When Rukmini meets Neela for the first time, she says, “I know everything about you.” Many of us have experienced obsessions with people who have star power where we feel like we know them intimately. As someone with a large social media following yourself, what does that feel like, to have other people making assumptions about who you are based on your online presence, and how did this influence how you wrote the book?
One of the challenging things for me in terms of my “brand,” or what I put out in the world on social media, is that because I don’t perform pain in a particular way online, I think there’s an assumption that I’m just thriving all the time and running around town getting blowouts. I love a blowout just as much as any other girl, but just because someone isn’t talking about the hardship that is happening in their life doesn’t mean that they’re not enduring some kind of pain. That’s something I’ve personally noticed, how my social media is misinterpreted in that specific way.
In terms of the novel, social media is sort of like a third character. What does it mean to make friendships or even be in friendship with someone in 2020 with social media acting as a sort of third party or mediator, where you learn about your best friend’s pregnancy on social media instead of directly from them?
One of the main characters is trans, but this wasn’t immediately revealed, and the fact that she’s trans was not a major plot point of the story. Why did you decide to share that this character was trans when you did?
As a trans writer, I think a lot about how trans characters exist in literature and I pay attention to a lot of the discourse and criticism around trans literature. One of my agendas around this book was, can I write a book that features trans characters that isn’t about transness specifically (by “transness,” I mean transition), that doesn’t have a big coming out, that doesn’t have people sitting around just talking about being trans? Because quite frankly, that’s not really my experience of transness.
At the same time, I didn’t want to pull a J.K. Rowling where I was like, “Surprise, did you know they were all trans?” That also feels a bit lazy. How do I create a trans character or trans characters without it being at the forefront, but without naming it as well? She sort of mentions it in passing in conversation. What’s really interesting is which readers will notice and which readers won’t.
We have an assumption — and I’m guilty of this as well — because of white supremacy and homophobia and transphobia, that most characters in books are white or cis or straight. That was another reason why I made a deliberate choice for her identity to be mentioned in passing because I think it’s important for readers who then do stop and see that, are then forced to be like, “Oh shoot, it didn’t even occur to me that this character could be trans. And why didn’t I consider that this character could be trans?”
There is a discussion in the book about how marginalized artists are grasping for limited resources and recognition, and as such often end up regurgitating behaviors that have been imposed through white supremacy and end up hurting each other, which seems like the goal of white supremacy all along. What do you hope readers take from being exposed to these conversations in your book?
As I move into my 40s, I think I’ve been evaluating my work a lot as an artist. So much of the work that I’ve done in my 30s, especially through books, has been in one way or another about educating. Not always, but often. She of the Mountains, my first novel, was about challenging biphobia. Even This Page is White was trying to use poetry to talk about the impact of systemic racism. I think that these have been useful gestures. But now looking back I realize how much of those projects have centered the dominant gaze. I think The Subtweet is me trying to move a bit out of that. What are the stories that I might tell if I’m not trying to educate, if I’m not trying to tell white, straight, cis people how to be an ally?
The conversations that you’re alluding to, I wasn’t necessarily writing them for a non-marginalized audience, per se. I’ve had white straight people say to me that they feel like they’ve gotten an insider look into something that they wouldn’t typically have had access to. And that’s great. But I think that so much of the work that needs to happen in dismantling systems of power needs to be happening within our communities.
