In Darryl, Jackie Ess has written what feels like an instant cult classic, a book that seems like it’ll be referred to in hushed urgent tones in the future by its readers as they foist it on a friend. One that functions like I Love Dick did in the early 2010s; I can already envision Darryl directing and distracting future readers and writers as they wrestle with its influence. It’s been a long time since I felt the mental wherewithal to ask a writer to speak with me about their work, but my son went back to school full time and so there I was, DMing Jackie to see if she’d speak to me about Darryl. I’d read it in two feverish sittings and many people whose taste I respect were calling it the best novel they’d read in a good long while.

MONIKA WOODS: I would love to talk about the form DARRYL takes. There are moments where it feels amorphous and narrative, and other times it’s clear cut and direct. (And this line blurred even more, at least for me, right at the end…) Can I ask you how you came to structure Darryl the way you did?

JACKIE ESS: In a lot of ways the style records a style of work rather than a deliberate commitment to form, nearly every chapter of Darryl was written, in some form, in a single morning, though probably not the form in the finished book. Of course there are some stylistic influences, they’re also about the length of a lyric poem, or a twitter thread, or a livejournal post, or a shaggy dog story, and I’ve written enough in those forms that I speak and think in them, for better or worse.

But I think I did start to own the form as I went, I definitely have some ideas about attention span, the need for hooks, and people’s receptivity to these quick cuts. I had a gamble that I could borrow something from slightly dishonored forms of reading like social media archive-binging, and that others would want to read a novel shaped like that. I’m kind of lapsing into talking about the internet here, in the same way that I don’t think psychoanalysts are really obsessed with childhood, we simply all happen to have been born, and perhaps that’s when some dynamics were on display very nakedly or without any countervailing common sense.

Though maybe the shortest and sweetest explanation, if you like the pang of bitterness as I sometimes do, is that it’s a first book and I didn’t have my style fully under control. I still don’t. Maybe when I get it under control people won’t care for my idea of order and execution, but I’m not too worried about that happening for a few books yet.

MW: I thought there was something really beautiful about that blurring. For me, when the form of “posting” felt clearer, it was useful as an artifice for Darryl himself. He could employ direct address and feel comfortable expressing himself, with those layers in between him and his output. It felt very earnest. Darryl *is* earnest about his struggles and his trajectory to change.

But I want to come back to something you said, about books and the internet. This is something I think about a lot too. When I read NO ONE IS TALKING ABOUT THIS a lot shook loose in my brain about attention span. Do you have any books that helped you along to “a novel shaped like that?” And what *is* that shape?

JE: I think some of the influences are very forward in the book, Dennis Cooper’s THE SLUTS, but also Berryman in makeup before the mirror, Walt Whitman—who are these guys talking to? I think with the latter two it’s actually hard to nail down the scope of address and sort of admirable that they seem not to have been worried about it. Sometimes they address the demos, sometimes Dear Reader, sometimes the one who got away, and sometimes God. I’m sure this polyvalent address has a name, but I just think of it as loose, lyric, “folksy,” in the good and bad sense of that term. Darryl talks the way I do.

As far as attention span is concerned, the crass thing to say is that readers including myself want a frequent sense of completion and some assurance that the chapter will end. Why should we need that, I’m not sure, it actually feels like some damage that I need it so much more now than I did when I was younger. After all, I'm never afraid that when I sleep I’ll never wake up, or that when I dance I’ll accidentally put on the red shoes. I’m happy when I’m immersed in the text, yet more and more I find myself not on the mountain but peering at it, planning the ascent. Every checkpoint, how to retreat in poor weather.

So short chapters are nice.

But you say that you think about books and the internet a lot too, and I just want to say that this might not be something we have in common. I don’t seek out books like that. I do spend a lot of time online, but the last thing I want is for novelists to do the real thing worse in an attempt to be topical.

I don’t think I’ve read anything that critics described as an internet novel, and I always have a little anxiety when that becomes the critical conversation around a book. To me it’s a huge turnoff. It’s true that Darryl wasn’t written on a typewriter, but I always want to say, “look, the book is about Darryl’s soul, don’t get too caught up in the fact that it’s set in 2017 or that it’s written in the vernacular.”

Partly to shake it, my next book is completely uninterested in the internet. I do have to mention computers a few times because it’s set in 2014, and they’re in the Bay Area: that’s just where the money is. One character has a tumblr. There’s a subplot involving a bail fundraiser. But the characters fundamentally don’t answer to the internet, and actually neither does Darryl. He doesn’t appear to be beholden to The Discourse, as in the superegoic repetition of twitter trends. He probably has an aol or earthlink email account.

