Maybe Messiness is the Answer: An Interview with Zoë Bossiere

Zoë Bossiere (they/she) is writer from Tucson, Arizona. They are the managing editor of Brevity: A Journal of Concise Literary Nonfiction, as well as the coeditor of two anthologies: The Best of Brevity (Rose Metal Press, 2020) and The Lyric Essay as Resistance: Truth from the Margins (Wayne State UP, 2023). Bossiere’s debut, Cactus Country: A Boyhood Memoir (Abrams Books, May 21 2024), chronicles their experiences growing up as a trans boy in a Tucson, Arizona trailer park.

American Literary Review published an essay version of one of the chapters, “Into the Body of the Light” in 2020. This past June, Zoë joined ALR editor Anna Chotlos on Zoom to talk about Cactus Country.

Anna Chotlos: I’m particularly curious about the process of the book, because on some level, I’ve been waiting to read it since I first encountered some of your essay drafts in workshops back in 2018. How did you decide to organize this book as a memoir, as opposed to an essay collection? What was the process of shaping that like?

Zoë Bossiere: I think for me, it was always going to be a memoir. When I started writing Cactus Country, I really didn’t have an idea about the story’s shape yet, I just had a lot of memories of the place where I had grown up, and specifically, the landscape and the desert that I’d grown up in. The things that were the most vibrant in my memories were the cactus and the animals that inhabited the landscape and the kinds of plants that I encountered, the kinds of trees that I climbed, things like that. And so, I began by writing about the place and then writing about the place would remind me of the boys and the men who were with me while I was experiencing this place. Through that, I began to remember them and the kinds of things that we would do together. From there came more specific memories and moments, and those moments became the seeds of each individual chapter. I wrote through those moments, and each one became kind of self-contained. I think that there are a few reasons for that. One of them is that that’s what a graduate writing program demands of you, when you go into workshop. You need to bring something that’s pretty self-contained, because if you bring an excerpt of something longer, chances are you’re not going to get great feedback on it because people are just sort of guessing about what’s going to happen next. And especially for nonfiction, that can be really a frustrating experience. And so I would bring in these chapters as essays. And that’s where you encountered them. I really like writing that way, and I like reading essays. I like reading stories that are self-contained within a pretty short span of pages.

In Cactus Country, because people came and went so much, I felt like I had a lot of these sort of episodic memories: the very short era where Angel lived in the park with me, the short era where the boys and I were killing these beetles, or when the javelina came to the park and were wreaking havoc. It made sense to me to write these chapters that captured sort of the beginning, middle, and end of these eras. But then, I found that I also wanted the book to be chronological, and I wanted these chapters to speak to each other. I always wanted it to be a memoir. I started writing these sort of essayistic chapters, I put them together chronologically, and together, they made the memoir that I hoped that it would be, if that makes sense.

AC: I was really drawn to the way that your memoir discusses different kinds of mentorship with such insight and empathy. From the persona’s father to the boys and men in the park, who are young Zoe’s models of masculinity, to the string of friends and other individuals in the persona’s young adulthood to the conversations with professors about applying to graduate school, I thought the way that the memoir sort of moves through all of these different kinds of mentorship  was really, really cool.

ZB: I think in my life mentorship has really shaped who I am. I think that that’s true of most people. You know, most people have folks in their life who they looked up to, and who they were looking to for guidance and for models of how to be. That was a really overt part of my childhood in a way that most people aren’t really thinking about it, but I think for me, it needed to be that way, because I was assigned female at birth, but didn’t feel like a girl. All of the models put forth for me to follow were ones that I was actively resisting because they didn’t feel right for me. I had to seek out alternate mentors. That was definitely the way I looked at my dad. I saw our relationship very much as a father-son relationship, even though I don’t think he did. Yeah, I think for him, it was firmly father-daughter. And then in the park, you know, because I had this haircut, I wore boys clothing, I presented myself as a boy, I lived among boys. I was always looking to boys and men for signals about how to behave, how to react to different situations, how to carry myself. And particularly as the book goes on, I encountered different kinds of masculinities, different samples, and started to parse them and realize which ones felt organic and worked for me, and which ones really felt toxic, or dangerous or problematic in some way.

