Fiction as a Space for Processing: Megan Milks Interviewed

CP You are constantly playing with genre, defamiliarizing familiar literary terrain as you borrow forms and structures from the likes of gaming narratives, choose-your-own-adventure stories, and ghost stories. Is genre-bending—we might call it genre bricolage—wrapped up with other kinds of fluidity for you, or do you view it as more of a formal experiment? I’m also curious about the desire to work within—and against, and through—genres that I personally associate with childhood and adolescence. It’s almost as if you’ve cobbled together a queer suburban bildungsroman.

MM Thanks for this term “genre bricolage”—it’s an apt description of my work and I’ll for sure be using it in the future. In Margaret, the genre shifts are designed to enact the protagonist’s coming of age and shifting relationship to her/their self. (I use she/her pronouns to refer to Margaret as a kid and teen; they/them to refer to M. as an adult.) In that sense, they mark a certain kind of fluidity of subjectivity that is perhaps more commonly accepted in childhood and adolescence, when we are expected to continuously be trying on new selves, than in adulthood, when we are supposed to have become our final selves. I think of the genre shifts as a way to indicate aging and evolution, but also—especially with the reprise of the mystery serial near the end, whose provenance is in juvenile fiction—as a way to defy expectations of normative maturation.

Why am I obsessed with these adolescent genres? Honestly, they are just so deeply ingrained in my DNA as a reader and writer, and are an important part of my canon of formative texts. But there’s something about gender and sexuality here, too, because so many of these texts imagine as their reader a cisgender, heterosexual girl who is most likely white and middle class. I was and was not that girl. Writing with, through, and against these texts, then, was one way to enact the particular kinds of dis/identifications that a character like me, a character like Margaret, might feel.

CP Is shifting perspective part of a related strategy? I'm thinking about your novel, which employs the first, second, and third person.

MM Yes, the shifts in point of view are markers of shifts in both genre and in gender—they’re one way I handled gender for a character who is beginning to question their relationship to femininity but who hasn’t really come into a solid sense of a gendered self. The book begins in third person, when Margaret is most desperately, anxiously attempting to inhabit femininity—and is also a bit removed from the world, from the reader, and from herself. In the Girls Can Solve Anything stories, we meet a younger Margaret who is bossy and self-assured, and who is narrating confidently, in control of the story. Shifting from third to first person was a way to measure the distance between those two Margarets. The shift to first-person is also a genre marker, as first person is the dominant point of view in girl-group series like The Baby-Sitters Club, which is one key source text for these sections.

The second person point of view shows up to mark Margaret’s growing dissociation from her sense of self, as well as her increasing disaffiliation from femininity (“you” being more gender-neutral than third person). It’s also a subtle marker of the genre shift into illness narrative—one common trope I’ve seen in eating disorder memoirs is the narrator switching to second person at a particularly low point to indicate a kind of split or dissociated self. 

I see all of these perspectival shifts as contributing to the arc of the book.

CP In one of your short stories, a woman disenchanted with S&M is fucked by a slug before transforming into one herself; in another, aliens posing as a couples’ sex toy fuse with and transform their user. In the world of these stories, bodies are liable to multiply, merge, or morph at any point—and it’s hot. Sex writing has a reputation for being difficult to get right, and I’m curious about how you approach it or calibrate it. 

MM Thank you for this question and the opportunity to speak on this! You’re right, sex writing has this reputation. I can’t say I know what “right” means or should read like, but what I’m definitely against is euphemism—using “bush” when you mean “cunt” or “he entered her” when you really mean demon possession. (For example.) My erotic scenes are often fairly straightforward which I guess has to do with the encounters themselves being quite wild. I tend to use exacting (as opposed to euphemistic) language because I don’t want to give my reader any room to pretend that what is happening isn’t actually happening. Make no mistake: there is a giant slug in this room and the giant slug is squeezing itself into Patty’s cunt. 

My main challenge in sex writing is to avoid repetition of verbs. I don’t believe there is or needs to be a division between literary and erotic or even pornographic writing. I am totally happy being prurient and porn-y in my writing. Writing queer sex into literature is crucial and necessary. Doing so speaks back to and defies the many, many attempts to censor queer sex in literature, from the obscenity trials surrounding The Well of Loneliness on up to the recent school board hearing challenging the appearance of Carmen Maria Machado’s In the Dream House on a reading list.