MW: I think about books and the internet in that I do think the internet has changed how some people read- it has for me at least! My attention span *can* sometimes reach my childhood’s depths but it’s rarer these days. So when I think about books and the internet, it’s less how a novel deals with the internet but more how readers do. There are so many books where this relationship seems inverted, but I didn’t find that to be the case with Darryl. Maybe that had a bit to do with the falling away of the “address” as you mention it, and that earnestness in Darryl, which was so attractive. Maybe it has something to with what you said about needing that sense of completion? Like we’re more used to the idea of the sentence standing alone now?

You make a distinction between discourse and a book about a soul; I found the way Darryl discusses political language to be seamlessly integrated into the novel. The word “cuck” might be the main example here, and I was wondering if you could tell me a bit about your approach- how did you achieve this very real sense of synthesis?

JE: One way I wanted to think about Darryl’s voice, and his folksiness, is that he actually has a very intense and punishing political superego. His own words echo for him, he feels their political and philosophical ramifications, and he always tries in some sense to dissolve the conflict and retreat into being a nice guy, as though any disagreement were simply more evidence that it takes all kinds. He has these mechanisms of coarsening (when he says at the end of the day isn’t it all really just poles and holes anyway?) and fuzzy-headed open-as-in-a-sieve-mindedness (it takes all kinds) and passingly, a kind of activist pluck (I’m standing up for guys like us!), and of course none of it holds. He’s full of ideas, and I would say often has an extraordinary vision, but his vision is very temporary. He doesn’t have the qualities I would associate with reason, he doesn’t answer to the edge cases and entailments, and the slate seems to be erased each day. I think that’s a more extreme version of what many of us are doing.

Of course I had some other interests here. I started writing DARRYL at the end of 2016 and at that time I was really concerned about being read through my identity and standpoint, and nothing else. I was very affected by a Yasmin Nair essay where she says “they don’t want your analysis, they want your experience.” Really just that one line of it, which I’m probably misquoting. I was very afraid of just becoming a better or worse voice of Trans Women Of Color. I don’t want to ironize that category too much actually, it may have some use, but I didn’t want to stand out in front, I still don’t, and I didn’t want to be reproached for the quality of representation. You know, this isn’t what I’m doing in my writing.

So when I found Darryl, I felt like I’d struck gold, because here was a way to sort of burn my card. I can write as a white man, in early middle age, maybe very queer in fact but not at all in identification. And that let me talk about, say, gender and transness, without invoking any kind of special epistemic status as an oppressed person. I don’t put my picture in the book, I don’t think readers necessarily know anything about me unless they look me up, and I like that. That was sort of the initial exercise, but I don’t think very much of that kind of thinking, which was too prickly, too topical, too local, really survives into the final draft. These concerns survive, they affected what story I wanted to tell, but then I just told that story. And maybe learning to tell a story also let me take up the burden of representation in some small ways, not through the story itself you understand, but in my life, just being less neurotic about it.

MW: I love this idea of “folksiness” belying intensity, and you wrap it up so nicely with that quote, “they don’t want your analysis, they want your experience.” Personally, I *do* want the analysis. But you’ve engaged in a bit of play with DARRYL, where you’re giving your reader both. Correct me if I’m wrong, but it seems like this novel started as a character study and grew from that. Did writing the book this way feel like protest to you in a literary landscape that seems to overvalue plot? And similarly, were you trying to sneak in that analysis you sensed might not be wanted?

JE: I’m not sure plot is overvalued, or that I’ve broken with it. Whatever weaknesses of plotting in DARRYL are no more protest than my imperfect smile is a protest against dentistry. I think it may be a little bit unconventional in its pacing: here psychological, here picaresque, here compression, action, the chronicle. But basically, I’d say “I thought it had a plot!” I also might remember Alexander Theroux’s motto “character is plot anyway.”

I think at least in its initial concept, the book simply didn’t refer to the contemporary literary landscape at all. I didn’t know those people yet. I started writing Darryl in 2016, at a time when I basically only wrote zines and lyric poems, with the expectation that I’d self-publish, and be read by a handful of other trans people, or maybe that I’d publish on one of a few small presses that take this kind of thing.

As for sneaking in unwanted analysis, I don’t think there’s anything sneaky about the book unless we regard fiction itself as sneaky. The novel is in some ways a medium for thought, which might be direct or indirect, humor and irony are available devices, sometimes we can hope for a little bit of intellectual pointillism, magic eye effects. So for sure, putting the right words in the wrong mouth can be a way to reflect on some ideas which I might find awkward to express another way, but that isn’t cloak and dagger. I think it’s actually an intuition of appropriateness, it’s actually the rightness of art that you’re pointing at here. And it’s not as though I’ve generally shied from expressing controversial opinions in other media.

MW: Maybe I misunderstood the way that Nair quote affected you!

(Spoiler alert! Scroll past this if you haven’t read DARRYL yet!)

I would love to talk with you about Bill’s character. I really loved him- and then I love the way you allowed him to surprise both Darryl and your reader. His revelation near the end of the book felt like a wonderful catharsis. In your mind, was it always going to happen that way? If not, when did you decide to give Darryl this joy?