So, I think mentorship really, really informed my childhood. I had to make a lot of conscious decisions, watching others about how to be and what kind of boy I wanted to be, or aspired to be. And then, I was also in this situation where, you know, I grew up in a trailer and a trailer park. That was my parents’ decision, you know, it’s something that they wanted to do, but we didn’t have a lot of money. I think that in school, especially, other kids had this perception of me, that because I grew up in a trailer I must be stupid, I must be dirty. A lot of kids kind of stayed away from me, for whatever reason, you know, the gender ambiguity, and I was kind of nerdy, all this stuff. But I think that living in a trailer park didn’t help.

When I got to the University of Arizona, I just felt like I didn’t know what I was doing there. It really felt like a fluke that I had gotten a scholarship, and I didn’t have mentors in the usual places. I couldn’t look to my parents, because even though they were as helpful as they possibly could be, they hadn’t had the same experience with college. Same thing in the trailer park— the boys and men that I knew hadn’t gone to college, so I couldn’t look for mentorship there. I felt very adrift there for quite a while. Then, I discovered writing. It was something I felt really good at and enjoyed, and suddenly, in my writing professors, I had this kind of mentorship because I think several of them recognized that this was something I was really passionate about and motivated to do. They really extended themselves to me and made themselves available, and that was how I got through college. It was having these relationships with professors and forming a writing community there among the other students. That was, I guess, the common thread through my childhood until adulthood: even if I didn’t know what to do, I could always look to someone as a mentor and figure it out.

AC: How did you decide where the memoir needed to begin and end?

ZB: Yeah. That’s really hard. The book—the story of the book— begins the first day in Cactus Country. I think I’d always known that that’s where the journey needed to begin. I already needed to be in Tucson, and the journey would end when I left Tucson. That was always something that I had in my mind as a guiding principle.

But the more difficult piece came when it was time to sort of contextualize that story and understand what it meant now. I had written all or most of the book before I actually started with the book ends—the opening chapter, and the final chapter; you could call them a prologue and epilogue, but I feel like they’re more integral than that. That took way more time to pin down because I was still, as I was writing, making sense of the story, and making sense of what it meant for me now, and what it meant for my gender identity now, and how I identified, and what words to use to describe myself and to talk about my experience.

When I was writing the very beginning of the book, and coming to terms with that, I settled on this the story that my parents always tell about me when I was very little, about how I would always wander away from the places that I was supposed to be. This was a story that had been told to me many times, it was kind of a defining story of my childhood, at least in my parents’ minds. And so, I thought, well, what if I start there? Because it seems maybe like something that was correct of me then, and is maybe still correct of me now. Maybe there’s a through line there? So, I wrote that into the opening.

And then, at the end, I wrote and rewrote and rewrote the ending so many times in different ways as I was going through the process of trying to figure out what it all amounted to. I think it was the last possible time that I could have rewritten it— I was working with an editor by that point. The book was sold. We were working on final drafts, and we had had a conversation about how the end really wasn’t working. And we both agreed, it’s not where it needs to be. I was so stressed. How was I going to pull this together? How was I finally going to understand everything that I needed to understand in order to pull it all together in a way that felt satisfying and inevitable?

I sat and I thought about it for a while, and I decided, I’m just going to write about the ways that I don’t understand any of this still, after writing all of it out. And I started to write a little bit about how I still don’t really know what to say, and I still don’t really know how to make sense of my childhood and how, maybe that’s the point, and maybe that’s okay, and maybe that messiness is the answer. And from there, it felt like the ending arose very organically— I just needed to approach it from the right space. It really felt like the beginning and the ending were speaking to each other, that they were contextualizing the book in a way that felt true.

