"The Time to Make Money From Your Secrets Has Arrived at Last”: Jeanne Thornton in Conversation With Bill Cheng

I’ve known Jeanne Thornton since we were teenagers. She was among the first of my online friends — bonding over instant messenger, chatrooms, and Livejournal posts. Part of our friendship was based on our shared aspiration to become writers. When she moved to New York in the early 2000’s, a group of us would meet weekly to share work at the now-defunct Cafe Orlin in the East Village. Among the earliest of her work I remember were sketches of what would become — now 12 years later — her latest novel, Summer Fun.

The book is a novel in letters, written by Gala, a trans woman operating a hot spring in Truth or Consequences, New Mexico.  She writes to B––, the songwriter and leader of the surf rock band the Get Happies — and in so doing, tells two interweaving tales: the first, her own struggles and search for meaning in the desert; the second, B––’s journey in confronting their own trans identity during the fraught production of an album that will either become a transcendental piece of music history, or the unintelligible recordings of someone in the middle of a mental breakdown.

Provocatively, B––’s story mirrors the history of Brian Wilson and the Beach Boys — particularly, in the production of their infamous once-lost album Smile, whose reputation, for a long time, has been shrouded in mystery, innuendo, and speculation. It is through this mythology, that Summer Fun takes a scalpel to the ideas of American expansionism, family, transitioning, queer community, commercialism, art, and transformation.

Even after so many years, I am struck by Jeanne’s gifts as a storyteller. She brings to bear a wealth of knowledge, a nuance of thought, and a sturdiness of conscience that bears out both in our conversations, and in her writing. But among my greatest joys in reading Summer Fun (and really, any of Jeanne’s work) is to see the ways in which who she is intersects with what she writes: her obsession, her sincerity, her compassion, her earnestness, her sense of humor.

—Bill Cheng

You’ve been working on this book for a long time. Tell me about its beginnings.

I was living in this basement apartment in Long Island City, working on finishing my first book. I was still an intern at my publishing job, being paid $90 a week or something crazy like that. All we could afford was this unbearably bleak, David Lynch-like place: checkerboard floors, soundproof baffling on the windows. So I’m sitting there working on my book with these foam covered walls in this incredibly dark underground place; and at the time, Michael Jackson was selling Neverland Ranch.

I remember looking at this realtor website with photos of Neverland Ranch, looking at all this strange, complicated, terrible stuff like a carousel ride with a plaque that read, “This ride has been presented to Michael Jackson for his own personal use” and thinking that, if you have enough money, and you have enough talent, and you have enough ways to be useful to capitalism, you can go as far as you want into these strange private worlds.

This made sense to me in this terrible basement; in wanting to write something about music, in wanting to write something about that kind of isolation. So I was thinking along these lines, I wanted to write about a very isolated musician; I was starting to realize I had to come out as trans so I was wanting to write about transness; I wanted to write about Truth or Consequences, New Mexico. These were the three starting points. Somehow I felt these things were connected.

How did the switch come from Michael Jackson to the Beach Boys?

I’ve always been fascinated with the Beach Boys, especially when you realize this ubiquitous US cultural phenomenon has this secret darkside that’s also strange and beautiful that has nothing to do with the surf-cars-girls thing that everyone knows on the radio.

What drew you to the Beach Boys as inspiration for the novel’s fictionalized counterpart, the Get Happies?

I kept thinking about the idea of “West-ness''.

There’s this founding myth of the Beach Boys. The grandfather of the family migrated west out of the center of the country until he couldn’t go west anymore. Then they were sleeping on the beach and doing agricultural work, building this fantastic family unit who, in three generations, go from agricultural labor to mechanical factory work, up to entrepreneurship for the dad, Murry Wilson, then Brian and the brothers get to be in this creative class.

Buried deep in the idea of Americanness is the idea that the answer is always “more.” The answer is always, “Expand west into places that are ‘empty’ and make a fortune out there. Continue to expand. Whenever there’s a problem, put distance between it. Continue to work harder to make these dreams come true.”

During the pandemic I kept thinking about how the American response to the pandemic was to weather this as quickly as possible and get everyone back to work. If we can just restart the economic engines as quickly as we can; that will pull us out of the problem and we won’t have to address what we’ve done; we won’t have to change anything. Nothing about society will have to change, no one will have to give up anything. We can keep going exactly as we are.

I kept thinking about it as a car that doesn’t have a brake pedal; it only has a gas pedal. There isn't the notion of stop. There's just the notion of taking a break before you go faster." I think there’s something super American to that.

What’s the consequence of this kind of non-stop Americanness?

Taking it back to the Beach Boys again, there’s this idea that Brian Wilson was burning out when he was very young. He had a series of nervous breakdowns. One of the fascinating things about the Beach Boys is that it’s both a family and a commercial unit that follows this traditional American pattern of, “if you’re not growing you’re failing.”

The Beach Boys have this meteoric rise when Brian is 21, maybe younger. All of those super classic songs were done between 1962 and 1967. In a period of five years, they released 10 or 11 albums, a huge number of hits. The younger kids are pulled out of school to be in the band full time. These kids are teenagers, driving around with their dad, going to different stadiums, working the whole time.

