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PowellsBooks.Blog
Authors, readers, critics, media − and booksellers.

Q&As

Powell's Q&A: Andrea Lawlor, Author of 'Paul Takes the Form of a Mortal Girl'

by Andrea Lawlor, June 17, 2019 9:23 AM
Paul Takes the Form of a Mortal Girl
Photo credit: Steve Dillon

Describe your book.
My first novel, Paul Takes the Form of a Mortal Girl, follows Paul Polydoris, a 23-year-old queer shapeshifter and sometime college student, living in Iowa City in 1993. Through the course of the novel Paul transforms his body at will in a series of adventures that take him from Iowa City to Boystown to Provincetown and finally to San Francisco. I sometimes describe the novel as thinly veiled autobiographical fiction, but of course I am not literally a shapeshifter.

What was your favorite book as a child?
I was (and still am) obsessed with D’aulaires' Book of Greek Myths; I loved the illustrations especially — I traced them and copied them and stared at them for hours. Perhaps unsurprisingly to anyone who knows me, I was most drawn to the stories of Hermes, Aphrodite, and Dionysus. Those are the original Greek myths for me.

Aphrodite

When did you know you were a writer?
I always wanted to be a writer, but felt humiliated by the cliché of that longing. In college I had a clippings file of xeroxed pages of books in which some variation of the sentence “all my life I wanted to be a writer” appeared. I wrote angsty poetry in my teens and made zines a bit later, but didn’t start writing seriously until I was 30. I was working at a web development company as an “information architect” (student loans, don’t judge) when my girlfriend said, “Why are you in that soul-crushing job? You’re a writer.” That was a turning point for me mentally, but I don’t think I described myself as a writer out loud until halfway through my second graduate creative writing program. I found it much easier to say “I’m a graduate student” than “I’m a writer.”

What does your writing workspace look like?
I wrote most of Paul at various coffee shops in Philadelphia and Western Mass, so my writing workspace looked like a table, or part of a table, likely shimmed with a napkin, ideally near a plug, with at least one empty coffee cup and me listening to something familiar, maybe the Cure or PJ Harvey, on repeat to block out the café sounds.

What do you care about more than most people around you?
Frivolity, excess, shiny things. But maybe that says more about who's around me.

Besides your personal library, do you have any beloved collections?
I have a decent collection of queer club flyers and zines and political posters and various ephemera from the ’90s. I thought I’d dump everything into the novel and be done, but the sparks of joy remain.

Have you ever made a literary pilgrimage?
When I was a queer teenager living in New York, on 9th between B & C, I used to walk by what I thought was Eileen Myles’s apartment every morning on my way to my receptionist job at the Putumayo warehouse in Soho. I think I thought poetry was contagious. I later found out that Myles lived on an entirely different block, but by then we’d become friends, which made the idea of a literary pilgrimage more awkward. 

Offer a favorite sentence from another writer.
“There are, to be sure, persons who wish to extract from books guiding principles for their lives. For this sort of most estimable individual I am therefore, to my gigantic regret, not writing.” — Robert Walser, The Robber (Trans. Susan Bernofsky) 

Name a guilty pleasure you partake in regularly.
My current guilty pleasure is the The Vampire Diaries. I just started season 5 and am firmly on Team Damon. Please no spoilers! Similar past guilty pleasures have included Degrassi, Skins, iZombie, and True Blood. I’m not proud. I sound like I’m bragging, but I’m not.

What's the best advice you’ve ever received?
I’ve gotten such good advice in my life! My trouble has generally been in following it. But I will answer this sincerely. When I was 20, my friend Deb told me, “Don’t pathologize your desires,” and this has turned out to be a distillation of important wisdom for me. I think as a young queer person I badly needed to hear that; I have returned to that idea often in my life, even when I’m struggling with something (say, The Vampire Diaries).

Create a Top Five Book List of Your Choice.
We’re living in a golden age of queer and trans fabulist writing — fiction which limns the space between fantasy and literary realism, drawing from traditions of magical realism, surrealism, SFF, and mythic retelling. In the spirit of queer excess, I’m including two Top Five lists.

My Top Five Queer Fabulist Novels
Sub Rosa by Amber Dawn
When a Fox Is a Thousand by Larissa Lai
An Arrow's Flight by Mark Merlis
Girl Meets Boy by Ali Smith
Fierce Femmes and Notorious Liars by Kai Cheng Thom 

My Top Five Queer Fabulist Short Story Collections
Look Who's Morphing by Tom Cho
Painting Their Portraits in Winter by Myriam Gurba
Her Body and Other Parties by Carmen Maria Machado 
Kill Marguerite and Other Stories by Megan Milks 
Blue Talk and Love by Mecca Jamilah Sullivan
÷ ÷ ÷
Andrea Lawlor teaches writing at Mount Holyoke College, edits fiction for Fence magazine, and has been awarded fellowships by Lambda Literary and Radar Labs. Their publications include a chapbook, Position Papers (Factory Hollow Press, 2016), and a novel, Paul Takes the Form of a Mortal Girl, a 2018 finalist for the Lambda Literary and CLMP Firecracker Awards. Paul, originally published by Rescue Press in 2017, is now published in the US by Vintage/Knopf.



Books mentioned in this post

Girl Meets Boy: The Myth of Iphis: Myths 8

Ali Smith

The Robber

Robert Walser

Look Who's Morphing

Tom Cho

Blue Talk and Love

Mecca Jamilah Sullivan

Painting Their Portraits in Winter: Stories

Myriam Gurba

Her Body and Other Parties: Stories

Carmen Maria Machado

Fierce Femmes and Notorious Liars: A Dangerous Trans Girl's Confabulous Memoir

Kai Cheng Thom

Paul Takes the Form of a Mortal Girl

Andrea Lawlor
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