AC: They caught my attention, because the rest of the book is so immersed in the moment, moving chronologically through the persona’s life, but we get these bookends of reflection, at the beginning and ending.

ZB: Right, yeah. I really didn’t want to break the spell of the immersion in the middle of the book, because I feel like part of its momentum and power is that we’re not being pulled away from it, or the reader isn’t being pulled away from it. And that maybe the reader is also getting to inhabit the speaker’s mindset at different phases of life.

AC: Yeah, we’re getting to learn things along with the persona.

ZB: Yeah, that was the big hope. Because, for me, when I read books, that’s what I’m always drawn to—not being told this is what this means, but getting to interpret it along with the narrator, the speaker, the character on the page. I was really resistant to inserting any kind of present-day knowledge into those pages, as much as possible. But I think that every memoir still needs that present-day context. So, the solution was in the bookends.

AC: I noticed that Cactus Country’s epigraph is from Carmen Maria Machado’s In the Dream House. Her memoir is about domestic abuse in a queer relationship, which is a taboo subject both at large, and I think, within the queer community. Your memoir engages with similarly complex stories: Sexual assault in a queer relationship, the process of articulating gender fluidity, and narrative expectations and telling stories that fall outside those expectations.

As a queer writer, I know that there can be pressure to skim over the messy stuff and represent queerness positively, especially in the political climate where queer and trans rights and lives are under threat, and these complicated truths can run the risk of being interpreted as a justification for continued discrimination. What kind of advice do you have for queer writers who are concerned that they’re telling the “wrong” kinds of queer stories?

ZB: I’ll start by saying, Carmen Maria Machado’s book In the Dream House is one of those books that very much changed my life. I feel like that’s something people say a lot about books. But truly, I had never, ever, and I mean, ever seen a queer relationship between two people assigned female at birth depicted in that way. I had definitely bought into the myth that queer relationships, and specifically, lesbian relationships, cannot be abusive, right? Which is absurd when you really think about it, of course. But I had never seen anything depicted like that. And I also was really interested in Carmen Maria Machado’s idea about the archive and how, through history, through time, there have been stories like that, that have been erased, often by folks who are not queer, often by folks who are seeking to erase queerness, but also within queer communities, because of, as you just stated, that kind of—we can call it, messiness. I think that some folks see that as a way for cis people and folks who aren’t queer to demonize the queer community and say something like, this is why we need to suppress queerness. I found that idea really fascinating because I had had an experience growing up that felt unspeakable. Not just because I was also in a similar kind of relationship dynamic as a teenager, but also because of the way that my gender had been expressed. The way I felt about my gender throughout my life was something that I’d never seen depicted in any kind of media before, and it was something that as a child, I really hungered for,  but it just, it wasn’t available to me at that time.

I think that reading Machado’s book really allowed me to begin to tell those stories, at first, just to myself and then to others. That was really empowering to me. And I think that through writing my own story, I began to feel less worried about what other people, and specifically other people who aren’t queer, would think, because it’s all true. This is my story as it happened, and if it happened to me, my thought was, it’s happened to other people. Other people have had similar experiences and they also don’t see those experiences depicted anywhere. People need to see their stories represented, I think, because if they don’t, then they can feel like they’re the only ones out there. And that’s very lonely, that’s very isolating. That’s a place that I lived in myself for a long time.

So, my advice would be, to anyone who has a story to tell but feels like maybe they can’t or shouldn’t, is to definitely tell it. To face those self-doubts and write it first for yourself. And then if you still feel called to, to write it for others, and to look for examples, like Carmen Maria Machado’s book, of folks who have written a story that was maybe previously unthinkable or previously untellable or previously unknowable.

Anna Chotlos’s (she/her) essays and poems have recently appeared in CRAFT Literary, Pinch, HAD, Split Lip, and Hotel Amerika. She holds an MA from Ohio University and now teaches and writes in Denton, Texas where she is a PhD candidate in creative writing at the University of North Texas and the editor-in-chief of American Literary Review.