Wanting to Reveal Yourself, Wanting to Hide: A Conversation with Jennifer Savran Kelly
Making art that communicates internal truths when you don’t know who you are or who you want to become is routine for most artists at some point. After all, art is a soul-growing exercise, a way to understand ourselves and our contexts. It’s a sometimes-painful project made harder still when you are different in a world that demands conformity.
Jennifer Savran Kelly’s (she/they) debut novel, Endpapers (Algonquin 2023), is a keen-eyed, big-hearted portrait of an artist in search of herself and the fatigue of a life spent bucking social norms. The novel follows Dawn—a young, genderqueer, creatively blocked book artist—as she struggles carrying the weight of people’s expectations, her own included. Her boyfriend wants her to be more masculine. Her boss wants her to be more feminine. Her estranged parents want her to be straight, or at the very least fake it. And Dawn, a fairly recent college grad, wants to figure herself out already and make some important art in the process. She feels as unwelcome in queer settings as heteronormative ones, both of which seem to think she should pick a side and be done with her in-betweenness. And her ready-for-a-fight attitude—a hypervigilance born of experience—is threatening to break even her strongest relationship.
While working in the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s research library, Dawn finds a love letter written on the back of a 1950s queer pulp cover hidden in the endpapers of an old architecture book. She becomes obsessed with finding Gertrude, the letter’s writer, who she suspects may have a similar relationship to gender, convinced it will help her make sense of herself. When she finds Gertrude, the truth is more and less complicated than Dawn had imagined.
I spoke with Savran Kelly about writing a deeply personal book, being a queer artist in a queerphobic culture, and the role of art. This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
E.C. Barrett: Endpapers is the second novel you’ve written and the first one you’ve sold. Do you think there’s something about writing this book that made things click in a way that your previous attempt didn’t?
Jennifer Savran Kelly: I wrote Endpapers at the same time I was learning about the word nonbinary—I had never heard it before. I’m Gen X and when I was in college one of the things that made its way onto my shelf was Female Masculinity by Jack Halberstam. So there was talk of gender and gender nonconformity but there wasn’t the kind of language we have now. As I was writing, these issues were becoming more mainstream, and trans folks were being targeted by violence and proposed legislation. By the time I was ready to start sending the book out, it was a little bit like dangling something shiny in front of the industry. The timing was just accidentally perfect for what I was writing.
ECB: Yeah, but the timing has also got to be a little scary to put out a book like this.
JSK: Yes, it’s very scary, I won’t lie. In terms of doing events, the idea of hanging a sign—Hey, queer event here, come on over!—like, if you hate us, this is a good place to be, right? So, yeah, it’s definitely a little scary. I’m not doing a ton of in-person events, I will say.
ECB: I’m sorry you have to worry about that while doing something so personally and professionally monumental. That sucks.
JSK: It does, although I’m also looking at it as a chance to speak up and speak out in whatever way I can. If it’s meant to reach people, and it reaches those people, then I feel like it’s worth it.
ECB: Early in the novel, Dawn thinks, “I’ve been trying to figure out what I can make if I forget everything the world wants to see when it looks at me.” Can you speak about the tension between wanting to make art that expresses your experiences in a world that’s largely hostile to them?
JSK: That’s the way in which I relate the most to Dawn. I learned about people hiding personal letters under the endpapers of books years ago in my very first bookbinding workshop. That exact sort of tension—wanting to express yourself and hide at the same time—stayed with me for a very long time.
When I wrote this book, I had published maybe a handful of short stories. I didn’t have any good reason to think I would ever publish this novel, because I had not published my last one. So I think that was one of the reasons I was able to write so freely—I didn’t really believe it would be published. It was a journey, you know, a lot of excitement and a lot of, Okay, this is really happening now; if ever I was coming out, I am coming out now. Would I have had the courage to write this book if I knew 100% that it was going to be published? Probably, but it might have been a different book. I may have held back more, I don’t know.
ECB: Dawn struggles with feeling like she has to always be prepared for a fight, assuming everyone is a potential threat. She knows this about herself and she feels like she needs to stop doing that in order to have healthy relationships and interactions, but there’s this other sense in the book that it takes a fighting spirit to be openly different in a dangerous world. Dawn wonders if, “Maybe in the end, most of us simply lose the fight.”
JSK: Dawn is messy and anxious and she has been through a lot in a short time. When you’ve had to fight, you’re prepared for the next fight. I feel like so many books about queer people try to portray sort of sanitized, model queers, to prove that they deserve to be treated with dignity and respect. The same pressure gets applied to BIPOC creators. I wanted to show that Dawn deserves dignity and respect not because she is a model queer, but because she’s human. So I wanted her to be messy and imperfect and all of that, but I also wanted to show her and the reader that she’s not always right. There are people out there who are better, who do care. There are situations and reasons to stand up for yourself in a way that aren’t always a fight, you know? And I wanted her to feel like she can move forward into a world where she can find those people and that inner strength.
