She was a towering blonde with goldfish swimming in strategically-placed clear plastic globes.
He was a nice young boy from the midwest who used to play bassoon in the school band. ("The fact that I played bassoon in our regionally renowned school band and wasn't mocked mercilessly is proof of my town's great midwestern socialist ethic.")
They were also, as it happened, the same person.
And they fell in love with a mysteriously inscrutable guy named Jack who lived in a beautiful apartment and definitely wasn't a doctor.
Josh Kilmer-Purcell's I Am Not Myself These Days is a familiar tale of star-crossed romance: they meet cute, they fall in love, love comes wrenchingly asunder. Josh Kilmer-Purcell's I Am Not Myself These Days is not a familiar tale of star-crossed romance: Jack is a high-price hooker who develops a nasty crack habit, Josh drinks too much and leads a cross-dressing night life as Aqua, the 7' 2" belle of the ball and life of the party.
Drag, I got the impression from this book, is for hiding in plain sight. There's a chapter about Josh's painstaking transforming to Aqua, an hours-long exercise that is equal parts art and torture. There's the body shave and the constricting corset and the makeup and and wig and the glued-on earrings and other ministrations I will leave you, gentle reader, to learn for yourself, and he concludes, "After hundreds of nights of lengthy and painful preparation, I've reached one solid conclusion. I would never, ever, ever want to be a woman."
In response to which I felt compelled to point out, in a most thought-provoking and enjoyable conversation with JK-P, that never in my life has it taken me four hours to get dressed to go to anything, including my own wedding.
But anyway, what I found particularly well done in the book, looking at it from a writer's POV, is that JK-P draws you into an utterly surreal demimonde, and you go willingly. It starts, for example, with a knife-wielding boyfriend:
"I was getting ready to kill you and then jump off the balcony," Jack says as calmly as if he were telling me what movie he was planning to see.
"With that?" I gesture toward the Wustohof chef's knife in his hand.
"Yeah."
"But I just got that for Christmas."
TALKING WITH JOSH KILMER-PURCELL
Where did this story begin? An idea? An essay? A dream (it sometimes seem somewhere between a dream and a bad trip)?
I always liked to read memoirs but it hadn’t occurred to me to write one. I was inspired by my friend James Frey. I met him through his wife - my then colleague - when they moved to NYC. This was pre-publication of A Million Little Pieces. Had I met him after the book was published, I would have been intimidated. But seeing the book typed out on manuscript paper, it [writing a memoir] suddenly seemed doable.
At first I thought my book would be a story about the entire lifespan of Aqua—but when I started thinking about what makes a good book, and wanting to do something fairly simple, I decided upon a love story. In truth, it seemed more manageable as a first work—a love story has a beginning when characters meet, a middle when they're together, and they either live happily ever after or break up.
So I figured if I was a novice, I’d take an established form and work with that.
I opened with a tease—I started with the ending—because I wanted to tell people they were going to a very weird, unusual place, but when they arrived there it would feel very normal.
Writing the story, you chose to give only small sips of your back-story—and really only hint at the details of how you went from bassoon-playing small-town boy to Aqua. I sometimes find that memoirs could use less back-story—if I rewrote mine, I’d excise some, because it feels like a pointless effort at trying to give a “Why.” Did you have more back-story in at some point or did you know from the start you wanted to keep most of that out?
I had a very tame editor, so there wasn’t that much added. The only thing that was added was the chapter on getting made up. I only added a few hints of my relatively normal childhood to throw off the speculative "oh, he must have been raised poorly" readers.
Also, for that matter, the book offers as given the state of the character and the life of New York partying drag queen. It doesn’t offer a lot of explaining about why a person might want to lead a life like that, which frankly, doesn’t sound like much fun at all. Did you worry it might be a risky proposition expecting the reader to jump right in and be sympathetic with this extreme character and situation?
I did worry about who the hell was going to read this. But I know from my day-to-day life that people are intrigued with the fact that I am this shy Midwestern boy who's had a rather bizarre "other life". It doesn't seem to compute with what they expect of me. I knew that if I could get that same upfront but conflicting personality and tone on the people, then readers could get into the book through that door. People think that, as a drag queen, I was clamoring for attention...but in reality, a costume was the only way my shy-self could go out and be a part of this exciting world. Drag, for me, kept me hidden. It was a strange way of being a wallflower.
I knew I could either write a book about how different I am from everyone else or, conversely, how surprisingly similar my life is to everyone else's. I chose the latter, because I think it's more unexpected, and more true.
When I was writing memoir—I’d wonder sometimes about people who knew me reading it. What would they think? Yet when you write fiction that in any way parallels your own life, everyone assumes it’s true anyway. Did you think of writing this as fiction?
