Queering Literary Structure

This post is about a discussion between queer authors Andrea Lawlor and Jordy Rosenberg about queering literary structures.

In this piece Andrea Lawlor, author of the book Paul Takes the Form of a Mortal Girl which I am currently reading for my project, talks to their longtime friend Jordy Rosenberg who wrote Confessions of the Fox, which I added to my TBR list as soon as I read this discussion. They talk about how they met, the formation of their queer identities, and how these books came to be.

I loved reading a discussion between two authors who are both writing very queer and very trans fiction and who have a great deal of history with each other. The part of this talk that stood out to me the most was the discussion of alternate literary structures. Lawlor explains that they had trouble creating Paul Takes the Form of a Mortal Girl because the traditional literary structures were not fitting in with their ideas for the story. Lawlor says that they realized that “my structure was going to have to be a little queer as well” which is so fascinating to me. I often think about characters and stories that are queer, and physical spaces that are queer, but I have never considered the possibilities of a queer structure in a novel. So much of queer life is lived on the margins or outside of mainstream society, so it only makes sense that this could be translated into the structure of a queer novel. When traditional spaces don’t work for us, we create new ones and I love that Lawlor is applying this same thinking to literature. So far, I have been hugely enjoying Paul Takes the Form of a Mortal Girl and keeping in mind the idea of it having a queer structure has really added to my reading of it.  

To pre-order Paul Takes the Form of a Mortal Girl click here.
To buy Confessions of the Fox click here.