T Kira Madden is a lesbian APIA writer, photographer, and amateur magician living in New York City. She holds an MFA in creative writing from Sarah Lawrence College and serves as the founding Editor-in-chief of No Tokens, a magazine of literature and art. A 2017 NYSCA/NYFA Artist Fellow in nonfiction literature from the New York Foundation for the Arts, she has received fellowships from The MacDowell Colony, Hedgebrook, Tin House, and Yaddo, where she was selected for the 2017 Linda Collins Endowed Residency Award. She facilitates writing workshops for homeless and formerly incarcerated individuals and currently teaches at Sarah Lawrence College. Her debut memoir, Long Live the Tribe of Fatherless Girls, is a 2019 New York Times Editors’ Choice. There is no period in her name.

EB: How did you start writing in general and nonfiction in particular?

TKM: My grandmother taught me to write on an electric typewriter when I was a kid because she was an obsessive letter-writer. She lived in Hawaii so she was always sending missives overseas, and she taught me how to write them. From letters, I started writing stories, yet somehow, they still all feel like letters.

My first stories were based on my own experiences, just exaggerated, elevated. There was this girl Jonie Baloney, who was essentially me, but she escaped her school and she escaped her parents and she joined a freak show. That idea—the exaggerated self—is what I ultimately returned to.

I left writing in middle and high school. I was too cool for it. I started taking classes while I was in college, and eventually, a graduate program in fiction; I only wrote fiction until my father died. His death flipped me back to that first place of writing––writing about the self using fantastic and even fictional elements.

EB: I really loved both the tone and structure of Long Live the Tribe of Fatherless Girls—the vignette-y fragments, the fantastical atmosphere, the magical-realism-like elements. How did you come up with the format of the book?

TKM: I wrote the only book I knew how to write. My focus in grad school and the writing I most love and admire has always been really short fiction—what some people like to call “flash fiction,” though I don’t like that term—anything between one sentence and two to three pages. I was, and am, most interested in compression. How do you build structure and narrative in such little space? How do you create a narrative flip, tension and release, a change of terms, set-up and payoff without “plot”? You have to work around and within the corners of the traditional rules.

So, when I started writing nonfiction, I transferred that interest and energy into writing these snapshots that were based on real life. Without really planning to, several of the pieces grew and grew and evolved into longer pieces. I honored a piece if it did that, but even the longer pieces, for the most part, are all made up of fragments.

At first there was no chronology between the fragments at all, and then I realized because there were certain—I use this term loosely—“experimental” elements in the book. I needed something to anchor a reader. I knew there were going to be photos, different points of view, different tenses, so I needed a beginning, middle, and anti-end to establish some sense of order.

EB: Comparing your writing process in fiction versus nonfiction, I know you’re writing compressed forms in both, but other than that, is the process the same? Is how you write fiction similar or different to how you write nonfiction?

TKM: I’m using the same toolbox. People cringe when I say this, but I’m using just as much imagination when I’m writing nonfiction as fiction. I’m just exercising those muscles differently. With nonfiction, I am thinking about ethics, how to fully develop a person even if I don’t particularly like that person, if I have a right to a certain person’s story. In fiction, I am also considering things like that—am I the person to tell the story of this person’s experience? Maybe not. Maybe I don’t read enough about that community or person to do it. I don’t think that if you’re writing fiction you can do whatever you want; you’re not off the hook. I also don’t think one must “stay in their lane.” Those two things can coexist if executed responsibly.  

The craft feels the same to me. You create dialogue, build characters, set the scene, make things up where there are holes in memory or understanding. And I can be just as emotionally devastated writing fiction as I am when writing nonfiction. Sometimes more so.

EB: Thanks for bringing up the ethics of nonfiction writing. This is something I think a lot about, and I always want to know how nonfiction writers handle writing about other people. Where does your story end and another’s story begins? What do you have the right to tell? I remember you tweeting about how excited your mom was to see the finished book, but there is also some pretty difficult stuff about your mom in your memoir. Did you show your mom your manuscript as you wrote it? Did you allow her to veto things in it about her?

TKM: If we are doing our job right, this is a question we will continue to grapple with always. If we get too comfortable in an answer, that isn’t a good place to be. I do think we all have the right to our own experiences, and our own experiences involve others who are making impressions on those experiences. But I kept going to memoirists and other nonfiction writers I admired while working on this book and asking what they did—Who do you ask? Who gets to see your work? Do you ask permission? And I was disappointed because every person gave me a different answer.

EB: Yup. Every writer I’ve talked to for this series has said something different in response to this question.

TKM: It was good for me, to find my own answers. An absolute truth that helped me was something Lidia Yuknavitch once said to me: you owe your abusers nothing. That was something I had been really grappling with, with the essay “The Feels of Love,” for example. Did I owe it to my abusers to show them the piece? To get their feedback? I was really hung up on doing right by everyone and being fair, and when she said that, it freed me. No, they don’t get a say in my experience of the situation. They already had their say and left my body to carry it.