I always new it was going to be memoir. People worrry about writing and hurting people’s feelings—I never really worried about that. If people approach their lives trying to assign blame for everything, then they approach memoir that way too. Perhaps I'm just not smart enough, but I fail to see cause and effect in my day to day life in the same way that others do. I don't see how my mother forgetting to pick me up at school one day thirty years ago has anything to do with me wearing fish in my breasts and waking up missing shoes on a subway car. And more importantly, I don't see how making that connection makes the current story any more or less relevant or interesting. I realize I may be alone in this approach to memoir.
In memoir, obviously, you're writing about real people and events, but telling what is inherently a subjective story--it's your memories, your experiences. I think that subjectivity is what makes memoir both interesting and potentially risky. It's the interesting tension in memoir. Can you make subjectivity illuminating? And what of all those people in your story who, by fortune of having been part of your life, end up in your memoir whether they will or no? Do you protect their privacy? Do you protect your own, or does writing a memoir mean you have to put all the cards on the table? Some people make composite characters, some feel comfortable blurring the line between fiction and non-, some insist on a strict, verifiable adherence to that slippery customer, "the truth." As a friend of James Frey's, you got a pretty vivid close-up view of the furor that arose over his books on these issues, I imagine.
What is a writer’s responsibility in memoir to those you write about? I’ve had people who are very disappointed they are not in the book, but I've have no one angry that they are included. The only responsibility I was aware of was making sure that I didn't reveal anything about an identifiable person that they wouldn't reveal in mixed company themselves. No one asked me to write a book about them, so I'm certainly not going to proactively embarrass anyone. If unappealing details about someone were important to the narrative, I made sure that I altered enough about the person that they were unidentifiable.
There are a couple of composite characters— the only narratively important one is Laura. There were two colleagues in my life at the time who were very similar people—but I considered it pointless, and possibly confusing to the reader to include two characters in the book who were essentially the same.
What is the purpose of memoir? I don’t really have an answer—but I think the wrong people are asking the question. I'm tired of journalists posing it and then answering it themselves. If I weren’t friends with James [Frey], it would have been very easy when my book came out to climb on the same bandwagon of mass populist criticism. It would have been politically, and economically, beneficial. But I believe that the bigger questions of literary criticism are best left to academics. Not Oprah. Or journalists. Or even other writers for that matter. I think that writers should busy themselves with creating. Not critiquing. But my response is a form of literary criticism itself, isn't it?
Personally, I believe a memoir is a self-portrait. I believe every writer, every artist, has the right to create a self-portrait however he wants. Norman Rockwell and Picasso painted very different styles of self-portraits. And one artist you would recognize walking down the street from his portraits and the other you wouldn't. But I'm convinced that both would go on Oprah and insist that their version of themselves was truthful. We all create our own stories of our selves.
What’s interesting about I Am Not Myself is that it seems to be a love story about not being yourself. Jack remains enigmatic and rather inaccessible, and he picks you out when you are operating under the persona of Aqua, not Josh.
In any love story that involves characters under 30, there is no authenticity to the people, because none of us know who we are at that point in our life. Which is why so many people have disastrous relationships in their teens and early 20s. All I know now [about Jack] is what I knew then—and it was all very mysterious. But it doesn't mean that the emotions I felt were any less meaningful then the emotions I feel today. In fact, at that age they are so raw, I believe they are more powerful. We should all hold onto them, and inspect them as we age.
And speaking of fantastical, your bizarre Thanksgiving dinner is one of the more poignant scenes of the book. All these characters on the far fringe, yearning for the most clichéd of experiences, the happy family holiday. I find in a way that the book is rather like them and like Aqua—extreme and painful in its details, beneath which there is that desire for something much more fundamentally ordinary, in the best sense. Did you know you wanted that scene?
I sat down and tried to remember as much as I could remember about that time—I had this string of memories that I put in chronological order. The Thanksgiving scene was one of the highlights, and the more I thought about it, I realized the theme of the book is “what is norma?” When the holidays roll around we all become victims of media representation of what “normal” is—and no one is immune to it. Turkeys. Tearful reunions. Cue the swelling music. We all want to fit into a version of a media proscribed normal, and that time of year especially makes us work a little harder for it. And yet it always fails for most everyone.
Talk about the process of writing. When did you end up with the opening scene, in which you wake up to find Jack standing over you with a knife? It sets the up the whole book—that you’re the kind of guy that worries about not letting the handle of the knife your parents gave you as a Christmas present rust, even though you never use the knife, that Jack is some kind of extreme escort, that waking up to find him threatening to kill you hardly seems unusual at that point . Did you have this as the opening all along, or did it come to you later?
That was precisely the point—the major them of the book is “what is normal?” Fighting fires for a fireman is normal when for the rest of us it would be high drama. For people opening the book who already knew it was going to be about a drag queen and an escort, I didn’t want them to feel like they were going to be titillated and thrown into a wacky world of no sense and logic. Sure, it was strange at times. But it was incredibly mundane too...sometimes even during it's most exotic moments. I felt by letting people peek at the ending up front, their expectations would be reset.