And the idea was that, if something is going wrong in the family, Brian is the one who has to fix it. Brian has to step in and resolve all the family tensions. And if there are things going wrong in the family, it’s because Brian isn’t working hard enough.

Any measure of imperfection in what you’re doing is viewed as some deep failure. You’re failing the business. You’re failing the family.

It’s an especially toxic environment, which stems a lot from the family patriarch. We see this between B–– and his dad, Bill. And yet, at his lowest point, B–– goes back to his dad.

Because his dad is the one who first instilled this idea. “This thing that's leading to self-destruction and doom is what's going to take me out of it.” I think that's sort of invariably the American formula.

It sets up a totalizing system where the answer can always be put back on you if you have a problem with the system. A conservative argument in America and in the world of the book -- Bill is always telling B––, if there’s a problem, “You got to have more grit. You got to work harder.” There is a seductiveness to that narrative. “If you only do everything right, you don’t have to be subject to tragedy.”

One of the biggest counterbalances to that particular vision is the character of Mona, who ends up becoming B––’s wife. Where did Mona come from?

One of the other musical elements that went into the book is this woman named Connie Converse. You can view the book in some ways as like fan-fiction: “What if a transsexual Brian Wilson met Connie Converse and they got married?”

She was this polymath autodidact who moved out from the Midwest to New York in the 50’s to start as a songwriter. She was trying to establish herself in one of those Brill building situations, selling songs for other artists to record. Then in the 60’s she sort of packed it in and went and  moved back to Michigan. And no one knows what became of her to this day.

The only reason we have her recordings is because this guy Gene Deitch, a jazz DJ archivist, did a lot of tape recordings of musicians in his living room. He decided he really liked her songs and wanted to record them.

The reason I thought this was interesting is because one of the things this book is trying to unpack is thinking about differentials of privilege, like male and female privilege. I understand that’s an extremely fraught thing for a trans woman to say in some key ways.

What do you mean by differentials of privilege?

Connie Converse is hyper-talented. She has this very distinct musical vision. There’s a real possibility that if Connie Converse had been 10 years later, she could’ve run into this Dylan-coffee house period and would have propagated further than this one jazz critic’s living room recordings.

But this ambiguously queer folk music from a a cis woman just didn’t find any purchase at the time. It was almost completely erased until these archival recordings were discovered in the late 2000’s I think.

If I imagine her having more of the same starting circumstances as Brian Wilson…

I was haunted by the idea that this one white kid in California is given this shot to have this whole arc to crash and burn in this complicated way and have second acts and third acts; then Connie Converse has her shot, goes back to Michigan, and vanishes into obscurity.

As a trans author, did you fear Connie Converse’s fate for your book?

There’s a line I remember near the end of the book, “the time to make money from your secrets has arrived at last.” That part of the book was put in very consciously as a trans writer thinking, almost aspirationally, almost like a magic spell, “Oh my god, I hope it’s time for the rest of my dreams to come true at last,” right?

When I was first writing this book in 2009, I tried not to think about whether this book would be publishable. Then the idea came that the culture is going to make more and more things, more and more thoughts thinkable, more and more stories tellable to the point where, over time, they can become marketable. I would’ve written that part right around 2014 when TIME magazine put Laverne Cox on their cover, talking about the transgender tipping point, where everything is different now. There is space for us to make money and create projects in different ways - there’s space for this novel to be published which wouldn’t have happened in the same way when the book was first being written.

I think now—particularly this year—there’s so much stuff that's coming out. It’s so varied: Torrey Peters’ Detransition, Baby; Jackie Ess has this book called Darryl; Ryka Aoki has got a new book; Casey Plett has a new book; Megan Milks has like four new book—all manner of stuff that’s expressing all these different “transnesses.”

You just mentioned ‘magic.’ There are a lot of references to magic not just in this book, but in some of your other work as well. There’s something very ritualized about depictions of magic in your work.

I think of religious devotion as a kind of heightened OCD. You’re very obsessed with purity, you’re obsessed with performing, you’re purifying your soul, you perform these mortifications to make sure you’re absolutely pure, you’ll attempt to do the same things in the same way.

Smile was a really intensely strange project that Brian Wilson was chasing around. At the time he was reading about the occult, reading about the elements, reading about witchcraft, psychic powers, all these different things. And also trying to record perfect sounds. Doing take after take of these chants, these different voices that are arranged in precise harmonies, making these grunts and moans and barnyard sounds, recording again and again. There are all these recordings of him saying, “I want these tapes to sound like jewelry, it has to fall apart in this controlled way.” Basically just repeating a performance until it’s perfect.

There’s this phrase in a lot of religious discourse where, “there’s a narrow way to heaven.” To me there’s something really appealing about writing characters who think that if they can do this one hard-to-do thing, then everything will fall into place around it. If they follow this one symbolic vision, everything else will reconstruct itself to embrace the act of that vision.

