Over the course of the essay, Smith turns from Walt Whitman’s ‘I am large, I contain multitudes’ as a guiding principle, finding fault in the word ‘contain’ which feels arrogant and colonising, and towards a phrase found in the poetry of Emily Dickinson, ‘fascinated to presume’. In her 2019 essay ‘Fascinated to Presume: In Defense of Fiction ’, Zadie Smith finds herself with a belief in fiction and a belief in her need as a fiction author to inhabit voices different to her own.
(Personally, I think it would make life easier if transness was part of the fabric of more people’s worlds, not fewer.) I exist, transness exists, and I don’t want to have to compartmentalise and discard that part of myself when I read because an author has been told they won’t get it right and shouldn’t try. Not ‘dragons and friendship and overcoming all the odds’ possible, but rather that the materials an author can draw from are infinite. I want to approach fiction believing anything is possible.
I know this and yet I am not someone who thinks that cis writers should not write trans characters or inhabit trans perspective through their characters. I think Pieper is right in some regard, something lazy happens, but I don’t think we’re really acknowledging what that laziness is avoiding.Īn author writing outside their experience often ends up reducing human experience, rather than expanding it, by leaning into assumptions and stereotypes in order to construct character. I hate being a trans person when a book like this comes out, not because I feel unsettled in my identity, but because I hate being treated like I’m too fragile to understand the stakes of fiction by critics who aren’t assessing it as such.Īnticipating the backlash that was to follow Honeybee’s release, Liam Pieper wrote ‘a novel is a static document and to lament art for imperfect politics is lazy criticism.’ I’ve been thinking about this phrase ‘lazy criticism’ and how it applies to incidents such as this, authors writing outside of their experience. No one considered it worthy of literary criticism, seemingly on the basis of its relationship to transness. I watched the book come out, I watched it sell well, and I watched as not one reviewer engaged with it as a literary critic. Offensive because it is a cis man writing a trans teenager with all the predictable tropes: a troubled home life, suicide attempts, ambiguous language that evades gender until a big ‘reveal’.
Honeybee, a story about a troubled trans teenager, Sam, and their unlikely friendship with the older widower Vic was considered, on publication, to be fairly offensive by many trans readers, myself included. Last year, Craig Silvey’s third novel was published, his first since the hugely popular Jasper Jones in 2009.
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