Real Change
An Interview with Still Life Author Katherine Packert Burke
Image: Dike Blair.
I am not a fan of musicals. But Katherine Packert Burke expertly weaves the work of Sondheim alongside essayistic explorations of life, wonder, grief, and love in her tender debut novel Still Life. It’s a fascinating book about three women, Boston, Texas, transition, and being a writer. Still Life is an incredibly moving, vital little book about trying to turn the body from a house into a home. Sweet, funny, and wry in all the right ways. Katherine is someone who's going to be writing great books for a long time to come. It’s also one of my go-to recommendations of the year.
Since I didn’t have time to do a proper review, (though you should read Emily Zhou’s excellent piece in Xtra), I asked Katherine if she’d be open to doing an email interview and she graciously agreed. We spoke about book tours, autofiction, the effect of crushes on writing, and the late Gary Indiana’s take on respectability politics.
First of all, how did you come to writing? I know you've written both fiction and criticism before the book.
There are two answers to this question: one embarrassing and one standard. The standard one is that I always wanted to write, from the time I was a kid. I started a portal-fantasy novel around the time I was 11 with a self-insert character who had my name (I think it got hung up somewhere around the conclusion of the first act). The embarrassing answer is that I really started writing because of Infinite Jest. Like Edith in my novel, I was a math major and really thought, for a while, that I would go get a Ph.D. in mathematics. It was while I was studying abroad--doing no math whatsoever--that I read IJ and I was so shaken by it, so deeply unready for it to end after a thousand pages, that I knew I needed to try to recreate that feeling for others.
Maybe also I am curious about this sci-fi epic that Edith is writing in Still Life. Was that based on a real event?
So, although Still Life is the first book I've published, it's something like the sixth novel I've written. One of those--my MFA thesis--was about a fictional queer arts collective in Soviet Leningrad, bookended by this contemporary narrative about a depressive guy whose ex was obsessed with said collective. Edith's fake novel was an attempt to synthesize, like, that and Philip K. Dick--something that was weird and ambitious and jagged, that I would have written when I was 25. I wanted to set it up in contrast to what she's writing in the novel's present (and what I did in writing it): taking a step away from the fantastic and forcing oneself to figure out how to write about one's own life very directly.
I heard you speak a bit about your move to Minnesota on Gender Reveal but I'd be curious to hear more about that. You seem like a bit of a nomad.
I know a lot of people who have only lived in three places: where they grew up, where they went to college, and where they live now. I notice, sometimes, that people who haven't moved around a lot attribute to geography certain ways their life fails to meet their expectations. For those of us who've had, as you put it, a little more nomadic existence, it's harder to ignore that you carry your trouble with you wherever you go. It's hard to be a new face in town, and to make deep connections and community. When I moved to Austin in 2021, I was coming from Alabama--a state I simply did not have a good time in--and I hoped that Austin would be the last stop for me. Austin was the place that I had the best community of my adult life. But unfortunately, state politics have caused that community to fracture, and so now I'm trying to find that kind of life, again, in a new place.
In that vein of travel, how was your book tour?
Really lovely! It's become a truism that tours don't sell books and that's probably true, but I still recommend doing one to anyone who can. (Tucker Leighty-Phillips has a very instructive site about putting one together.) It's been a great way to see friends but moreover, a great way to meet strangers who have thoughtful questions about the book, or are just excited to hear about it. All of my conversation partners have been amazing and asked very different kinds of questions, which have helped me to see the book in more detail. And of course, I love getting to meet so many wonderful booksellers, who will always feel like my people. Releasing a book is weird and lonely in many ways, and tour is perhaps the best remedy against that.
Where do you sit and write?
Nearly always in my bed, or the bed wherever I'm staying. When I lived in New York City, now almost 10 years ago, I didn't have a desk or a bedframe, and I got used to writing like this. Thankfully, now I have a bedframe.
Do you often write in spurts or just all in one go?
When I'm drafting, I will write 500 words a day every weekday. (I used to do this weekends too, until I met my partner, who was a moderating influence.) I know that this rate of work doesn't work for everyone, but it's essential for me to remain immersed in the flow of the novel so that I can hang onto the various threads and problems. I mention this in the acknowledgments but, in particular, I recommend writing at a mad pace to distract you from having an insane crush; a week or so after I met my partner I wrote something like the final 10,000 words of Still Life.
What are you reading right now?