Let’s talk about the structure of this novel. Why did you choose to construct it as a series of letters?

Right when I was first coming out to people, there was one very close friend in particular who I didn’t see in real life. I remember writing to her and coming out to her and her having questions about it, and me trying to narrate transness to her.

Part of slowly coming out is having the notion that you might be trans, and then narrativizing it. I used to conceptualize it as going through every possible objection to why you would be trans until you realize, “I'm coming back to this idea over and over for a reason.”

What happens when you narrativize something that has that initiatory burden of transness, you take these steps to bring that narrative into actuality—to bring the inside outside. That process involves taking that which had been an inner monologue and turning it into a dialogue. The act of writing a letter in that moment felt liberating not just in the sense of ‘Oh, finally I can unburden my soul about this stuff.’ You need space for that work of cultivation, gestation, that pupal phase to happen. And a letter provides a place for that work.

I also started to just get fascinated by the way my voice was transforming when I was writing about this stuff to this person. There was energy to this writing that wasn't in all my other writing. And where do I follow this voice? How do I bring it in? The choice to make it about letters started just from that— there's something going on, there's something mystical that's happening  in terms of the way this voice is forming and I need to do whatever's possible to capture it.

In what ways is the book Summer Fun like the album Summer Fun? That is, do you see this book as making some kind of statement about art and transitioning?

This is a complicated question. The thing that always fascinated me when I was reading a lot about this band is that anytime Smile was mentioned, Brian would make a point of talking about how it sucked. And the narrative people imposed on that is that there are forces in the band that hated the music so much that Brian was too ashamed to release it, and that he's been driven to disown his most glorious work.

In his autobiography in 2016, after Smile had been released a couple different times, he finally got to say, “Look I don’t think Smile is very good” and make an argument for why that is, and be believed. Not like the album is bad, but that its legend is obscuring what the reality is-- which is like, “I was a kid who had a lot of weird ideas about magic and all this different stuff and I thought I could make this incredible album” and that there was hubristic stuff to it, it’s overwrought in various ways.

But there was a moment where, when I was working on the book, I had this sort of conscious fantasy. Whenever things would go bad, whenever I faced a setback, whenever I’d lose a job, or whenever I had to move when I didn’t necessarily know that I’d have to move, there was certainly this thought of like “Oh my god, Brian Wilson used to talk about how Smile was magic. What if, in writing this book, I somehow tapped into that same magic and it’s bringing on a curse-- that it’s pulling through some of this negative energy.” That’s a crazy thing to think but at a certain point I had a run of bad luck and started thinking, what if it is cursed to do this?

There were definitely moments where it seemed like there was a lot arrayed against this book. But part of the legend is that if you keep going with it, it’ll come out to some conclusion. I think there were definitely times where like, “I really believed I'm never going to sell this. I just need to put this away, no one wants this weird book.” And there was something about knowing I was participating in that legend that was helpful to at least open the door to that fragile possibility.

However, much like Brian Wilson in 2016, when you ask, “Is this book your statement?” It’s not.

There’s definitely a sense in which this book—had it come out closer to the time I had written it—I would have really stood up for some of its central design where “we should turn away from the cis world and its ideals; we should turn towards trans solidarity; we should turn away from capitalism, we should turn toward finding our way through the desert.” There’s a stridentness to that vision that's radically separatist that I don’t necessarily subscribe to now. But I certainly acknowledge that I believed that at the time, and tried to not efface it from the book

That surprises me. As a writer, I would’ve assumed you’d want the most ideal vision of yourself to be reflected in your work. Why wouldn’t you edit out those parts you no longer believed in?

Do you know the writer Corinne Manning? They wrote this book called We Had No Rules that I really think is fantastic. Its this collection of short stories they had written over the years that are about various queer lives, forms of queer relationships, etc. At a certain point Manning was preparing to collect them in a book. They started to think about the question of how ethical these stories are, how ethical are the relationships they’re depicting in them.

And they made a point of asking—without changing the content of the stories—”Can I drain the stories of the magic and romance of that perspective? Can I reveal the darkness that was in what I was writing for this long period of time that reflects the way I’m looking at it now?”

Some of the final changes in how Summer Fun conceptualizes the way cis women and trans women relate to each other tries to reflect that. I think the novel was presented very differently in 2015 than how it’s presented now. It’s still something that I don’t totally own as a statement but I'm trying to—in presenting it this way—to at least set it off to its best advantage, to present all the rough spots, even putting highlights on them.

When you’re young, it really does seem that dramatic, and it really does seem like transitioning is just the hugest thing in the world; and it's going to change everything once you step into this moment of radical transformation, that everything is going to be different. I think this idea is, at best, quaint now but I also think it was important in writing this not to throw this book away, to say, “Look, somebody believed that at one point. Somebody thought this was that deadly serious.”

This is a book that someone thought was very important to write in this way. Part of my job is to curate it, to become its editor, to become its caretaker even if I can't claim to be its author right now.

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Bill Cheng is the author of Southern Cross the Dog.