I decided that my mother and my brothers were the only people whose permissions I needed. Asking other people for permission felt like a false ask—if someone from my middle school said no, I was still going to write about it. It didn’t feel worthy of asking—it felt self-serving. So I decided I was going to ask my mother and my brothers, and I was going to honor whatever they said. They all read the material, they all supported the material. I liked to show them the work after I wrote it rather than before because I think it is much scarier to say hey, can I write about this really terrible thing that Dad did, rather than just show them the fully rendered piece, written to the best of my ability. Then they could see through the lens of it, the mood, the language—see it for what it is rather than just a scary idea.

For other people—the people I felt comfortable getting back in touch with—I did show them the piece, but I asked them: what do you think of this? Rather than: can I write about this? Then people were able to offer some feedback and say, I’d rather you not say that, and for the most part I would honor that. That feels fair to me.

EB: That’s such a smart idea. I also really like what you said about only showing people work after it was already written—it’s definitely more terrifying if you abstractly explain an essay idea that maybe you haven’t even figured out yourself yet, and then the other person can imagine the worst possible thing you could write, rather than what you actually plan to write.

TKM: Yeah, it’s a knee-jerk reaction. I have afriend who, after she writes a piece, calls her mom and reads it to her over the phone. She doesn’t give her the document, because she knows then she will read it a million times and start to cross things out. Her idea is that by reading it out loud, by having that one singular experience, an experience that is very intimate and connected, the things that her mom really wants her to change will jump out, rather than holding a red pen over what you’ve done.

EB: That’s a really good idea. I like that.

TKM: I thought it was really interesting.

EB: So, you’ve mentioned friends, andyour book is about a community of friends that helped you through some really difficult times when you were younger. Can you tell me about your community of writers? Who do you turn to for writing support? How has your community helped or shaped your work?

TKM: In terms of sharing drafts, I always show my fiancée, Hannah Beresford. She is a poet, but she is also the best editor I know of any genre. She is very harsh, but she knows when I need that. She is the only person who can say, you need to start over, and I can admit that she is right.

I also have a writing group of two other women—Molly Tolsky and Justine Champine—we have been in a writing group together for five or six years now. I run things by them as well, and also my agent, Jin Auh, who gives really terrific feedback.

Rick Moody was one of my first writing teachers when I was a teenager. He has remained my mentor forever. I love him so much, and he was one of the first people I showed my book to when it was finished and he made it a better book. He is someone I always turn to for advice as I navigate this world—going to grad school, publishing a book, going on a book tour—I always ask him: how?

The Twitter community is really amazing. There are so many people on there that I haven’t met in person, but I feel like I know them through this weird medium, or I found their work through the platform. I really like the online writing community.

EB: I know, I often get frustrated with Twitter and want to quit it for a variety of reasons, but then again, I have met so many great people through it that it keeps me on there.

TKM: Totally.

EB: I was also wondering, considering the fact that your book has a glittery cover and has the word “girls” in the title, have you been getting awful, gendered questions about it? What questions are you sick of answering?

TKM: Even if my book didn’t have glitter on the cover and it didn’t have the word “girls” in the title, it is still a memoir written by a woman, that’s where it begins and ends. I fought against the title for so long, I fought against the cover, I fought against everything. Because I thought a man was never going to pick up a book called Long Live the Tribe of Fatherless Girls, and that man was never going to pick up a book covered in glitter. And then my friend Danielle Lazarin, who has pink on the cover of her book, said, “Those people aren’t going to read a book about a girl growing up anyway. The readers who won’t read a book with the word ‘girls’ in the title aren’t interested in your story. So why pander to them?” And it clicked for me. Who is going to read a coming age story of a young middle school girl learning to masturbate? Not them. Glitter is not going to be the hard line!

EB: [laughter]

TKM: So, I let it go. The cover doesn’t feel like the “me” of “now”—I wear a lot of black and gold, gothy at heart—but it feels like the cover the girl in the book, the younger version of me, would have chosen. And she is more important than me. This is about her—the person who sprinkled glitter on her pen pal letters.

EB: I love hearing about how covers come about. I’ve heard some horror stories about covers.

TKM: Question-wise, people don’t often ask craft questions or what about what is in the book. The tour started off rough because people hadn’t read the book yet, which I hadn’t really considered. So, their questions weren’t going to be great. One of the first questions I got was asking about how much therapy I get.

EB: Oh my god.