What was most difficult in writing the book? Was there a particular scene or section you wrestled with more than others? Scenes you cut/debated leaving in?
For me it was definitely the ending. I struggled with the idea that the ending of the book should have some importance. Our relationship didn’t end with a bang—and I didn’t suddenly doff my drag clothes or go to AA—it ended the way relationships end. Not with a bang. Not with a whimper. Just with the next day dawning.
It seems as though the setting itself—the drag bar scene, this New York demimonde with its slightly otherworldly characters who mostly seem to come out only at night—is a character in the book. It’s not at all like, say, Woody Allen’s New York.
I’m unabashedly in love with New York and I always have been since I was a kid. Nowadays I live in Woody Allen’s New York, and the Warhol-esque New York in the book is completely far away to me.
Did you always have the humor? I like this line, about caring for the well-being of your goldfish: “Sure, they die on a regular schedule. Who doesn’t?”
Yeah, I actually thought the book was going to be funnier. I didn’t have the tone set from the very beginning. It begins much funnier than it ends. But as I got going, I ran out of funny – which fortuitously parallels with the story. The tone gets darker and my life got darker.
When I first moved to New York I was so excited and everything was fun and funny and an adventure. But then it got sadder. Relatively quickly.
When did the decision happen to put in the end materials—the quiz, the music, the “Finding Jack” part?
That’s something Harper Perennial does with all their books. At first I was ambivalent about it. But now I find that readers have really enjoyed the additional material. I was most happy about the "Finding Jack" essay—I wrote it while I was editing the book, and it had a profound affect on me, that phone call. I had no idea if he was dead or alive or somewhere in between. I was doing the final edit and I said “I’ve got to find out.”
But the week before the book came out—it was on the shelves—Jack called me. He hadn’t read the book yet—he was very upset about it. I tried to explain that it’s not a good guy/bad buy scenario. I asked him to read the book, and he did, and about two weeks after it came out he called me and felt pretty good about it. He said it is “chivalrously discreet.” He was always good with a phrase.
You’re in advertising—has the whole flogging the book marketing experience been what you expected, or have their been surprises? What was good/bad/weird on book tour?
It’s hard. It’s really hard. I can’t imagine that if you didn’t have a marketing bent that you could have any level of success, because it is really very much up to the author. And I have a fantastic launch—I give endless credit to the publisher. I hear so many author’s stories and realize how fortunate I am. Many other authors are insanely jealous that I had something as simple as a book party. But still...much of the continuing marketing duty falls onto me.
I probably spend three or four hours a day pushing the book. I want the book to sell and I want people to read it. And I want to write the next one, which is entirely contingent on how this one continues doing.
I read recently that you and several other writers have started a “memoirists collective.”
It started as a conversation with my agent. I asked what I could do to publicize the book. She said "start a MySpace account." I linked up with another author (with the same agent) and we had such a good time chatting and discussing the business. Then we linked up with other authors and we all were learning so much from each other that we said let’s do something old-fashioned and start a collective. We’ve tried to figure out how it could be a marketing tool as well as something fun to us. We had so many writers connecting to us so that we tried to concept ideas of how to foster their writing careers.
The "Win a Shot at Getting Your Memoir Published" contest we recently concluded was just a silly idea we had. Then one of the collective members said "why don’t’ we send out a press release." It got picked up by several major news outfits, and you would have thought we were changing the face of publishing with it. It's been a great deal of fun, and we found some incredibly talented writers from out of the internet ether. The winning entrant will have their proposal read by editors at three major publishing houses – Holt, Hyperion, and HarperCollins.
What questions/concepts/conundrums interest you? What are you working on next?
[My next book is] fiction. It’s all about media shaping who we are. A story of a young boy growing up wanting to be a television celebrity, then getting close and finding out the reality is not what he expected. It's a theme I’ve been exploring all my life—how media shapes our vision of ourselves.
A writer you’d like to meet?
Living or dead? I’d like to meet Armistead Maupin.
What are you reading now?
I’m reading The Queen of the Oddballs which I really love.
You note that you are friends with James Frey. Your book came out just as what I called on the blog the James Frey Fray exploded. Did you feel that your book caught some of the fall-out from the fray? I’ve noted that the fray was a happy feeding frenzy for those who don’t like memoir anyway.
Thankfully, recently, the Frey questions have died down. And memoirs continue to sell. I hope the memoir-haters who predicted the demise of the genre are waking up to the same dull judgmental lives they had before this whole molehill mountain.
You can find JK-P online at:
The Memoirists Collective (and by the way, their recent special guest is the author of My Pet Virus, noted here in the last new nonfiction roundup)
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