ECB: The opposite can be true as well in terms of marginalized creators being expected to write trauma narratives over and over. Like there are two paths for marginalized creators—either show your characters in these terrible situations or show them being exceptional, but don’t give us anything in between. I’m thinking about Gertrude not getting a happily ever after. She’s nearing her death with all this guilt and shame. Meanwhile Marta, the letter’s intended recipient who doesn’t appear in the book, embraced who she was and shared her life with another woman. Tell me about your thinking behind those decisions.
JSK: It was important to me that Dawn could see that even though Gertrude didn’t get a happily ever after, Gertrude still lived a meaningful life with meaningful experiences and she had a lesson for Dawn. I didn’t want it to feel like apples to apples, like, Oh, good, this person had a happy ending, therefore, I will, too. I wanted more nuance.
What is a happy ending? And how do you get there? And given when Gertrude grew up, does she sort of get this happy ending now, in a sense, knowing that her dad had the letter and he protected her without destroying it, that she had been loved? I think there are degrees to happy endings. Gertrude’s didn’t look like what I might consider a happy ending, but there was a journey that Dawn could relate to and could take further.
ECB: Endpapers is as much about Dawn’s gender questioning as it is about figuring herself out as an artist. She starts the book blocked, desperate to produce something meaningful, and the way she eventually does that is through connecting with other queer artists. In the final pages, we get what seems to be the book’s thesis about the work of art: “There’s something beautiful about putting yourself out there when you don’t know who’s going to listen or care, because one day someone will think it matters. And that will be more powerful than anything.”
JSK: Dawn is really trying to tap into something about herself that she can share with the world. And that’s why she’s so blocked artistically, because she’s trying to cover it up and let it out simultaneously. The beauty of art is that it doesn’t stop with the person who created it. It lives its own life. It gets interpreted, it gets reviewed, it gets recreated or reimagined in some other format. You make something and you put it out there and then you sort of let it go and watch the life it takes on. For Dawn, collaborating with her queer friend Alice and other marginalized artists helps her learn that other people can see her and the world in ways she’s longed to see both. It gives her the courage not only to finish the work but to let it go into the world. For me, the novel is a little like that too.
ECB: You’ve written a book that is so much about becoming in and through art, that I wonder, did the process of writing this change your understanding of yourself?
JSK: Yes, in many ways. I was always interested in questions of gender and I definitely strove to look androgynous when I was in college. Then I fell in love and married someone of the opposite gender and I sort of felt like, Okay, well, I’m hanging up my queer card now. I thought I didn’t really need to think about it anymore. I thought that it would just anger the queer community and upset the straight community. And it felt more like a personal issue than anything, so for a long time I was sort of content to let it go.
But being queer is not something that you just decide you are not anymore. In one way or another, it comes back up. Even though I love my husband and I’m happy with the life we have together, I felt like I was not being myself, like I was hiding. Only a few of my friends knew I was bi and I felt very much like I was living some life that was not mine. As I wrote this book, I increasingly wondered, Am I writing about myself? And it became very clear, very quickly, that yes, I am.
It hasn’t been about making any radical changes. I changed my pronouns in my work email and I started adding more masculine elements to my wardrobe, though most people didn’t notice or thought I was just being fashionable. It was about living more as who I am. Writing Endpapers gave me a different way of looking at myself, and it felt really important to me to stay true to my own discovery of who I was and who I could become.
Jennifer Savran Kelly (she/they) (@savranly) lives in Ithaca, New York, where she writes, binds books, and works as a production editor at Cornell University Press. Their forthcoming debut novel Endpapers won a grant from the Barbara Deming Memorial Foundation and was selected as a finalist for the SFWP Literary Awards Program and the James Jones First Novel Fellowship. Jennifer’s short work has been published in Potomac Review, Black Warrior Review, Trampset, Green Mountains Review, and elsewhere.
E.C. Barrett (she/they) (@ec_barrett) writes folk horror, fabulism, and dark speculative fiction. They are or have been an academic, journalist, bookseller, editor, and obituary writer. Their nonfiction work was awarded first place in police/crime/court coverage by the New York Press Association, and they are the recipient of a Saltonstall Foundation Fellowship and financial support from the New York Foundation for the Arts. A Clarion West graduate, E.C. has work in Bourbon Penn, Baffling Magazine, Strange Horizons, Reckoning, and elsewhere.