Mad Honey: A Novel (50 page)

JENNIFER FINNEY BOYLAN

On the eighth of May 2017, I woke from a strange dream in which I was writing a novel with Jodi Picoult. There were three characters in the dream: a trans girl who had died; her boyfriend, who had been accused of her murder; and the boy's mother, who was torn between the compelling evidence of her son's guilt and the love she bore for him in her heart.
Wow,
I thought, wiping the sleep from my eyes,
that's pretty specific.

I got out of bed, went to the kitchen, and made myself a cup of coffee, and then I got back in bed with the newspaper and read the headlines: Emmanuel Macron had won the French presidency; the governor of Texas had signed a bill outlawing sanctuary cities; a nominee for secretary of the Army had withdrawn after comparing transgender people to ISIS militants.

Then I went on Twitter and tweeted out,
I dreamed I was co-authoring a book with Jodi Picoult!

Moments later, I got a private message back from Jodi.
What was this book about?

We had never met, Jodi and I, but we'd been on each other's radar for a few years. I'd loved her work since I read
The Pact
back in 2003; for her part, Jodi had read my memoir
She's Not There
and had
generously blurbed my 2016 novel,
Long Black Veil
. Quite frankly, I always thought of her as a kind of guardian angel.

As I sat there in bed with my coffee, I told Jodi the plot of the book that we'd written in my dream—although, to be honest, the whole thing was already starting to fade like breath on a mirror.

We hadn't swapped more than two or three messages, though, before Jodi wrote back to me, in all caps, and I quote: “OMG I LOVE THIS LET'S DO IT.”

I mention this because it seems not unimportant to me that
Mad Honey
began its life as a dream, and that as a result of that dream Jodi Picoult, whom I had always admired from a readerly distance, became my friend. At that time, she was finishing up
A Spark of Light,
soon to begin work on the novel that became
The Book of Two Ways;
as for me, I was just starting the memoir
Good Boy: My Life in Seven Dogs
. It would take several years before we would be able to actually begin work on
Mad Honey
.

We finally started sketching out the plot in the spring of 2020, at the exact moment that quarantine trapped us in our separate houses. I spent several weeks crawling around on the floor with the two stories—Lily's and Olivia's—and literally cutting them apart with a pair of scissors and taping them into place on a storyboard that, in the end, took up several rooms of my house. We agreed that Jodi would write Olivia's voice to start, and I would write Lily's, but that each of us had to write at least one of the other's chapters, and that as the writing proceeded, each of us would reedit the other's work to make the novel feel like one continuous work, even if told in two voices.

I admit that it gives me great pleasure to imagine readers trying to figure out which one of the Lily chapters is Jodi's, and which one of the Olivia chapters is mine, although to be honest, by the time we were finished editing and reediting, I would frequently read a paragraph and be unable to remember which one of us had written it. Plus, I think there were times when we each deliberately, and diabolically, attempted to imitate each other.

It reminds me of the old Russian proverb
You tell me you're going
to Minsk so I'll think you're going to Pinsk, but you really are going to Minsk, so why do you always lie to me?

Speaking of proverbs, I should also mention that the epigraph to this book from Kierkegaard—the thing about life only being understandable backwards—is actually a simplification of the original text, which says, in part, “that life at any given moment cannot really ever be fully understood; exactly because there is no single moment where time stops completely in order for me to do this: going backwards.”

In any case, getting to write this book with Jodi has been one of the greatest gifts of my long career as an author. No one could possibly ever have a more generous co-author than Jodi Picoult. At every moment she treated me with respect and good humor and love. She was fierce, forgiving, and funny. There were days when she had more faith in my ability to find my way through this story than I did.

