A lot of these poems were written when I wasn’t well. Poetry came to me later in life. I was really in a weird mental state and one thing that’s common among people on the schizo spectrum is this interest in mysticism and Eastern philosophies, although it’s not always the case.
Lovato: I had several original titles, one of which was Digging for Salvation. Another one was Américan with an accent on the E because I stopped calling myself American long ago. As you read my book, you’ll discover I saw some horrific things done with the support of America…
I hadn’t read many memoirs before I started to write my own. When my agent Barbara Berson said, “You’ve got a nonfiction book here.” It was scary for me to say, “This is not a fictionalized world.” I hadn’t gone out of my way to read anything in preparation for writing it.
Because of the fact that I did my MFA in fiction, I actually hadn’t read that many memoirs. But then I started as a staff writer for Buzzfeed News in the fall of 2015, and one of the first pieces that I wrote for them was a genre review of trans women’s memoirs. That was when I became interested.
Wilkinson: A lot of it was intuitive at first. A lot of it was writing and trauma, writing about difficult subjects. It feels possible to do that by writing in fragments, to take bits and pieces and then try to assemble them into some sort of holistic body after the fact, as opposed to just telling a nice, unified narrative.
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