About a year ago, after Wild Geese was picked up by a UK publisher but before it was signed in the US, I told my therapist I had set a realistic target for the novel’s earnings. Recently, she recounted the story and observed that I have now exceeded the target. The sum of money in question is useful but not life-changing, but, to the extent that my debut novel was going to change my life, it was always going to be in non-economic ways.
I started transitioning at 28, took up writing fiction at 29, got an agent at 30, signed a publishing deal at 31, and published Wild Geese at 32. Now, I am a 33-year-old semi-professional author with a mild superiority complex. My novel wasn’t a bestseller, nor has it been shortlisted for any prestigious awards. I am not a success by most conventional metrics, but at this point I don’t think I care. The goal was to survive, and survive I did.
Aspects of Wild Geese have been described as ‘self-indulgent’ in reviews which were otherwise favourable. This strikes me as quite generous, because it is an extraordinarily selfish novel. It is diffident and uncompromising and wears its stupid idiosyncrasies like a giant foam finger. It does not aspire to relatability; its primary message is that the author is much cleverer than you. It is less a conversation-starter than a novel determinedly telling the reader to shut the fuck up.
I love it so much. I love that I came from nowhere – a socially awkward trans woman who looks like a cross between Andrea Dworkin and Tina Belcher and has no literary experience and no publishing connections and frankly didn’t read much until recently – to publish something like that internationally.
When you publish a novel, it ceases to be yours for a while – but, if you’re lucky, and it’s not too successful, you will eventually get it back, somewhat scuffed and somewhat polished by the attention of other people. A lot of kind things have been said to me about this selfish novel, and maybe I needed that more than I let on. I needed to be told not to run away from this like I had run away from most other things. Most authors write because they love reading; other tragic people do it because they think there’s money and prestige in it. I did it because writing is the only way I have ever been listened to.
Perhaps writing a selfish novel was the way out of a life in which I had been a bystander, invisible, unseen and unheard, mattering to no one, least of all myself. A touch of Phoebe-like self-absorption to write the thing, and a bit of Grace-like impulsivity to rush it into the hands of other people, when I wasn’t ready, because I would never have been ready.
It is a testament to Wild Geese that I have no interest in doing anything like it again. I am finished with writing as self-actualisation and ready for writing as a means of kicking doors down. Having got my debut novel out of the way, I’ve got myself out of the way too – I have escaped what looked for quite a while like an eternal adolescence. Human beings are social creatures, but we also act upon our environment – indeed, it is our ability to manipulate the reality in which we live that separates us from the rest of the natural world, for better and worse. The world, our world, is something we make, and could just as easily make differently.
Act now, and think later: there is, perhaps, a literary project in that. In a moment with a surfeit of words and a distinct lack of action, it might be the only literary project worth a damn. I am frightened by the passivity of contemporary fiction, because I see in it the passivity of my own life – the smug despair, the learned helplessness, the quiet self-destruction which pretends to be lofty and intellectual, more interested in being correct than being. But mostly, I am bored.
I am bored of pretending that words matter. These are morally, intellectually and verbally degraded times. I feel a nauseous sense of honour at being part of the generation who saw Godwin’s law – the idea that comparing things to the Nazis is a cheap way to shut down debate online – rise and fall, as, from Canadian liberals to Israeli prime ministers, there seems now to be an ongoing effort to rehabilitate the Third Reich. There is no cogent response available to the claim that You Are Hitler And You Are Worse Than Hitler Because Hitler Wasn’t That Bad. What do you say to that? Where do you even begin?
I am bored of trans people being compared to the Taliban by people with a sneaking regard for the Taliban. I am bored of wondering when we’ll get around to the definitions of adult, human and female.
I am bored of novels in which the discursive world of social media overwhelms the human-level human condition: if people in general are busily narrating our lives, broadcasting our psychic collapse under the weight of late-ish capitalism and incipient fascism, endlessly bearing witness, teacher’s pets at the end of the world – what use is it for authors to do the same? Is literature just posting with somewhat better production values?
I spend a lot of time thinking about third-order suffering, a concept developed by a Baptist pastor, which influenced Wild Geese a bit. My definition of it is the dissonance between the individualistic ethos of the modern world and the self-evidently unjust, arbitrary, and even monstrous outcomes it produces, for which no one in particular is held responsible. Power is diffuse but we are not. Negative experiences beget self-blame which congeals into hopelessness, or, in many cases, into conspiracist revenge fantasies. I don’t have a good response to that dissonance. We used to use God for it.
I also think about the unmediated social interaction: the encounter unencumbered by capitalist hierarchy or familial ties or technology or romance (all of which also beget hierarchies, of course). Friendship, maybe. Acquaintance, more accurately. Given the subtle hierarchies of race, class and gender, such an encounter might not truly exist.
What does it mean to meet an individual in their real-world wholeness and not have a script, a sense of who is in charge, who is superior? How often do people engage with strangers who are not performing a service for them? I want to write about how people acquaint themselves with the unfamiliar as equals. As the world gets smaller over the twenty-first century – literally, given the likely decline in habitable land – we will need to learn to respect those encounters. Our ability to value other people when there is nothing in it for us is the only thing that can save us.
The best I can do as a writer is to overcome my ego, my pretensions and my morality: to imagine people who aren’t me, in a world slightly different from mine, acting upon that world in a way I would not, and aspiring to better than I can hope for. To make them exist more loudly and insistently than I ever have. To slough off the weight of an incurable future; to make humanity out of post-humanity. That’s what I will be trying to do in 2024. x
Soula Emmanuel 