TKM: What I talk about in therapy, what kind of issues or PTSD do I have now… things that just felt ick. Another thing, too, I have noticed now that the book has been out longer is that because I had boyfriends in the book, people now think it is a bisexual book, which I find interesting, because I’m… not bisexual. I thought that came through in the memoir, but because I’ve had past experiences with men, the past dictates how I am seen in the present. So many big outlets have said that it is a bisexual book by a bisexual person. And one gentleman in a Q&A asked me if I had sex with men. That was his question.

EB: Wow. Just in the Q&A.

TKM: Yup. So that was unexpected. I have so much respect for the bisexuals in my life and the bisexual community, but I never thought I would get questions about this. That’s not how I identify, yet people are always looking for the proper packaging.

EB: Yeah, it seemed pretty clear to me by the end of the book that you were a lesbian and that dating men was just part of your journey… but, yeah, people like to ask memoirists extremely inappropriate personal questions. Though I feel like male memoirists don’t get the same questions.

TKM: No.

EB: So, what questions do you wish people were asking you instead of whether or not you have sex with men?

TKM: [laughter] To be honest, I have been asked so many beautiful, thoughtful questions. I have been so fortunate to have so many really engaged readers with really good questions. But I do love being asked craft questions—anything about sentences, ordering, structure. I like talking about the ethics of nonfiction—I think that’s something that is really interesting and important—and also the importance of genre and also why genre is not important at all. And I love when people find something or pick out a moment or an image in the book I had missed and they ask about it and it teaches me something new about my own work. I think that is the best-case scenario always, when someone says, I noticed xyz, did you mean to do this? And up until then I had totally missed it. That’s always really exciting.

EB: That’s so great, like in a workshop, when someone asks did you mean to do this and you want to say, yes, of course I am that smart! But it’s amazing what your subconscious can do.

TKM: Yeah!

EB: So, in general, what do you find most challenging about writing nonfiction?

TKM: I’m fiercely loyal and protective over the people in my life. I don’t really care if people judge me or have misconceptions about me, because yes I have imposter syndrome and so many insecurities and so much anxiety, but I feel that the love I have for my parents and the mistakes I’ve made in my life—well, I feel pretty good about the person I’ve become. I’ve worked really hard to be here, so I don’t care if someone thinks I am a slut because of something I did in middle school. I don’t fucking care at all.

But as far as the people in my life… they didn’t do this. They didn’t sign up for this. So, I struggle with the ethics of that. So if someone is saying something mean about my mother on the internet, or there was this one person who was just tearing my father apart on Goodreads, saying he was an abusive piece of shit… that stuff is hard to read, especially with my father because he can’t speak for himself, and for me to have the only word that people have on him feels unfair.

EB: And what do you find most rewarding about writing nonfiction?

TKM: The people I’ve met and spoken to and connected with who have had similar experiences. Talking to people who feel seen by the book. That’s always the dream—having your book find the right person. You need only that one.

My pub week was the opposite of what I’d anticipated. I thought was going to be the best week of my life, what I had been waiting for forever, and, instead, I was depressed. There was just so much build up for so long and then, to be honest, it was kind of flat. It was clearly not going to be a bestseller, no top sales or rankings. I knew from pub date and on it would slowly sell fewer and fewer copies, and then it’d be time for the next book. The book went from mine to other peoples’. So that week, I was comparing myself to other friends who had gotten better Amazon listings or a better Bookmarks listing, things I don’t normally care about because they don’t matter, and I am not someone who usually gives a shit. But then on the fourth day someone I went to high school with wrote me. She is a psychiatrist now, and she said a teenage girl in the waiting room had my book with her, and the girl said it was the book she needed to help process some of the trauma going on in her life. And I completely turned around after that one message. I haven’t looked back since. I haven’t been sad, because that is all anyone can ask for, to reach that one person, and I did it in the first week. All the rest of it is noise and luck.

EB: Oh, that’s such a great story.

TKM: I cried.

EB: I am getting teary just hearing you talk about it! That’s what I love about nonfiction too. Being a person can be very isolating and you can often feel like a lot of things you’ve experienced no one else can get, but it’s really cool when you can read something that makes you feel like you’re not alone.

TKM: Books have certainly done that for me. Fiction can do it, but there is something special about nonfiction—you don’t really know the person, but you feel like you know the person behind the page. It feels like a closer embrace.

EB: Finally, do you have a favorite passage of nonfiction by a fellow non-man?

TKM: “I haven’t really slept in about a week, to meet a deadline, and I can’t think of a thing that I know better about writing than anyone else; 99% of it seems to be about building up a tolerance to failing all day long, and short of the death of loved ones or a break-up with a soulmate, it is about the deepest loneliness you can bring on yourself, until, every once in a while, there is a reminder, the shimmering connection—to language, to readers you’d otherwise never meet, to the world you have to ignore to write, that you see with new eyes having left it for a bit, and to the future.” That’s Kristin Dombek. Read her.