LGBTQ Books
different about writing it was that
it didn’t feel natural to use food as
the entry point. It was a challenge
to find other ways to access my
memories, and to find my way
back into scenes from the past.The Fixed Stars is in many
ways about resisting fixity—
of identity, of sexuality, of
conceptions of family. What
does the title mean for you?
From a very early age, I looked at
the adults around me and thought
they were these immutable forces,
for good or for bad. I thought all
of us, at a certain point in our lives, would reach this endpoint
when we would be ourselves, finally. I thought that when I
grew up I would feel that sense of authority within myself.
That’s one aspect of what I was trying to interrogate in the
book: being confronted with how naïve that notion was, how
hopeful, and trying to let go of the idea that I would ever beanything that was sturdy or solid or unchanging. That
went both for me and for my relationships. Even through
moments of questioning whether my husband and I were
right for each other I somehow still felt, this is just how it
is. It seemed like we had established this structure and it
was fixed. And of course that’s not the case.In writing this memoir, did you discover anything
that surprised you?
Well into writing the first draft, I still thought I was going
to be able to come to a definitive conclusion about my sexu-
ality, and whether I had been queer all along and had some-
how managed to repress it or whether something in me had
truly changed. What surprised me was that I came out at
the end of writing the book feeling like, yes, what I experi-
enced in myself was a tremendous change. I don’t believe I
was closeted all along. At the same time, I still don’t feel
that I can say what I am. And what surprised me just as much
was that, at the end, I didn’t really care. That wasn’t what
it was about for me anymore. It was about me finding a
way to be comfortable in a place of only being able to know
about myself what I know at any given moment. —D.L.JKP KIDS!
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