had a recurring dream when I was about the same age, where I was at my great grandmother’s funeral, but her body was not in the casket. It was in the pew and slumped over on my body. And they were like going to, I guess, move her into the casket, but they kept just sermoning. But what they couldn’t hear was that she was talking to me—she was actually still alive and they were going to bury her alive. There was a Duracell commercial at this time that was like, “Duracell is the best battery because we power the ZOLL defibrillator.” So this word, “defibrillator,” was stuck in my head as a kid. I would say it to myself over and over. And in the dream, my grandma is saying, “I need the ZOLL defibrillator.” But nobody would believe me.






Oh my god! So you’re trying to be like, “She’s awake and she needs this little defibrillator,” and the people are just saying, “Sit down, young child.” That is so upsetting! That sounds like a stress dream.






I guess so. I was really obsessed with the idea that I could catch her death. My inheritance from her was this pair of moccasin slippers and I was certain that if I wore her slippers, that I too would be taken to the other room.






Like death was contagious.






Exactly.






Oh my gosh, that’s so scary.






OK, last one: Is there one defining truth that you believe that guides your life? Like one?






Oh my god, oh my god, one truth.






Or two truths and a lie.






Two truths and a lie that define my life. What’s the lie that defines my life? I’m the lie. My first thought when I think of the lie is, “If it feels good, it is good.” Yeah, spoken like a true sober alcoholic. I mean, pleasure is very important to me. That’s something I think about with writing, too. I hope that my stories are about something, but they should be pleasurable, too. I always think of Lorrie Moore first—like, it’s just a fucking pleasure to read her sentences, you know? It just feels good. So like, “If it feels good, it is good”—I guess sometimes that’s true and sometimes it’s false. Can you say that, if it feels good to read, it is good writing? I think maybe.


Two days ago, I got stoned. The weed here is amazing. I took an edible and I ate so much ice cream. I ate… the craziest amount of ice cream. And I just like, it felt so good in the moment. And then I was so sick because I am lactose intolerant and I do take Lactaid, but sometimes it’s not enough. I do try to enjoy myself a lot. People say that to me, they’re like, “When you like things, you really enjoy them.” I’ve gotten that feedback from many people. And it’s something that I pride myself on.


I think part of it is that I was very unhappy as a child. Like I was depressed and closeted and was just like, “What’s happening?” And then I was at the girls’ school and I was like, “Am I broken? What’s wrong with me? I don’t like boys and I’m at this Catholic school and they’re making me go to mass and wear a skirt and I am miserable.” If that’s where you start from, more or less, in your adolescent-to-adult journey… Now that I’m an adult and I’m like, a large, beautiful man, and I have a hot wife who I’m in love with, and I live in California, and I get to read good books, and do stuff like this—I get to do interviews with cool, smart people, because I wrote something good—like, I’m just gonna enjoy it so hard. Because I know what it’s like to just be so depressed and feel that your life is never going to be any good at all. This is a little “It Gets Better”-coded but I am not beating the “It Gets Better” allegations, I guess.


So I don’t know, I suppose the truth, or lie, that defines my life is some kind of half-truth, half-lie—that pleasure is important. And I think that’s important for trans people, too. The world wants us to only have these degrading fucking lives. And so much of the media narrative about us is obviously about our suffering and stuff. But the pleasure is important too. And that needs to be represented in our art through like, silliness and those kinds of things. Does that make any sense?






Big time.

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