A Reader's Interview with Griffin Hansbury

The author of Some Strange Music Draws Me In and Feral City on writing in multiple genres, Michael Jackson ("an object that has to be outgrown"), and why he loves Carson McCullers.

Hello!

On a semi-regular basis, I talk to authors about their work and their reading practices. This week, I talked to Griffin Hansbury about his novel, Some Strange Music Draws Me In. In the summer of 1984, 13-year-old Mel (short for Melanie) meets a bold trans woman in her working-class Massachusetts town who will change the course of her life forever. Decades later, Max, (formerly Mel) is a teacher at a prestigious private school who is forced to attend sessions with a sensitivity trainer after he runs afoul of the school’s language code regarding appropriate terms for trans people. Critics have called Some Strange Music Draws Me In a “gorgeous novel readers will want to live inside” and “the coming-of-age, reckoning-with-gender story we have all needed for decades, the kind that can change and save your life.” Griffin is also the author of Feral City: on Finding Liberation in Lockdown New York (a finalist for the 2023 Lambda Literary Award for Transgender Nonfiction) Vanishing New York: How a Great City Lost Its Soul, The Nostalgist, and Day for Night, a poetry collection.

And this news just came in today (so exciting!): Lucy Sante named Griffin’s memoir, Feral City, one of her top ten favorite novels in a New York Times survey of the best 100 books of the 21st century.

I asked Griffin about day jobs, music, Carson McCullers, and writing in multiple genres.

In addition to your writing, you are a practicing psychoanalyst with an impressive publication history. I’m curious about what it’s like to balance those two roles. At the risk of revealing my own neuroses, I wonder if you find that your psychoanalytic practice and your writing practice play well together, or are they more like rival siblings, competing for your attention?

In some areas of my life, I can be very compartmentalized, and I’ve managed to do this with my analytic practice and my writing practice. I fit my full-time practice into three days and my writing into two days and I keep them very separate. Sometimes it feels like being in two different self states, occupying one completely and then the other. I know clinicians who can go back and forth more frequently and quickly, seeing patients in the morning, doing other things midday, and then going back to patients in the evening, or else they alternate days. I am not so flexible. I need to be fully situated, settled in for the duration in one “brain” or the other. That’s how I think of it—I’m either in my writer brain or my analyst brain. They feel very much like different parts of me and they don’t compete with each other. I keep them so separate, they barely take notice of each other! 

Obviously, Patti Smith sort of hovers over Some Strange Music Draws Me In like a punk rock angel, but I noticed music as a theme throughout the book. I’ve been telling everyone I know that your novel has me thinking about Michael Jackson in a whole new way. Can you talk about the role of music in your writing? (This book, but also generally.)

In the book, both Patti Smith and Michael Jackson offer the character Mel a portal for escaping their small-town life, which is trapped in the grip of white, American, cis-heteronormativity. Both Patti and Michael do gender differently from the norm. Michael was exciting in large part because his gender was so mysterious at a time when gender was pretty much settled into the binary. I was a serious fan, like Mel, with a room full of Michael posters, books, dolls, buttons, all the memorabilia, and I believe he was a queer love object for me at the age of 12 and 13, when my girl friends were infatuated with more masculine celebrities. Michael was sort of boy and sort of girl, sort of trans or non-binary. He was soft and this made him available for my nascent queer love. And so, too, for Mel’s. 

Michael was also childish, famously so, including his apparent pedophilia. He is an object that has to be outgrown, like the child's transitional object of a teddy bear or blanket. That’s where, in the book, Patti comes in. She’s an adult love object, tough and sexual, also queered by her androgyny. I didn’t start listening to Patti Smith until I was in my forties, but I wish I’d had her as a kid. I imagine she would have opened up new pathways. Music does this for young people. I don’t think it works the same once we’re past our early twenties. For young people, music is the world. It helps you to shape your identity, to find your aesthetic and your people. It helps you to express and hold the difficult emotions of adolescence. For most adults, it seems, the most emotionally charged music remains the music we listened to in youth. I still love Michael Jackson’s music. And Patti Smith’s. I listen to them both.

Your last book was a memoir, and you also write poetry. How do you think about writing across multiple genres? Do you think of yourself primarily as a novelist who occasionally writes nonfiction, or a nonfiction writer who also writes novels? (I guess a larger question is: Does it matter how a writer identifies?)

