Books

The Stylist
Interview with Cai Emmons about The Stylist

Q: Your main character, Hayden, is a hairdresser who has dropped out of Harvard. How did she come about as a character?

I grew up in a Boston suburb where Harvard cast a long shadow. There was a huge emphasis not only on going to college, but on going to the ‘right’ college. If you went to Harvard people thought you had achieved some pinnacle of success. I liked the idea of a character who rejected this notion and opted to discard a high class/high brow education that might open doors for her, in favor of something she could fully embrace and call her own, even if it was what her father – her whole family – would think of as déclassé.

Q: Emory Bellew appears at the beginning of the book as a “she” and by the end of the book Hayden refers to Emory as “he.” What drew you to writing about a transgendered character?

I have always been fascinated by what it means to change one’s gender – it is such a complex choice in our gender-bound culture. I never wanted to be a man in quite the way Emory Bellew does, but I do think that I’ve wanted certain aspects of what we think of as masculinity. I developed the idea very early on that things would be better if everyone were androgynous. In fact, the first play I wrote was a surreal piece about two women, a couple, who have ten ‘neuter’ children. The children are sent out into the world and in the course of the play they come back to tell their stories about being neuter in a gendered society – all pretty horrific stories.

Q: How did you research the transgender aspect of the book?

I did as much reading as I could, particularly the personal testimonies of people who had been through some sort of gender transformation. Amy Bloom wrote a wonderful book called Normal that explored the experiences of transsexuals, among others. I loved reading about the experiences of the musician Billy Tipton, who was a biological woman, but who “passed” for most of his life as a man without having had any surgery. I read books by Jan Morris and Renee Richards and Kate Bornstein and Deidre McCloskey, all of whom went through gender transformations. It was easier to find written testimonies about people men who had become women (M-to-F’s) than to find stories about women becoming men (F-to-M’s). I was also very fortunate to make face-to-face contact early on with two F-to-M transsexuals who were happy to share their stories with me: Ryan Powell and Sunny McHale. I met Ryan through a mutual friend. He was still in high school when he first had his breasts removed, and at the time we talked he was interested in having access to both male and female personas. Sunny I met in a weekend course about gender taught by Liz Reis. She brought Sunny in to talk to the class. He had been a man for a long time and he was married. In fact his wife came to the class too. It was hard, at first, for me to wrap my mind around the fact that he had ever been a woman. That surprised me, that he could appear so completely masculine. Afterwards in our conversations over coffee, I was impressed with how comfortable he was with his both his gender and his sexuality. Later I attended the 2004 Transgender Odyssey in Seattle. It was a conference for F-to-M’s (and their partners and families) to discuss the issues that arose for them to do with relationships, surgery, etc. I was warmly welcomed and I learned so much in the space of a few days. Many of the people there had accomplished stunning transformations and were very happy, but I also saw a great deal of struggle and pain. Some lesbians there were upset by having their partners become men. There were also a few parents whose children were going through gender transitions.

Q: The second part of the book takes place in an eco-resort in Costa Rica. Why did you choose that location?

In 2000 I traveled with my husband and son to an eco-resort in Costa Rica that was very similar to Tranquilidad. It was a composed of a series of bungalows on a hill in a monkey-and-bird-filled jungle. At the top of the hill was the thatched open-air palapa where we all ate – it had a beautiful view out over the jungle to the water. At the bottom of the hill was the Golfo Dulce, edged by a beautiful beach. Because there were not many guests, and because we all ate in the same place and went on walks together, we formed a loose community and were acutely aware of each other’s comings and goings. It seemed a rich place to set a novel.

Q: At the beginning of the book we are exclusively in Hayden’s point of view, but gradually, as the story develops we begin to see things from Emory’s point of view, from the father’s point of view, from an external narrator’s point of view, and even from the viewpoints of some of the characters at the resort. Why did you decide to include those other points of view?

The decision to widen the point of view came to me gradually as I went through draft after draft. Early on in the writing this was a first person story, written from Hayden’s point of view exclusively. But I gradually realized that we weren’t seeing around Hayden’s viewpoint sufficiently. I wanted people to be able to see her more objectively, more from the outside. So I began writing from the third person, occasionally pulling back to some viewpoint that is an outside narrator’s. Eventually the point of view became even wider, to include Emory, Angus, and even Janine and Perry who are relatively minor characters. The inclusion of those other perspectives mirrors Hayden’s learning curve. As the book moves along she begins to see that her viewpoint is not the only right one – her sister Cornelia has a different view of things, as does Angus, as does Emory, as does Manuela. By the end of the book Hayden’s transformation is to see that all of these different viewpoints are valid, they can co-exist, they do co-exist whether she wants them to or not.