Grace Lavery is a writer, editor, and academic living in Brooklyn, NY. As an Associate Professor of English, Critical Theory, and Gender & Women’s Studies at the University of California, Berkeley, her research explores the history and theory of aesthetics and interpretation, with particular interests in psychoanalysis, literary realism, and queer and trans cultures. She is the author of Quaint, Exquisite: Victorian Aesthetics and the Idea of Japan, which published by Princeton University Press in 2019, and her speculative memoir, Please Miss: A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Penis, which was published by Seal Press in 2022. Grace has a husband named Daniel and a Japanese Chin named Bon-Bon. She enjoys cooking and walking.

EB: How did you begin writing nonfiction? Was your way in through academia?

GL: I was a writer of creative and fictional pieces first. In college, when I was supposed to do academic work, I spent a lot of time working with group of artists who did a lot of performance work, installations, various kinds of experimental theatre. I was always interested in questions of memoir and self-disclosure. At one point when I was twenty, I put on a weird and intimate memoir show. That was my first experience with memoir specifically. Though the work was not really nonfiction. Well, whatever it was, it wasn’t fiction.

But then I kind of quickly realized, or came to believe anyway, that after graduating college I was not going to be able to get a job that way, so I went back into academia after a few years of trying not to, and I began writing scholarly essays. That’s where I trained, and I still publish academic essays. I just this week finished an academic book manuscript. I have another one coming out with Princeton next year. So that’s my day job, being an academic. But I really value that work––one of the strange things about academia is that so few people read one’s work, and even fewer are really able to make use of it in the most direct ways. But I really value that I get to build these relationships with other scholars over a period of decades. I’ve seen colleagues’ work develop, and there is an odd intimacy. We have the same very weird niche interests, but otherwise very little in common. So I really value academic writing.

And at the same time, when I began to get sober and I began to transition back in 2016, I realized that I needed new ways of writing myself into the world that would not be possible within an academic framework. So I tried to activate some of my old experimental performance work, but with an eye towards memoir. I started writing long Facebook and Instagram posts, and my friends suggested I see if I could make a manuscript out of them, and then I started a newsletter. And eventually I had a book’s worth of nonfiction material, though I should say that parts of Please Miss is really fiction.

There are a couple of stories in there that are fragments of surely imaginative or fanciful pieces. I hope it’s fairly obvious which ones those are.

EB: I mean, it felt pretty obvious to me!

GL: I was trying to figure out how to build a new voice for myself. Which, you know, sounds terribly pretentious. But so much of my transition had to do with finding myself suddenly and somewhat unexpectedly in a different writerly tradition than the one I’ve been in. I was in a different genealogy. And so that was that was the work that I needed to do: inscribing myself in a new tradition, to try to figure out how to speak within a new language.

EB: I love that. Like you had to transition into a new way of sharing information. Though you’ve continued to write for academia as well. I wanted to know a bit about how you manage writing in those two different styles. Your first book––Quaint, Exquisite: Victorian Aesthetics and the Idea of Japan––was published in 2019 by Princeton University Press. What was the process of writing that book like compared to Please Miss? Is your approach the same or different when something is going to be more academic writing vs. more personal writing?

GL: All of my books have been so different from each other! Honestly, I don’t like that about my work. I wish my work had a degree more consistency than it does. In some ways, though, it seems like a common thing for queer writers to not find a genre that works for us. Though in everything I do I try to think about Oscar Wilde, the greatest writer who never wrote a great book. He’s unquestionably the most important writer of the late 19th century, but he never really found the genre that works for him. I mean, whatever genre The Importance of Being Earnest is kind of works, but there’s only really one play in that genre, which is The Importance of Being Earnest.

EB: [laughing]

GL: I think that diversity of genre came from an in ability to fit into a genre, so he made a new genre of himself. The genre of Being Oscar Wilde. That’s something I see in myself and other queer writers.

For Please Miss, the process was that a third of it was written before it was actually written. The rest of the process was ordering these fragments. The book tells a variety of different stories, and each chapter was trying to work through a few different ideas.

As for my scholarly work, the manuscript I just finished is about sitcoms, and it was the first thing I’ve written absolutely not in chronological order. My thinking was that the sitcom has always been the same so why not talk about it all at once. The book is very short and it was written very quickly, 30,000 words in two weeks, which I know sounds fucking insane.

EB: [gasp]

GL: Whereas my other academic book was about 105,000 words and took me ten years to write.

EB: Wow, okay.