CP Your writing is simultaneously playful and colored by trauma. In a collaborative story that riffs on the teenage magazine confessional, you collate friends’ personal recollections of searing humiliation. In another short story, a protagonist has a limited number of lives that she deploys to defeat her bully, seemingly exorcizing a trauma. And your novel’s protagonist, a former child detective, has an eating disorder that lands her/them in a treatment facility. What do you see as the relationship between writing and trauma? Is writing a mode of processing for you? There’s another layer to this question, too, which is: how close do you get to your characters? 

MM I’ve been thinking a lot about the relationship between writing and trauma since reading Parul Sehgal’s recent essay “The Case Against the Trauma Plot” and various responses to it. The essay is about how trauma is operationalized in narrative, how it’s being used as a shorthand for why a character is how they are. I read that essay in a big gulp while working on a new story for which I kept reaching for some sort of original trauma for the main character, a trauma that I wanted to not be cliché (?), at the same time as I was dubious and grossed out about this impulse. I’ve since abandoned that story—which is to say, these questions and issues have very much been on my mind.   

With “Traumarama,” written between 2009 and 2010-ish, I wanted to explore the gap between the kinds of things that got included in Seventeen magazine’s Traumarama column, which archived a range of (presumably straight cis) teen girl humiliations and the kinds of things that didn’t—things like lesbian sex snafus, unwanted pregnancy, rape. I wanted to see what the form of the Traumarama, that formulaic little nugget composed to be pithy and cathartic—had to offer for writing these other kinds of experiences. And I just invited my friends to share or to write their own Traumaramas, whether they wanted to mimic or step out of the form (with the understanding that I would be anonymizing and editing). This was many years ago, and I learned a lot about my own and other people’s relationship to narrativizing trauma through this project, which I initially approached with the assumption that we all find sharing healing. I quickly came to understand that this isn’t the case. That awareness comes through in the piece, I think, which turns from a confessional impulse to a refusal to share in the end. In some ways, I see that piece now as reflecting the shift from the 2000s tell-everything era of radical oversharing (e.g., on Tumblr and in the endless parade of confessional personal essays) to the more critical stance that got adopted in the 2010s, when we saw a stronger, more critical interrogation of how we narrate trauma. 

With “Kill Marguerite,” which is one of my earliest short stories, the bullying that Caty experiences is not something that I experienced as a kid, though I did often feel shamed in subtler ways for being bigger and heavier than my friends. I remember having qualms about that first, bullying scene as I was writing it—like, is this the truth? Is this honest? Is this even believable? What is my investment in inventing this kind of trauma and abjection for this character, who is loosely based on but is not me? Similarly, Marguerite, the bully, is constructed as a cartoon villain and does not correspond to anyone I knew in life, but embodies and expresses a lot of the anti-fat, pro-hetero sentiment I absorbed as a kid and as an adolescent. I guess inventing a specific, overtly traumatic event and a clear enemy—and a video game structure to contain both—gave me places to put a range of subtler, less overt experiences.

I have often used fiction as a space for processing (trauma and everything else)—I see it as a tool for invention, fantasy, revision, flattening, compartmentalizing, cross-identification, and general interrogation of the self and experience.

CP Your novel, which is predominantly narrative, closes with an epistolary epilogue with lines sourced from a number of figures in the queer/trans pantheon: Tori Amos, José Esteban Muñoz, and Lou Sullivan, to name a few. Why did you choose to end the book this way?

MM In previous drafts, the book ended with Margaret getting dropped out of the mutant body back into Briarwood, having come much closer to an understanding about their gender and sexuality.  When I really reckoned with myself, that ending just didn’t seem true or honest to the story I was telling. Though my life is definitely not mapped directly onto to Margaret’s, the book is semi-autobiographical, and the truth is I didn’t come into queerness until my mid-twenties; it took me another decade to come into a trans identity. 

When I first started writing the book in 2006, I don’t think I even knew any trans people. When I was returned to the umpteenth draft in 2016, queer and trans visibility awareness had changed immensely, and I was almost embarrassed to be writing this story in which a teen protagonist is just so fucking clueless. (So many teens today have gone through ten different gender identities by the time they’re seventeen!) But – things were much different in the suburban 1990s. There’s a lot of fantasy and fiction in the story, but I wanted to tell that part truthfully. I needed another section to do it. So I wrote what is basically a coming out section in the form of autotheory, where M., much older now, “comes out” in all these ways—as queer, as trans, as an adult who is writing and rewriting the self.

CP What’s next for you? 

MM Right now I’m working on essays toward a book about names and milk(s), but mostly just keeping things open and seeing what comes through. I’ve been more nonfiction-leaning these days, but more and more even my nonfiction is opening up towards the speculative and the fantastic.