I admit that as the project neared completion, I was dogged by two melancholy thoughts. One of these was for Ava, Lily's mom, who loses her daughter, the person she loves most in the world, and whom she has done so much to try to save. I am hopeful that she and Boris find some solace on the Appalachian Trail, but I don't know. I think of Paul Simon's line
And sometimes even music cannot substitute for tears
. I briefly tried to talk Jodi into writing a sequel with me, in which we might follow Ava's adventures on the AT, but alas: if that book ever gets written, I suspect I will end up writing it solo. It's not even that I wanted to write Ava's story so much (although that, too) as the simple fact that, as we neared the end of this project, I was not ready to give up working with Jodi Picoult. I'm still not.

It is also worth confessing that we had a brief disagreement over which one of the moms would wind up with Detective Newcomb. I had high hopes that Ava might take off into the wild with Mike, but the day I suggested this, Jodi simply laughed and said,
Bwahaha. He's mine
.

The other lingering sadness I have, of course, is for Lily. I hate the idea that she will never play her cello in the orchestra at Oberlin, that she will never walk down the aisle of a church with her mother at her
side, that she will never sit by a fire with Asher as the two of them grow old together.

But the world is full of trans girls and women whose lives have been cut short. During the year that Jodi and I wrote this book, more than 350 transgender people were killed around the world, more than a fifth of them inside their own homes.

November 20 each year is recognized as Transgender Day of Remembrance, a day when we stop to acknowledge the violence that so many trans people suffer, especially trans women of color.

To be trans, of course, doesn't mean only one thing, and as Elizabeth tells Olivia, “If you've met one trans person, you've…met one trans person.” I have spent many years celebrating the amazing lives of the trans people that I know: airplane pilots and sex workers; fire captains and college professors; astrophysicists and electricians. I regret, in some ways, telling a story of a trans girl who gets killed; there has been no shortage of these stories over the years, and I long for the day when we can instead celebrate November 20 as a day of trans endurance, and courage, and survival, instead of loss. For what it's worth, some of that does now take place on March 31, the Trans Day of Visibility.

Lily, of course, will never get to celebrate that day. But I still hope that her story opens hearts.

After I lost my hearing several years ago, I started trying to learn American Sign Language, and I learned that the symbol for
transgender
in ASL is a hand held over the heart, fingers pointing down as if depicting a flower
—a lily, say—
with its petals closed tight. Then, to make the sign, you move your arm forward, and point the “petals” at the sky, so that they can open. You end by putting your hand back over your heart with the petals now facing upward.

I love this sign because in so many ways it echoes the process we all go through, and not just people like Lily, or me. All of us have something in our hearts like a flower that cannot bloom because it is held in secret. The adventure of life can be to get that thing out of the darkness where it lies and let the sun shine on it.

So it can go back inside your heart facing the right direction.

At the end of that long morning when I dreamed I was writing a book with Jodi Picoult, I signed off of our DM session by reminding Jodi how much I loved her. And also, I said,
I hope tomorrow night I have a dream that I'm co-authoring a book with Stephen King.

Bahahhaha,
she wrote back. And then added,
Don't we all.

—Jennifer Finney Boylan

JODI PICOULT

Those who say nothing good ever happens on Twitter clearly have not had Jenny Boylan—an author I have long admired—post something about co-authoring a novel. What Jenny didn't know at the time was that I had been thinking about writing about transgender rights for a while now. I have had so many readers send me hesitant emails, asking if maybe that was a topic I'd consider in the future—and I had written back, every time,
Yes.
In so many ways my entire career has been about untangling the knots that society tangles itself in as we futilely attempt to separate the
us
from the
them
. It never crossed my mind to think of a trans woman as anything but a woman, or a trans man as anything but a man, but there are cisgender folks out there who do not believe that. Maybe, I thought, I could break down that resistance a little by creating a trans character who was so real and compelling that (as Asher says) they'd love her for
who
she was, not
what
she was.

This was long before I had met Jenny. I thought I'd be writing about trans rights from a theoretical vantage point, because even if I supported trans people, I didn't actually
know
anyone who was trans.

Except…I did.

One of my closest friends came out as trans shortly before I started this book. We had known each other for years, but it still took courage for him to have that conversation with me. I know there are people who still do not know this about him or call him by his preferred pronouns.

