I find little to be hopeful about, and yet, I tire of writing stories that suggest everything is just as bad as I think it is. Billy-Ray Belcourt tells me, “The creative drive, the artistic impulse, is above all a thunderous yes to life.”(1) It’s hard to believe. I drift closer to Clarice Lispector’s narrator in The Hour of the Star, whom I imagine chewing his fingernails off in an empty room. He tells me, “Let those who read me get punched in the stomach to see if it’s good.”(2) It’s satisfying, in a world that beats up queers in back alleys, to punch a reader in the stomach. Violence begets violence, and I am not immune to it.
I have written a novel, and it ends without hope. I finished the first draft a year ago, and in every iteration it’s been through, the ending remains the same, a deep loneliness and cliff’s edge uncertainty defining the last scenes. I wanted my reader to feel like the ending is hard on everyone. I wanted to punch my reader in the stomach. I’m tempted to say that this is what the story demands. This ending came to me, a carving of pain, and I can’t change it just because I want to.
Well, says who? Am I not in charge here? A novel isn’t a beast to tame, it doesn’t claw at my door. I create it, and the arc of it is in my hands. So if the tragedy is not inevitable, not an immutable feature of the story, I get to decide what happens. To make that decision, I need to know what questions I want my reader to wrestle, what emotion I hope to paint behind their eyelids. I made of my ending a void. Is that the best I can do?
Clarice Lispector again: “What can you do with the truth that everyone’s a little sad and a little alone?”(3)
Amitava Kumar: “What is the truth but the story we tell about it?”(4)
I write fiction to create truth. Hold a question in your heart and it scalds you. Thread the question through a needle and embroider words on paper, and it transforms. Questions like what do we owe each other? and what does love look like, really? are ones that I can consider in fiction in a way I can’t elsewhere, because fiction is an experiment. I control some variables—plot, character, language—but the final result will be an explosion of the questions I choose to ask. And when the smoke clears, there is a truth.
My novel is about the limits of love, and the result of my experiment was that those limits are hard and unkind. You won’t end up with everyone you want in your arms. And it was so satisfying, a confirmation that the cruelties I see all around me are real and that the pain I feel seeing them is just as sharp as I know it is. But if I say that I create truth with this book, then I have to reckon with that tremendous responsibility. Do I choose to put into the world a truth that asserts hopelessness, despair, and loneliness?
I don’t think I should write happy endings for their own sake, but I do think cruelty for its own sake is worse. I used to be an optimist battling against pessimism, and now I’m a pessimist battling against pessimism. I sink my heels into the sand and the tide rises: pain is incalculable in this world.
The 2022 National Survey on LGBTQ Youth Mental Health tells me that half of trans youth have considered suicide. A girl I almost dated tells me, “I like going places where people died and I like going places where people think about dying.” I write about gender and I look all around me. Is the graveyard real or created by endless narrative loops, the same story repeated and transmuted until it manifests in granite headstones? If I shut my eyes, I can imagine another world, the world I dream about, the world I don’t really hope for anymore. Give me an instruction manual and I will build that world. Show me what to nail together. Please, tell me there’s a way.
Enough abstraction. If someone reads my novel, they are giving me their time and attention, and I am using that time and attention to make them feel empty. Hank Green tells me, “I feel as if my life is about constructing the right sort of armor, the right sort of strength, that lets the light through.”(5) Why can’t I change that ending to let the light through?
I seldom hope, but I am often joyful. Finding a future on this dying planet is impossible, but right now, I live. Hope asks me to ignore certain realities, but joy lets me stand in the moment and hold contradictions. Contradictions like: the world is cruel and people are cruel in it, and: I encounter care in every corner I take the time to dust. Contradictions like: I think we are all doomed, and: I am in love with almost everyone I meet. I am in love with everything that prolongs queer life. I want my art to prolong queer life. My novel ends without hope. Would it kill me to infuse it with a little joy?
Sasha Fletcher tells me, “What do I do about being in love, he asks, and Sam says, only cowards do something about being in love, buddy. Everyone else, they’re just in love.”(6)
Sick of death, I will write life. I will not write hope, but I will write joy, because it is as close as I can get. Let the world know that I am in love with it, and let it respond how it will. Seas still rise, cops still kill, and I am at heart a nihilist. If nothing matters, then nothing matters, and I am free to dance at midnight with a room full of queers. Death hangs over us, and we live anyway. It’s all we can do, really.
(1) Billy-Ray Belcourt, A History of my Brief Body, 2020.
(2) Clarice Lispector, The Hour of the Star, trans. Benjamin Moser, 2011.
(3) Ibid.
(4) Amitava Kumar, A Time Outside This Time, 2021.(5) Dear Hank and John, 2020.
(6) Sasha Fletcher, Be Here to Love me at the End of the World, 2022.
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