An Interview with KB Brookins, Author of Pretty
The night I saw KB Brookins read an excerpt from their debut memoir, Pretty, at a small brewery in Kansas City, I knew I had to get my hands on the book. A hybrid memoir of transmasculinity, Blackness, belonging and unbelonging in Texas, reckoning with sexual violence and adoptee identity, cultural criticism, and joy, Pretty is an essential addition to the contemporary trans memoir canon. I read it in a single sitting at my desk in Minneapolis, loving its lyricism, its incisive insight, and the warmth and generosity with which KB brings their speaker to a broad audience. I felt cared for reading this book.
One of the things I’m most interested in when I read a memoir by a trans author is all the things that exist outside and around gender and transition. Gender informs how the world receives us and how we react to that reception, but it isn’t anywhere close to the whole story. In Pretty, I found beautiful passages about friendship among butches, bois, and mascs; about pushing the body to its limits in marching band; about yearning for family; and about repairing harm. These are the things I was most excited to ask KB about.
I was so amped to talk to them via video. Our interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Krys Malcolm Belc: I read all the transmasculine and non-binary memoirs that I can, and the memoirs that get out there and get published are very white. Why do you think that is? And what communities are you hoping to reach with your book?
KB Brookins: Whiteness is the most comfortable, most palatable kind of identity for people. When we think about a marginalized identity, we think about white folks and amplifying that community. And I think I noticed that when I was first starting my medical transition in 2020 and looking for literature to tell me what to expect. When I’m looking for transmasculine literature, it’s white. So I started writing just my own experience and talking to other Black trans and transmasc people of color about their experiences. And then it kind of dawned on me that I could, like, try to publish some of the little rants, right? At first that is what I was writing, but then, you know, I made them more so into cohesive pieces.
Who I envision really reading the book is anyone who can stand to learn something from it. And also people who understand and desire to see themselves reflected in literature. So, lots of trans, Black trans folks, right? Black transmasc folks.
But every reader is not going to be the same as me, and I think the things that I talk about don’t just exist in a vacuum, like they’re transferrable experiences. As far as Blackness and transness is concerned, [I’m] ultimately saying something like, You don’t understand me. A lot of different people are going to feel that and have felt that before.
KMB: I was really pleasantly surprised reading your book; the materials I had read about it kind of flattened or even ignored how your book exists as an adoptee narrative. I don’t want to spoil anything for readers looking to pick it up, but there’s a thread grappling with longing for biological family and trying to figure out what their connection to your gender, race, and class is. Can you talk a little about including that thread in the narrative?
KBB: It’s hard describing a book, right? Especially a book that doesn’t have just this one theme that is the through line. As far as adoption is concerned, I have this real and, at times in my life, intense curiosity about what I don’t know, and a really big thing in my life that I don’t know is my biological father. You have these characteristics that you can’t trace. It can just be a very isolating experience. I wanted to reflect that in this book.
There’s a lot about belonging. In depicting that kind of longing for family, I felt it was very queer in nature, a queer longing for someone who understands you, someone who you can be like, Oh, that’s why I walk this way, or That’s why I have this eye color. Having that kind of relation to someone I think is pretty universal, but also very specific to my and to a lot of other people’s queer experience.
I talk about not growing up with my bio parents, but ultimately, I just wanted the book to depict the humanness of wanting to belong someplace, wanting people to understand you, and then also the very specific experience that I have of being, like, Black and trans and also not having some traces to family due to societal expectations and also due to the nature of adoption.
KMB: Thanks—those are some of my favorite parts of the book.
Teen KB in this book is a musician. Marching band and music are really important parts of their life and how they relate to the reader. So what, at this point in your life as an adult, is the relationship between music and writing?
KBB: Music was in a lot of ways my first love. Before I had words and writing, I definitely had music. I come from a very musical family. A lot of people in my family are singers; I mention that in the more religious parts of the book, talking about #religioustrauma, which a lot of us queers have, right?
My relationship to music and writing these days is probably just finding inspiration in the lyricism and in the performance aspects of musicians. Most of the world right now is listening to all those diss tracks between Kendrick Lamar and Drake. There’s a real craft to lyrics and song and poetry also, which is included in this book. The relationship between poetry and music is very close, right?
I even think about, like, the lyric. How way, way, way back in the day, Homer, before the act of writing even existed, was illiterate and said his poems out loud [and] recited his poems and needed a specific type of rhythm in order to memorize pages and pages of a long poem. I say all of that to say: When I approach the blank page as a writer, I’m thinking a lot about sound. So why not be influenced by another medium of art that also is thinking about sound in its composition?
KMB: Can you, for the Split Lip Magazine readers, recommend one book other than yours by a Texan that we should check out?
