"What's the Worst Thing Your Mother Has Ever Said To You?"
A Conversation With Jordy Rosenberg, The Other Trans Man Who Published A Novel About A Difficult Woman Named Barbara This Year
Jordy Rosenberg lives in Massachussetts.
DANNY: Hello, Jordy. We are both transsexual men who published novels about difficult older women named Barbara whose sons do not like them this year. To the best of my knowledge this was done without prior coordination on either of our parts.
Your book is called Night Night Fawn and came out in March. My book is called Meeting New People and came out in June. Your Barbara is a Rosenberg; mine is a Foerster. Give us a line or two from your book that you think is representative of your Barbara, won’t you?
JORDY: “Some people, aka “liberals” (which is not a word we ever used until my so-called daughter started uttering it like a slur, and I realized Stephen was one and I was actually just a bigot, but according to students at Wesleyan University both were equally bad!), think relationships in the world can be the embodiment of abstract ideals. Liberals think that living in accordance with these abstract ideals makes them good people, and Marxists think that’s bullshit, and actually this is one thing I really agree with Marxists about.”
DANNY: Mine (from a moderate crisis Barbara undergoes after seeing a woman ten years her senior wearing cap sleeves) is: “The present common sense is something like this: Never wear makeup or dress well when you’re young and attractive, because it’s a pernicious drain of your time and resources, designed to distract you from pursuing your fullest potential. This is supposed to hold until you reach menopause, at which point it becomes a virtue to wear the loudest possible clothes and the most outrageous colors of lipstick in order to prove that you’re fun and don’t care what anybody else thinks. Associating dignity, reserve, or decorum with increasing age is restrictive and demeaning. Noticing what anybody else wears or how they comport themselves in public, unless it’s complimentary, is the equivalent of being a Peeping Tom. Not only are you supposed to only say nice things, you’re only supposed to think them, too.”
Do you think it would enhance our book sales if one of us were to accuse the other of plagiarism? If so, would you like to accuse me, or would you rather I accuse you?
JORDY: It’s worse than that! Both of our Barbaras are also going through an epic friend breakup. And the ex-friends’ names sound suspiciously similar: Susan in yours, Sugar in mine. I think we can skip the plagiarism accusations and go straight to the hypothesis that all trans men are the same man. Either that or one of us hypnotized the other and made some subliminal suggestions. Do you have a more capacious account of how on earth this could have happened?
DANNY: I take it I can safely assume that we both wrote these books at our mothers but didn’t want to use our mothers’ real first names lest we be accused of autofiction or something, so we went with something very nearby on the Social Security Administration list of commonest baby names the years our mothers were born. Nancy and Barbara are only two names apart on the 1955 list.
We’re roughly contemporaries, yes? Late thirties, early forties? So Barb(a)ras loom large in our mothers’ generation; Streisand, Walters, Bush, Stanwyck if you want to push it. The powerful televisual mother who must be killed before we can run free with the wolves, or something.
And my mother had a best friend named Susan, whom she often affectionately called Suzy Q, although I don’t think they ever fell out. Come to think of it, I don’t think I ever knew my mother to fall out with anyone. I’m sure she must have. She certainly fell out with me! But it suddenly strikes me that my mother might be an easier person to get along with than I myself am, which isn’t at all a pleasing thought to have.
What are your earliest memories of/associations with the following:
Male transsexuality?
JORDY: I guess it’s me? Identifying very emphatically as “a wolf” in a 3rd grade class assignment.
DANNY: The short-lived Dawson’s Creek summer replacement Young Americans, around 1999/2000. Then I guess things were pretty quiet until Chaz Bono.
Me?
JORDY: Your viral rant about possums from 2016. I had two reactions: total delight but also anxiety. I shaven’t be having these young whippersnappers being this funny and smart.
DANNY: If it helps, having a phrase like “viral rant about possums” associated with my work fills me with dread and anxiety that I’ve never really stylistically exited the long 2014, that I’m hopelessly tied to all the worst and most dated millennial tics, and that I’ll never achieve blogspeak escape velocity, so let that comfort you retroactively.
