In April 1965, Harper’s Bazaar unveiled an edition of the magazine guest-edited by photographer Richard Avedon and dedicated to “the off-beat side of Now.” Borne of a moment of upheaval not unlike the one we’re currently living in, the issue explored the people and ideas that were shaping the era. Sixty years later, we’re marking its anniversary by talking to some of our own era’s most influential figures and faces about the idea of the Now.
Many realist novelists write to comment on the now. In practice, that means writing the near future so that it might be the near past when the book finally comes out. However, when things go to shit where a writer lives, and fast, it leaves a novelist guessing: How bad must I make reality in my novel for it to look like actual reality? Get it wrong by making reality too bleak and you’ve accidentally written a doomer dystopia; get it wrong by making reality too positive and you’ve accidentally written clueless nostalgic propaganda.
This problem has me—a trans woman who writes about trans women—paralyzed as I try to write my next novel. On January 28, I wrote an essay about Trump’s executive order that banned gender markers in passports other than the sex assigned at birth. By January 30, two days later, Trump had released so many new antitrans executive orders that my passport seemed like the least of my problems. Forty-eight hours: That’s how long it now takes for an essay on an illegal autocratic order to go from emergency to quaint—never mind the years it takes to write a novel.
I’ve been thinking recently about Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain. When Mann began writing in 1912, he intended his novel to be a series of humorous reflections on the society of the age, based on observations he’d made at a sanatorium in Davos while his wife recovered from tuberculosis: good bourgeois fun. Mann was a supporter of the German Empire at the time. But a year or so into Mann’s writing, an anarchist threw a bomb at an archduke, and boom: the First World War. By the end of the Great War, everything that Mann had believed, the country that he had believed in, the society that he had hoped to criticize—it was all over, lost to the unrecoverable past. During the years of the war, his writing couldn’t keep pace with the destruction that overtook the settled world he’d been trying to describe, and he couldn’t guess at the future.
Yet Mann found a neat solution. In The Magic Mountain, he created a sanatorium suspended in time where his hero, Hans Castorp, debates with other tubercular patients about the values disappearing from Mann’s actual world. For hundreds of pages—and a mystical seven years in the book’s time—the story exists in a kind of eternal 1912. Only in the final pages does the story jerk forward into the war, at which point Hans Castorp runs headlong into a spray of machine-gun fire.
As a counterpoint to Mann’s suspended time, I think of Irène Némirovsky’s Suite Française, an unfinished novel that depicts the stages of French life during the German occupation of World War II as Némirovsky lived through them. Like The Magic Mountain, Suite Française ends abruptly when the author’s present catches up to the novel: Némirovsky herself was arrested midway through the writing. She died in a concentration camp.
Between The Magic Mountain and Suite Française rests the entire range of my options for the world of my next book. Perhaps I might have my protagonist movingly chill out at the equivalent of a health spa for an entire huge novel, or, equally, I might myself die in some horrific and bigoted purge. Hard to say how it will go!
In the meantime, I’ve been trying to calibrate a plot that can accommodate the entire range. Yet, a plot is also a plan for action. Below, I’ve included my notes on the changing plot summaries of my next novel to demonstrate just how I’m gauging and preparing for the trajectory of the imagined future.
Plot Summary, Summer 2022
This will be a Vending Machine Western. Vending machines, I posit, make for a gangster economy: You must claim turf, you deal in cash, your vending-machine empire grows. Like Westerns of yore, this story involves a gold rush and the people the gold attracts. Only it’s black gold: oil. In Montana’s Bakken oil region, two trans women set up vending machines to feed the far-flung “man camps” of the oil drillers. The two of them must wheel and deal to claim prime vending-machine spots while fighting prejudice, battling rival local vendors, and even romancing a few of the lonely oilmen.
Plot Summary, Winter 2023
Okay, there’s no way that two trans women are going to be able to work alone, navigating sheriffs and all, dealing with drillers, in rural Montana. Have you seen the news? A trans woman would have to be crazy to do that. Move the story to Vermont. Make up some new mineral rush instead of oil. Maybe you imagine there’s a cobalt vein discovered in the Green Mountains?
Plot Summary, Fall 2023
I don’t know if two trans girls are going to want to live all alone in Vermont either. Actually, what the two trans women do is that they start a commune for trans girls—kind of a separatist commune—to get away from the bigotry of society at large, to provide for each other. The vending machines are how they fund it.
Plot Summary, Winter 2024
Wow, so states are really going to ban youth trans care, aren’t they? Gotta change the novel in light of that. New twist: The trans-girl commune is using the vending-machine money and the gangster economy to also procure black-market puberty blockers and get them to trans kids in need?
Plot Summary, Summer 2024
You know what? Fuck vending machines. That’s a stupid plot. Who cares about vending machines? Now the girls at the commune are going to be compounding their own hormones. They are, like, growing yams—you can extract estrogen from those!—and they are making a secret laboratory in the woods of Vermont to produce and distribute estrogen for when it gets illegal.
Plot Summary, Fall 2024
Also! The commune ladies make a deal with some cartels to get other types of pharmaceutical precursors. Like, maybe some semaglutides. Really, if you think about it, bodily autonomy and DIY body-mods can’t just be about hormones. That’s why these girls are also going to be about compounding and distributing abortion drugs, maybe? And cheap semaglutides. There’s an affinity between these things.
Plot Summary, Winter 2025
Trump banned trans women from the military? That’s crazy! Like, doesn’t anyone realize that trans women are disproportionately represented in special ops? Wasn’t it a trans woman who shot bin Laden or something? They’re just going to send a bunch of deadly-as-fuck trans women into the world? Well, those women are definitely going to end up at the Vermont trans-girl-separatist commune. And probably they will get violent? Maybe they will incite a violent revolution for trans freedom. …
This article appears in the April issue of Harper’s Bazaar.