KBB: I actually just went to an awards ceremony with the Texas Institute of Letters to accept an award for my last book, Freedom House. And a book I’ve been really loving is by Deborah D.E.E.P. Mouton called Black Chameleon—a really amazing memoir that won the Texas Institute of Letters Award for Nonfiction this year. 10/10 would recommend. She’s also the first ever Black Poet Laureate of Houston. Just, in general, a good person.
KMB: You said you’re going on book tour. What parts of that book are you most excited to perform?
KBB: Oh, man. I, for the first time, read some of this memoir at this event specifically about sex stories, so I read a portion of the book that is called “You Just Haven’t Met the Right Guy.” And I had never read it aloud before that event, and people were just kind of eating it up in the audience, even though it was kind of making me blush internally. I’m excited to read that because I’m excited to just, like, get more comfortable talking about sex. I guess it’s like, Well, trans people have sex, right? And talking about the nature of their sex and also the nature of, like, discovery of one’s sexuality I think is, like, so surprisingly relatable. Even people coming up to me after that performance and being like, Man, I really like that because I can really relate and it’s just the whitest, straightest looking man, right? Being able to make someone feel less bashful about talking about their experimentation with their own sexual orientation I think is really cool to see. So I’m excited to hopefully read that again during book tour.
KMB: That’s awesome. I’m really excited about that. I think because I’m a transmasculine reader, I realized how little the experience that a lot of us have—of experimenting sexually after medical transition, after being told our whole lives that we should be fucking men—I was excited to see it in nonfiction. So thank you for writing that into the canon for us.
Okay. I want to talk a little bit about the essay “Pretty.” It’s longer than some of the other essays. It’s got this really interesting lyric structure where it’s talking about this queer volleyball teammate that you had had when you were young and then this relationship in which, looking back, you’re scrutinizing yourself, your past self and the way that you acted. Can you talk just a little bit about this being your first book-length work of nonfiction and how you approached this radical honesty, looking at your past selves through this lens?
KBB: I’m really cognizant of how I show up in the world. I have this beard; I have this, you know, very illustrious, deep voice. I have this specific kind of stature. And I know that when people see me, for the most part, they’re like: [This is a] Man. I think it’s really important for, I don’t know, masculine or male-or-whatever literature to depict fuckups just a little more often because I think that there’s this very ~scare quote~ time that we’re living in of “cancel culture.” Right? And people being so afraid, in theory, of cancel culture. But I’m actually not afraid of people wanting me to be accountable for my actions, past and present. And I think that lets people who have, like I have, perpetuated some misogyny to be honest about the fact that they’ve done that, to commit to doing better in the future, and to show that they now are doing better.
The most rich conversations that I’ve been able to have with other transmascs and also men in my life have been ones where we can be honest with each other, right, where we can say, Hey, this is a kind of thing that I’ve done, and how do I change? I thought it would be weird to publish a book about masculinity without talking about how I myself have perpetuated some of these things that I’m critiquing. So I wanted to include that just to make the book a bit more honest.
I also think that piece in particular [is important] because the book is titled the same as that piece. I think it was me trying to display what to expect kind of in the book. The book is very much a meshing of prose and poetry. The book is also looking at the past through a present lens. I wanted to have that piece in there to hopefully empower other people to be honest, hopefully for other folks to witness. Your life is not over, right? You don’t have to keep being this way after you’ve done something bad. That’s really hard to admit to. With that piece, I made a concerted effort to have conversations with other people in my life to be like, Hey, is this my story to tell? It was a piece that had been just, like, on my mind for a very long time, and with some community support, I was able to hopefully, for lack of better words, put it out there. I’m relieved of feeling like I’m holding a secret.
Krys Malcolm Belc (@krysmalcolmbelc) is the author of The Natural Mother of the Child: A Memoir of Nonbinary Parenthood (Counterpoint) and the flash nonfiction chapbook In Transit (The Cupboard Pamphlet). His essays have been featured in Granta, The Rumpus, Harper’s Bazaar, and elsewhere. Krys is the memoir editor of Split Lip Magazine. He lives in Saint Paul, Minnesota, where he is the Edelstein-Keller Writer-in-Residence at the University of Minnesota.
KB Brookins (@earthtokb) is a Black queer and trans writer, cultural worker, and visual artist from Texas. KB’s chapbook How to Identify Yourself with a Wound won the Saguaro Poetry Prize, a Writer’s League of Texas Discovery Prize, and a Stonewall Honor Book Award. Their debut poetry collection Freedom House won the American Library Association Barbara Gittings Literature Award and the Texas Institute of Letters Award for the Best First Book of Poetry. KB’s debut memoir, Pretty, was released on May 28, 2024 with Alfred A. Knopf.