I started off as a poet, writing seriously in high school and college and then, at NYU, getting a master’s degree in creative writing/poetry. In my twenties, I tried a couple of screenplays, but poetry remained my focus, though I never had much success at publishing it. I wrote a memoir, too, during that time, about testosterone and transition, and that was widely rejected—“beautifully written” they said, but “before its time.” Editors told me that “readers aren’t ready for this.” I gave up writing about trans experience. That was the 1990s.

When 9/11 happened I felt like I needed the breadth and depth of a novel to tell a story about it. I wrote The Nostalgist, my first novel, and managed to eventually get it published with a very small press. I abandoned poetry completely, a move I still don’t understand. I was just done with it. I wrote maybe seven other novels in between The Nostalgist and Some Strange Music, and I failed to publish any of them, collecting piles of rejections from agents and editors. 

After writing a short novel called The Recollex Cycle, about a New York character named Jeremiah Moss, I decided to give him a blog and that was Vanishing New York. Of all the things I’ve written, that blog took off. I had to go outside the publishing machine, outside agents and editors, to get anyone to read my writing. And maybe I also had to be perceived as a cisgender man. Having the platform of the blog enabled me to publish the book Vanishing New York with HarperCollins. People had been pushing me to write that book for a few years and I wasn’t interested. I wanted to publish my novels. I basically wrote and published Vanishing New York in the hopes that it would open the door to a novel. It didn’t. My New York novels kept getting rejected. 

I switched gears and went back to my hometown roots, and to the trans subject, which had become much more acceptable and interesting to readers since the 1990s. Some Strange Music was rejected by several agents until I landed with Doug Stewart at Sterling Lord. He was helpful and patient and I feel very lucky to have him. Unfortunately, we sent the book out to editors in March of 2020. It was rejected or ignored by everyone it went out to. I put it aside and started writing about my experience in the pandemic. That was Feral City and we were able to sell it to Tom Mayer at W.W. Norton and then, on the back of that book, he bought Some Strange Music. 

In and through the 2000s, I’ve also written and published several psychoanalytic papers on the trans subject. One of those papers has been especially successful, winning an award and getting translated around the world—and stirring up controversy. 

All of this is to say that I identify as a writer. From a young age, I’ve been trying to get my stuff out there in any form I can. I seem to have the most success with my non-fiction. Which I find irritating. I feel more emotionally close to the lyrical that comes from poetry and the kind of storytelling you can do in a novel. But it seems like something there doesn’t work as well for me. Some Strange Music is being almost completely ignored by reviewers. Readers love it. People write to me almost every day to tell me how emotionally moved they are by it. But the gatekeepers won’t touch it, so it’s not reaching as many readers as it could, and this is heartbreaking. It’s a mystery that has me locked up at the moment and I’m unsure which way to go with my writing. Do I keep at the novel or shift back to memoir/essay? I have to be writing, always, or I don’t feel like myself, not fully alive. It doesn’t matter what genre I’m writing in, as long as I’m writing. And, ideally, as long as people are reading. I don’t see the point in writing if I am not going to be received by others. Maybe all this genre-hopping is a way to figure out how I might best be taken in—and understood—by readers. 

Your novel begins with a quote from Carson McCullers’ 1946 novel, The Member of the Wedding. Is she a major influence on your writing? I'm also curious if you’ve read or plan to read the new biography (Carson McCullers: A Life by Mary V. Dearborn).

I fell in love with Carson McCullers early in high school and I am sure it’s because she was so queer, and really so transmasculine, though that is speculation. Whatever her identity, she wrote transmasculine characters and I received them at a time when there was a total absence of anyone like me to look out at from the solitary place of myself. So McCullers was a lifeline. She was also a freak who was interested in freaks, people at the margins, which is also a queer feeling. McCullers understood. I got very into the Southern Gothic as a teenager, reading McCullers, the short stories of Truman Capote (which are far more compelling than Breakfast at Tiffany’s), and so much Flannery O’Connor. In recent years, I’ve been inspired by the ideas in queer negativity and affect theory, and these writers of the Southern Gothic fit right in there with their focus on the marginal, the mad, the ugly, and broken. 

Growing up in the 1970s, there was space for the marginal and weird in the wider culture of that time. All of that started to get pushed out and sanitized starting with Ronald Reagan in the 1980s, the catastrophic onset of neoliberalism, the way capitalism scours everyone and everything, making us into clones of normativity. (I write about this in Feral City.) I wonder if McCullers could be published today. 