GL: When I’m doing an academic project, I find that to get it from inception to publication takes about ten years, and the first part of that is doing the research which for me, by virtue of my position as an academic, at this point, mostly means teaching. The way that I conduct research is to teach a bit of it and then gradually develop an argument about it, and it can even take several years before I really know what I think about something. It’s a great luxury of academic writers that we don’t really have to rush. Another great luxury is that we don’t really ever have to have a hot take. We can always say something that’s boring and true. But these are all very different processes.

EB: In my MFA program, I had a professor who said, “You only know how to write the book that you just finished writing.”

GL: My god that’s true.

EB: What you’re saying about academic writing is so interesting to me because my day job is working in communications at Wellesley College, and a lot of what I do is try to help faculty place op-eds and essays written for a general audience at more mainstream publications. Do you have advice for any academics hoping to make the jump from academic writing to more personal or commercial nonfiction, nonfiction for a general audience?

GL: That’s a good question, and I think there is a lot of value of academics doing work in for the public. When I was coming out of grad school, a number of people I was close with started a blog called Dear Television.

Everyone who was writing for it were people who were coming out of PhD programs. Some of them were getting academic jobs, some of them were not getting academic jobs, but just trying to figure out how to do cultural criticism in public during a time when the academic job market was collapsing. I learned so much from writing for them, and I take online vernacular cultural criticism profoundly seriously. I can’t really understand why people treat online criticisms and discussions so contentiously in the academy as people often do. I really do understand that people often say objectionable and oversimplified things online, but you know, people say objectionable and oversimplify things in the faculty lounge, and our students say objectionable and oversimplifying things in class and we try not to punish them for it or castigate them for it. We try to teach them, and I think one thing that has been really important to me is to think that as  a public educator, working for a public university, my job is to educate, and so if I disagree with someone online, I try not to get mad at them. I try not to punish them or make fun of them. I try to teach them. And, sure, I’m not a saint and I’ve violated that rule on more than one occasion. But that’s the general principle I’ve had in my classroom, and I try to take the idea very seriously that your role as a teacher is to teach and not to condescend. And I try to extend that a little further when I write for a public audience.

EB: As a teacher, I really appreciate that approach.

GL: I think sometimes when academics try to pivot to writing for a public audience they have a specific voice in mind, and think they have to write in that cheerful mommy blog style or like Vox lifestyle journalism. But it’s about more than changing your tone––you need to think about who can you speak to, and who do you want to speak to, and who is speaking already? It’s not just about taking academic prose and making it vaguer and blander, but you can really learn into the weirdness of the work and explore the complexities while working in relation to people who can see things that we can’t see because we’re inside a university.

Sometimes there is this tendency to think if you’re not an academic, you’re probably stupid and, therefore, you need to be taught to because you’re a simpleton. But that’s not the case. There are a lot of very, very, very smart people outside of the academy. They just have no interest in reading a vague take by a well-heeled Wellesley or Berkeley professor.

EB: You are so incredible at taking in all these different possible perspectives, and I actually want to ask you about one specific one in Please Miss. In chapter five, you talk about how you spoke with your mother about your memoir while you were writing it, “Not because I can ask her to sign off on what I write, but because I need to record her testimony, as a counterpoint to mine.” Can you speak a little bit about how to deal with the challenges of writing about other people in your life––who you are close to, or who you have strained relationships with, or who have different perspectives on events?

GL: My mother doesn’t remember many things the same way I do, or she will sometimes default to simply refusing to believe things as I remember them or refusing to accept them. As I’ve grown older, I’ve come to have a great deal of compassion for her position. I think being my mother must be pretty difficult in some ways.

It’s hard being a mother and, in some ways, my mother is extremely well-equipped for it and, in some ways, she was extremely poorly-equipped for it. Which I’m sure is true of everyone.

So I approached this problem in Please Miss by speaking to my mother on the phone and transcribing everything she said. I put it in a different font and introduced what I was doing, and I also think my mother speaks in a voice that is clearly very different from mine.

But it’s an ethical question first, and then it’s an aesthetic one. The ethical question being: how do I responsibly address the fact that I have access to a readership that my mother doesn’t have? And we have disagreements about what happened. So that was my attempt to address that. And then that’s the aesthetic question of having made a decision about how to do it, how can I do it in such a way that it isn’t solely moralistic and kind of boring to read? Using Comic Sans was part of the extended citation of that because my mother actually does write emails in Comic Sans and really likes Comic Sans, so it’s authentically her.