Here's what changed in our relationship: absolutely nothing.

He still knows how I take my coffee, when to send me a GIF via text to cheer me up, and indulges my addiction to Goobers. The only thing that's different about our friendship is that now, when I look at him, I'm seeing him the way he's always seen himself.

A similar trajectory had happened once before to me, when I was writing
Sing You Home,
about gay rights, and my eldest son came out to me in the middle of it. Suddenly I wasn't writing hypothetically. I was writing as a parent with a vested interest in making the world a safer, more inclusive place for my son. I feel the same way about
Mad Honey
.

I am no stranger to hate mail—and I'm sure I'm gonna get plenty for this book. There is a small corps of people who seem to have made it their mission in life to exclude trans women (in particular) from the greater umbrella of “women.” Many of these individuals have suffered abuse at the hands of men. They say men pretend to be trans to get into female spaces and commit acts of violence (this is beyond rare, and it is worth noting that more congressmen have been arrested for misbehavior in public restrooms than have trans women); they say children are being pressured into labeling themselves trans because they don't want to identify as gay (which conflates gender and sexuality); they say trans people often regret transitioning (detransitioning, in fact, is rare, and the reason for most detransitions is not unhappiness with the target gender, but the cruelty of others, who make life for a newly out trans person intolerable). They most recently have said that support for trans women erases biologically female people (as a biological female, I do not feel personally erased). Do I feel bad that they've suffered their own instances of fear and abuse by men, in a way that might have shaped this philosophy? Absolutely. I chose to have Olivia be an abused wife because I wanted to underscore that violence against women is real and horrific…but it is not a reason to dismiss trans rights. In fact, a trans woman is far more likely than a cisgender woman to be hurt or killed by a man. Given how far women—
all
women—have yet to go in terms of equality, it breaks my heart to know that some women spend their time and energy tearing down the rights of other women. As Ava
says to Lily, maybe being a woman, for some people, might mean just not being a man.

I also know a lot of very nice cisgender people who are not intentionally cruel to trans folks, but are just plain uninformed. If you're a cis woman, imagine what it would be like if you woke up tomorrow and looked in the mirror and suddenly saw a man's body looking back at you (or vice versa). Imagine how disoriented you'd feel, and how trapped, and how confusing it would be. Imagine having to sneak the moments when you could dress or act to reflect who you truly are; imagine the ridicule at being “outed.” Imagine having to justify yourself to people simply because you were born this way. That's a good starting point for understanding.

I know that many cis people have questions, and also are aware that it may not be their place to ask those questions. I hope that Lily's journey can be educational—but more important, I hope it inspires compassion.

I also want to take a moment to talk about co-writing. This book began as a literal dream, and became a metaphorical one. I've only written a novel with one other person before, and I gave birth to her (my daughter, Sammy). I wanted to work with Jenny Boylan because (a) I was already a tremendous fan of her writing, and (b) as a cisgender writer, I was well aware that Lily's story wasn't my story to tell. Even if I did my research, even if I was meticulous…trans writers are so underrepresented on bookshelves in general that it wouldn't have felt right or fair for me to write a story about a trans girl by myself. I was honored that Jenny knew my name and had read my books. I wondered,
What if we could combine our voices, and tell both Olivia's and Lily's stories?
The result was a lot of fun…and a lot of work.

I realized pretty quickly during the process that we were going to have to treat this as a unified novel, even if it had two narrators, or it would feel like two pigs fighting under a blanket. I admit I didn't realize how much of a control freak I was until we started working together, and I am so grateful that Jenny trusted me when I told her that she
could
tell a story backward (and let me house the master
document on
my
computer because I'm possessive that way, LOL). I can't count all the times Jenny made me cry with passages so honest and raw they took my breath away, and made me want to write something equally good. But I am also really pleased at how the end product feels seamless. If ever there was a novel whose scars should be invisible, it's this one.