I haven’t read the new biography because biographies tend to bore me, but I did enjoy Jenn Shapland’s book, My Autobiography of Carson McCullers: A Memoir, because I am more interested in autotheory and memoir, and how someone is engaging with the writing and the writer. 

Who is another writer you took inspiration from in writing this book? Was it a specific book or their body of work?

I really loved Emma Cline’s novel The Girls, which has the back and forth of the character as a middle-aged woman looking back on her youth, trying to make sense of it in her current life, and also the theme of girlhood, which was important to me in the writing of my novel. So I held that as a model in my writing. I’m not sure who else. Probably just the accumulation of everyone I’ve read over the years, but I will say that it’s rare that I pick up a contemporary novel and just love it. 

Can you talk about the timeline of writing and selling this book? Whatever you feel comfortable sharing.

I started writing this book in the fall of 2017. A memory kept tugging at me, what became the scene in the book where Mel sees “the tranny” for the first time outside the post office. I was about 12 or 13 years old when I heard that a trans woman was in town and when I finally saw her, outside the post office, I was enthralled. I looked for her and never found her. My story ends there, but it was the springboard for the novel. What if I had found her? I sent the manuscript to agents in late 2019, I think, and Doug Stewart took it on, gave me notes, I revised it, and it went out to editors in the fateful month of March 2020. I didn’t sell it until after I wrote and sold Feral City.

What did writing this book teach you?

In the writing of this book, I was very intentionally teaching myself how to bring in an emotional depth that my previous novels lacked. Not that they weren’t emotional, but there’s something that writers do that feels, in some ways, like a trick. Using phrases like, “I didn’t realize it then, but looking back now I can see…” whatever. I don’t know what to call that. Maybe it’s just self-reflection, where you show how the narrator is thinking about themselves. This seems simple, but it took me awhile to figure it out, and it brings a depth that is often missing in a lot of fiction. So this book was doing depth-work and I set out to do that, to figure it out.

If you feel like sharing, what is next for you in your writing career? 

I wish I knew. I’ve been blocked since publishing Feral City and I’ve never been blocked in my life. I’ve always been a compulsive writer, usually juggling a couple projects at once. I haven’t stopped writing since I was 14 years old. But I’ve done nothing in nearly 2 years and it’s driving me nuts. I just signed up for an essay writing workshop, my first workshop since graduate school, many years ago, and I hope it will jar something loose. But I also know I’m in some kind of transition. I’ve published 3 books with major presses. W.W. Norton is a dream, ever since I was a kid, so it feels like I’ve finally arrived at a place that I was busting my ass trying to get to for decades. I’ve got that “now what” feeling. Accompanied by the “is that all there is” feeling. 

The worst thing for an overachiever is to be successful. That’s when you realize that all your striving can’t fix the childhood wound. My wound, like those queer gothic writers I loved as a kid, was to have my interiority misunderstood or ignored. So I write. I keep banging away, reaching out, trying to get it. And it’s not there. It’s not there because it’s in the past—I tell this to my patients all the time—this is the great tragedy of life, that the thing you’re so desperately trying to get, whatever it is, can never be had because it belongs to the past and there is no going back for it. That’s over. All there is left to do is grieve the loss and figure out another way to exist. So I think that’s where I am right now. Grieving the failure of my success to heal the wounds of the past. And if that’s what was driving my compulsion to write, then I have no choice but to find another reason to keep writing. Or maybe I’ll just stop and find a hobby. But I doubt I’m capable of that.

Other interesting things

• On the power of music to connect people, note in this rave review that the title of Griffin’s novel, taken from a Patti Smith song, lured a “straight, married, middle-aged (OK oldish)” guy into the story about a teenage girl and trans characters.

• Griffin is amazing on Instagram. I haven’t lived in New York for 20 years, but when I did my favorite parts were downtown, around Washington Square Park. I follow Griffin for a portal to those special places.

• I enjoyed hearing Griffin talk about why it’s important to have intergenerational stories of queerness on the Barnes & Noble Poured Over podcast. (Griffin’s part begins at about the 50 minute mark.)

• On that podcast, the way that Griffin talks about writing in Mel’s voice as “stepping out of one’s knowing oneself into a state of unknowing” reminded me énouement, a French word for the bittersweet feeling of having arrived at the future, finally knowing how things turned out, but being unable to go back and tell your younger self.

Check out Some Strange Music Draws Me In at Bookshop.org.