I'm reading Gary Indiana's novel Three Month Fever, which is part of his trilogy of crime novels. It's extremely good. It's a book that's very conscious of its aporias, that does not try (at least by the halfway mark) to resolve the uncertainties and contradictions. And, like most of the gay writing I love, it isn't remotely afraid to portray its characters in a negative light. As I work on my next book, I've been thinking a lot about Indiana and Dennis Cooper; the ways they violated the norms for gay writing in the late 80s. I don't think trans writing is quite so beholden to those expectations right now (in part because of excellent, transgressive work by writers like Gretchen Felker-Martin and Davey Davis), but I do worry about it becoming fenced in, eventually, by a desire for "respectability."
What are your feelings about autofiction? I know you describe the book this way-- but is there a percentage of it that feels one-to-one? Or is that a messy question? I remember once asking another writer about that and getting dodged, which is also a fair response.
I think far less of the book is one-to-one than a reader might suspect--maybe something like 10%? Edith's life follows the trajectory of mine, more or less, but the details are different. Although, as I said, this is far from the first novel I've written, I think there's an expectation that a debut novel will align more closely to an author's life than later work. The book is teasing the reader with that, a little bit. Daring them to buy it all as fact even though some of it is clearly implausible or false. Maybe that's just for my own satisfaction, though; there's nothing wrong with taking it all at face value, except that I'm not as annoying as Edith is.
"But I'm not as annoying as Edith is." I think a lot of autofiction writers seem to say this about their protagonists. Why do you think that is? I didn't particularly find Edith that annoying. She's not Hannah Horvath by any means.
Maybe I just find her slightly annoying because she's a calcification of a particular point in my life. The events that precipitated the book happened in February 2022 but by the time I began writing, in late July 2022, my life was already significantly different. The (very bad, toxic) friendship that had brought me to Austin had nearly fallen apart, and I was forcing myself to get out and make friends and felt like I was a real person for the first time since, I don't know, 2018. There are elements of all of that in Edith's story (the parties she goes to a lot like the parties I was going to at that time) but she is less capable of recognizing how good things are for her. She's still caught up in grief, in self-loathing, and can't see that she has the power to fix many of these problems in her life. I think this calcification is probably necessary for writing autofiction; real change happens in a way that doesn't narrate well, or doesn't propel fiction.
What writers, thinkers, or ideas do you feel like the book is in conversation with?
There's a sort of joke in the book about Edith wanting to write a Semiotext(e) novel--which is not quite how Still Life turned out but I would say much of their catalog influenced its writing and worldview. In particular: Chris Kraus, Kate Zambreno, McKenzie Wark, Cookie Mueller, Dodie Bellamy, Robert Gluck. I have tried to stay on top of trans lit for the past 5 years--but we're getting to a point where it's impossible to read it all, which is very exciting to me. Nevada, of course, will probably be the most important book in my life until I die; I can't imagine this book taking shape without Detransition, Baby. Cat Fitzpatrick's incredible novel The Call-Out is perhaps the best evocation of a larger trans milieu that I've read. The essayistic sections owe a lot to Charlie Markbreiter's Gossip Girl Fanfic Novella. And then queer theorists and historians--Susan Stryker, Jules Gill-Peterson, Cameron Awkward-Rich--helped give me the tools to write about identity in a way that, hopefully, resists simplicity.
It's interesting you bring up the idea of respectability politics in trans and queer fiction. Say more.
Oh, I mean maybe I'm worrying over nothing here. But in the politicization of transness (and queerness!) in the past 4ish years, I think there's been an increase of trans people saying, "I'm not like those degenerate freaks! I'm normal! Give me rights even if you don't give them rights!" I worry that with time, the trans literary scene is going to start calcifying, and there will be fewer weird/transgressive/gross trans novels. But a couple of things will probably save us from this--one being the robust indie press scene, which I think is unlikely to cave to any kind of market pressure; and the other being literary forebears like Cooper, Indiana, Kathy Acker, Jane DeLynn. We've seen how it can be done, which makes it easier to do ourselves.
So many of the references in your book---whether Ernaux or Sondheim or Joni Mitchell--are things that I think a lot of your readers will really latch onto. I'm always nervous with how to balance referencing specific people in fiction, how did you balance that? What things were important to you to weave into the tapestry of the book?
I have a (soft) rule for myself in writing that I will not reference anything that I'd expect the target readership to not have heard of. Still Life breaks this rule maybe twice (once referencing a Kate Zambreno book and once referencing the Emperor X song "Raytracer") but for the most part, the referents are widely known. The things that made it into the final draft are those that were most important for me to process the feelings that catalyzed the writing. I did go to Boston in February 2022, I did spend lots of time in the aftermath listening to Into the Woods and feeling sad. There were lots of things that didn't make it in, though, perhaps because the connections were more tenuous, or perhaps because at a certain point the book felt overloaded. There was a whole section about Katherine Mansfield's diaries (she, as I have, moved around a lot), about Anais Nin's affair with Henry and June Miller, about Elizabeth Hardwick. There was a section tying Sondheim's "Moments in the Woods" to Virginia Woolf's Moments of Being. At a certain point, I felt I had to strip these things away. They were too in love, maybe, with their own erudition.