JE: It’s easier for me to talk about reasons than the order of composition. It does seem to me that part of the scheme of the book is that Darryl offers very strong and sometimes baseless interpretations of the people around him. Bill is Don Giovanni or Christ. He lays the Goddess trip on Satori. Moonbeam is exactly who Darryl thinks he is, but the truth of Darryl’s picture is basically a coincidence (could say it’s a Gettier case). Clive is whatever he is, probably Paul Valéry’s Monsieur Teste, but Darryl wouldn’t have read that. Anyway, Darryl offers these interpretations, and the reader is invited to do the same, because many of the characters begin their lives as broad stereotypes or as having no existence outside of the bedroom scene. I wanted to show how that turns over.

So Darryl expects Bill to be coarse, homophobic, and inexperienced, but none of these things turn out to be true. Why does he expect this? Because Bill is masculine and working class, and possibly because he has to defend the cosmopolitan virtues as his own domain as a bulwark against feeling absolutely inferior. You know, “you may be all that, but I’m actually very reflective, very modern.” From inferiority to condescension to redemption, wow, this guy oughta become a novelist! For example, already very early in the book, Darryl says “Bill is cooler with it, I think, though I can’t figure out his attitude. I think I always expect him to be meaner about it because he’s poor. But he’s not stupid, he’s not cruel. He’s just straight.” Well, that’s halfway there, but you can see he hasn’t given up his condescension. In fact Bill isn’t all that straight, in the same sense that Darryl isn’t all that straight. Of course neither is legible in the official queer ontology, but Darryl never stops to think whether others might be as reflective or complex or unmapped as he is. He’s too hung up on feelings of inferiority.

Darryl’s love always begins in condescension, it’s the same with Satori (too hippie, too therapized, or too superstitious) and Oothoon (too punk, or too much in love with her own gender journey). That’s what love is for him, a triumph over condescension. Finally, we thank our lovers for educating our hearts. There’s something that isn’t quite right about that. He’s putting himself through a script that I think of as very Christian, you know, he humbles himself and that is where he finds God, in the face of someone who an hour ago was beneath consideration. That can be a beautiful thing and I think actually a true thing that happens, but also that Darryl doesn’t really humble himself. Maybe his failure to do so is what keeps the story alive. But it might kill him.

If you’ll grant me that as some of the emotional logic of the story, a kind of non-ideal Christianity, then I think it makes a lot of sense that right from the beginning, Bill’s heart is the story. If you’ll forgive a long quote from very early in the book:

We’ve all lost people. It’s easy to forget a big guy like that has a heart.

That’s actually what kills me the most. When he was just a big brute sex machine it was easier to maintain a sense of relevance. That’s the boyfriend, I’m the husband. He can fuck and I can talk. But he’s a real person. He’s sweet, he’s actually sweeter than me. I think that must be the appeal of him for Mindy, he doesn’t just get her off, he gets her. He doesn’t just get to have a big hard cock, he gets to be a real person with real feelings, and real reasons for them. Thinking about that put me right back on my spiral of shame.

It occurs to me now that I may have talked too much about Darryl when we meant to talk about Bill. You know, I think part of Bill’s truth is that he’s a guy who everybody wants to be their rock of masculinity. He has some of the problems that very beautiful women have, being somehow too implicated in everyone’s gendered fantasies to really be seen. What if you’re gruff, simple, well-built, well-hung, and what you find is that other men don’t see past their inferiority feelings and can’t be a friend to you. What if you find that it’s hard to make a loving connection, because people see you in a pornographic light, or through their own sexual athleticism and sense of adventure? Sometimes you might like to say, “I’m not your mountain, but a man.” I think maybe there are a lot more guys like that than we think, whose vulnerability, expansive identification, maybe their “feminine side,” it all finds no venue. I’ve known men like that, and as with everyone, you might lean into your objectification, or throw it off completely, or find a kind of intimacy in spaces where you can put it down and be human for a moment.

And I think in that light we can see something sort of sad in Darryl’s gay feelings, because of course on the one hand it’s sort of a triumph to find his way there, the love for Bill is very right. But the sort of gay man he’d be if he developed more fully that way would probably be one with his sense of inferiority very much intact, worshipping Gym Gods, despairing of his age and middling body, never understanding the way his ultra-hierarchized view of the body destroys the limited intimacy he is likely to find. His comments about other gay men scattered throughout the book are not promising. He doesn’t love them. He doesn’t love the kind that he could be.

I think the book feels sweeter because of where it ends, and that was why I was sure of ending it there. In that way it shares the satisfactions of dreams and sexual fantasies, satisfying in their incompleteness. There was a version of Cinderella I read as a kid and now can’t find, when Prince Charming gets the glass slipper on her she says, “it fits, what shall we do now?” The Prince pauses, not really sure. “I guess maybe take it off and put it back on again?”