EB: So while we are talking about some of the more challenging parts of writing nonfiction, in chapter four, you write about your fears of writing about transition/transness, and how long it took for you to coming around to writing about your experiences. Do you have any advice for writers who are also afraid to write about the thing they want to write about?

GL: It’s complicated, genuinely terrifying, and I am compulsively drawn to it anyway.  Freud would call it a death drive. There’s a desire to be vulnerable and exposed in that way. And I don’t know how to stop at this point. Plus I’ve been doing it for so long, all of my secrets are out there––I don’t know what I would be scared of at this point. Anyone who has any interest in knowing knows at this point how my husband and I have sex, how I used to drink and do drugs, and all that.

EB: Ha, true. I guess it must get less scary.

GL: One of the things I’ve learned through recovery is so much addiction has to do with secrecy­­––if anyone really knew your secrets, you’d be unlovable and an outcast. But through sharing your deepest, darkest thoughts, you can find ways to build trust with people who then say, Oh, I’ve had that experience too, I’ve done that too. Part of the work I can do with this book is identify with other people who might feel utterly isolated.

EB: Feel free to speak about writing Please Miss in particular or writing nonfiction in general – but what do you think is the most challenging part of writing nonfiction? And what do you think is the most rewarding?

GL: The hardest part when writing academic nonfiction is feeling an extraordinary responsibility to be correct. Feeling like I need to really have done my work, but I always worry there is going to be a source for I didn’t find or a scholar I didn’t consult or some killer fact that might somehow disprove some element of my argument. Of course, it’s that fear that leads people to be as diligent as they can in their research and in their composition. But that fear never goes away, especially thinking about my work being read by people I really admire and whose opinion I value. That never stops being scary.

The most rewarding part I think is making that connection with readers, though  in order for a connection to be real it has to happen only in the reader’s mind. Like when someone comes up to you after a reading and gushes about how they so related to your work and went through the same thing, and you have to say, “I’m really glad, but I just met you.”

EB: I’ve definitely been that reader before.

GL: I also love it when I make an argument I can really stand by or write a phrase that I am proud of. That can bring me pleasure for years. I feel pride just at the level of craftsmanship.

EB: Some parts of Please Miss almost toe the line of fiction––such as chapter three, which you write in the form of a play––but the book is called a memoir. How do you see the line between fiction and nonfiction?

GL: Fiction is such an interesting word, because we think of it meaning something is “not true” but it’s possible to say true things in fiction that we can’t say in nonfiction. I wrote a novel after Please Miss, and the narrator is me and has my experiences. I’d say that book is 60/40 novel/memoir, while Please Miss is 40/60 novel/memoir.

Also, the world sort of left the genre of realism a few years ago.   Donald Trump became president and then we had a global plague. The thing we thought of as “realism” didn’t depict the real world anymore––we needed science fiction to explain what was happening. Realism broke, in a way, which now makes realism all the more interesting to me.

EB: Were there any particular writers or books that you found influential or inspiring while writing Please Miss? Fiction or nonfiction?

GL: My two biggest literary forebearers are Franz Kafka and Charles Dickens. Something I think both writers do so well is think about literature as a legally imminent object and all the questions about legal personhood.

As for contemporary writers: Melissa Febos, Torrey Peters, Carmen Maria Machado. Also a lot of performers too, like Maria Bamford. I love how she does imitation and pastiche. I want to do on the page what she does with her voice.

EB: Writing can often be a super solitary task. Who or what do you turn to for support while writing? Who makes up your writing and artistic community?

GL: My husband Danny and my girlfriend Lily are both writers. I think we have a certain degree of experience in common although we write in very different ways, and I feel lucky that I have a close inner circle in that respect. But I also have so many friends and colleagues, I think in part that comes from being part of an academic community for so long. One good thing about academia, among its many problems, is that we are good at reading each other, and I am grateful for that.

EB: Finally, what is a favorite passage (or two) of nonfiction?

GL: I love Terry Castle’s description of Susan Sontag buying her ice cream in “Desperately Seeking Susan”:

We would go on little culture jaunts. Once she took me to the Strand bookstore (the clerk said, ‘Hi, Susan’ in enviably blasé tones); another time she invited me to a film festival she was curating at the Japan Society. But there were also little danger signals, ominous hints that she was tiring of me. One day in the Village, after having insisted on buying me a double-decker ice-cream cone, she suddenly vanished, even as I, tongue moronically extruded, was still licking away. I turned around in bewilderment and saw her black-clad form piling, without farewell, into a yellow cab.