There are no references to trans lit in the book, which came out of a desire to avoid having the Trans Lit snake eat its own tail.
Talk to me about Val. There's so much tension there in the book in her character, in these triangulations of desire and pain and role model--how did you write into that and what drew you in about having this sort of threesome at the core of the book?
I expect most of us have the experience of loving someone in an incomplete, counterfactual way. Like, oh if only X weren't true. If only we could get back to Y state, or stay there. Most failed relationships are the wreck of a perfect idea. (This is true of Edith's relationship to Val but also her relationship to Tessa). But I knew that Edith could never let go of Val more than temporarily; the thing about having a friend who is always on the move is that you can trust they will come to you, eventually--will meet you in your stasis.
Edith exists at a midpoint on a spectrum between Tessa and Val. Tessa: with a stable job, stable home, stable partnership. Val: always on the road, doing whatever jobs she has to to survive into next week. They each offer ideas to her about what it might mean to live a good life. Edith struggles to act on this knowledge (see, again, her attempts at heterosexuality), but the book ends with her pushing, maybe, a little closer to one end of the spectrum.
How did Boston and Austin shape the book as settings? There's a lot in the back half about the politics of Texas and also the sort of hauntedness of Boston. It reminded me a bit of Some Strange Music Draws Me In but also times I’ve been to Veggie Galaxy.
I went back to Boston in 2022 for the first time in 5 years and was walking around just wrecked with nostalgia. A lot of the places that Edith goes--Harvard Bookstore, the Tatte down the street, Veggie Galaxy, the museum--are places I went, which are extremely bound up in nostalgia for me. I still can't go to Harvard Square without feeling like I'm going to throw up. There are less specific things you forget, too, living in different parts of the country. The grayness of the sky, the bite of winter air. The contrast, returning to Texas and it being shorts-and-t-shirt weather. I wanted the book to capture the very specific differences I felt living in these places--as a boy in Boston and a girl in Austin--but also wanted to push back against the idea of Boston as some utopia, totally free of hate for trans people. Because the book is narrated in third person, the reader can kind of see around the edges of Edith's experience going back. She romanticizes the time she spent living in Boston, but she very obviously has a community in Texas in a way she never did in Boston.
The scene where Val comes and sort of interrupts Edith's life, upsetting the way she's trying to build a life and be a writer, romantic energy seems almost a destructive force rather than as you describe it in your own life, a positive-if-not-frenetic, creative one.
Isn't it often both? The reason I was able to write so much while in the grip of this crush is that I was unable to sleep. For two or three months I was waking up at 4 am and rewatching Gossip Girl and driving myself crazy. It took a while for the crush to resolve itself in an actual relationship and so I had to do something to distract myself. It's much harder, if the object of your love is moving in and out of your house every couple of months, to ignore them and sit in front of your computer and write. It should be hard. Love is more important than art.
Of course, we should talk about the more essayistic passages too. I hadn't connected them to Charlie's work, that's an interesting cross-current.
I also read Lucy Ives' Life Is Everywhere--a fucking all-timer that everyone should read--around the time I was writing the second half of SL. But I was working on a review of Charlie's book and reading/rereading his book really closely. He made it feel less like I had to integrate the essay fragments directly into the narrative (you can tell, as the book goes along, that they become more disjoint). And of course we both write about Gossip Girl, the greatest American TV show.
Were there parts of the novel you wish critics/interviewers had gotten more into? Things you felt people shied away from?
No one is talking about Seb! Why do people not love my beautiful, foul-mouthed boi Seb! They're my favorite character in the whole thing; at every reading I've read a scene of them and Edith together. But the number one lesson of publishing a book is that no one is going to have the relationship to it that you do. (How could they?) There will inevitably be threads that aren't developed enough for people to feel they're important. The difficulty, say, that Edith has resolving the difference between self-harm and the pleasure of pain. (A difference she'd have an easier time figuring out if she'd simply read Susan Stryker.)
What directions do you want to push into with future writing?
Most of my novels to date have been genre experiments of a sort--some more successful than others. I'm framing the book I'm working on now as a "gothic novel about the cis gaze" but, again, that may end up having little relationship to the experience people have reading it. What I don't want to do is just endlessly reiterate the realist contemporary trans experience.
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