A New Direction for the Trans Novel

In a decrepit Manhattan apartment, Barbara Rosenberg, the elderly Jewish narrator of Jordy Rosenberg’s new novel, Night Night Fawn, is dying from a “notoriously lethal illness.” Thanks to the effect of OxyContin, she’s flickering through memories of her life, composing (possibly only in her head) her uncensored autobiography. She’s periodically attended by her estranged child, J., whom she calls “the bird” and describes as a large, feathered creature with a beak that retracts into a normal nose “like a flaccid penis.” Something other than drugs is obscuring her vision of the person J. has grown up to be. As she faces death, this one topic looms over all others: the frustration and contempt that she feels over her trans kid’s refusal to be the daughter she wanted. The book, animated by Barbara’s reflections, is a striking, darkly comic portrait of a mind narrowed by disappointment. For Barbara, the blows begin early: As an aspiring actor, she attends NYU to study drama—but unlike her trust-fund-supported peers, who reside on campus, she lives at home in distant Brooklyn under her father’s curfew. After college, she has to get a job as an administrative assistant, and instead of finding the surgeon of her dreams, she eventually marries her boss’s son Stephen, a social worker. She also fantasizes about a more adventurous life—a glamorous, robust, back-to-the-land existence in 1980s Israel, but when she visits, no one is nice to her. To make matters worse, her best friend, Sugar, becomes a wildly successful comedy writer who seems incapable—according to Barbara—of seeing the fundamental differences between their lives. As a result of this litany of defeats, she has soured on nearly every ideal, but there is one that Barbara still fully embraces, and that embraces her back: her sense of what it means to be a man or a woman. She is a ruthless arbiter of gendered behaviors; at one point, while walking arm in arm with her husband, she admits to having “a kind of mania for gender itself.” Women, she believes, need to know certain things that men could never understand: “the stakes of looks,” for example, and how difficult it is “to give degradation the slip.” Gender, above all, determines how life is supposed to proceed, from cradle to grave; one of her longest digressions is an overview of the different ways that, to her mind, men and women are supposed to die. (“Every dead man is a felled tree. But women die ignominiously, like dried raisins stuck to the bottom of a Sun-Maid box.”) It’s no surprise, then, that of her many discouragements, the greatest seems to be J. [Read: In defense of fakeness]

Understanding what Jordy Rosenberg is up to might begin by highlighting the obvious: He shares a last name with his protagonist. Rosenberg first set out to write nonfiction, before turning the book into a novel narrated by a woman based on his mother. There are plenty of clues that the bird Barbara speaks with, a transgender Marxist who loves lesbian sci-fi, is a stand-in for the author. But this is autofiction told from a sidelong distance: J. is visible in the novel, but—as seen through Barbara—illegible and terrifying. More than other popular works of trans fiction, the novel recalls J. M. Coetzee’s Summertime, a book written as a series of interviews conducted after the author’s supposed death. In Coetzee’s book, as in Rosenberg’s, readers meet the writer not through a story they tell about themselves but through the stories told about their fictional double. Night Night Fawn borrows real people and events, but it doesn’t use them to create a complex view of a person resembling its author; instead, it uses another character’s biased perspective to offer a partial view of the subject, who is being judged and is found wanting. Rosenberg isn’t only upending the rules of autofiction; he’s also pushing back against prevailing trends in trans writing. The 2010s saw a rise in trans visibility, thanks in part to popular celebrity memoirs by Janet Mock, Chaz Bono, and Caitlyn Jenner, who shared their own stories in the hope of inspiring wider compassion. But during those years, palatable, oversimplified narratives became prominent—and limiting. Even ideas that encourage acceptance, such as the popular notion that trans people inherently feel as if we’re born in the wrong body, can fail to fully capture the nuances of the experience. As this confessional approach has worn thin, the national mood has also changed. Today, the most widely circulated stories about trans life are dehumanizing—the president of the United States has referred to gender-affirming health care as “mutilation”; many influential figures in government classify transness as a mental illness, call us “groomers,” and accuse us of wanting to hurt children. On the surface, telling Night Night Fawn through a character as transphobic, narcissistic, and temperamental as Barbara might seem to give greater weight to the perspectives that shape anti-trans sentiments and legislation. In fact, Rosenberg is exposing the fragile foundation beneath such motivations. His clever autofictional dodge sidesteps the expectation that trans people must explain their life to outsiders. J. never attempts to justify his queerness to Barbara; it’s clear that she wouldn’t listen. And the real-life Rosenberg rejects the impulse to tell his story to some imagined, persuadable audience. Instead, he holds a mirror to his antagonists, revealing the contradictions and flaws they may not want to confront in themselves. In doing so, he delivers a different kind of trans plot—one that does not linger on the pain of coming out or transitioning, but rather focuses on the pain that builds inside a mother who refuses to love her child as he truly is. [Read: Three very different ways to live honestly]

Whether Barbara always had such strong feelings about womanhood or developed them in reaction to her kid’s gender nonconformity is unclear. From the outset, she is at war with J.’s inclinations. In an early scene, she bars her young child from wearing her husband’s blazer to a funeral, an act that Barbara seems to take as a personal affront. When J. plans a road trip with a female lover from college, Barbara intervenes, forcing J. into an Israel Defense Forces volunteer program. Although her memories of being ostracized still color her attitude toward the country, she envisions it as a kind of boot camp for her wayward child. Barbara believes that “in Israel—­land of rigor, gender, and brutality—­they’d take care of the gayness, the mannishness, the whole bit.” But the bird remains defiant into adulthood. And now this only child is camped out in her apartment and is having a lot of phone sex with any number of lovers, all within earshot of his dying mother. Barbara takes this as well as you might expect. As difficult as its main character is, Night Night Fawn succeeds thanks to her compelling, singular voice. Barbara isn’t a caricature but a deeply human portrait of a woman whose worldview swings wildly between moral superiority and intense self-doubt, both extremes that foreclose human connection. These contradictions—colored by her prickly, embittered judgments—make Night Night Fawn a pleasure to read. When, on a date, her future husband successfully parallel parks, she remembers, he “embraced me with all the pomp and circumstance of Odysseus arriving back in Ithaca.” As they head into a movie, Barbara has reservations about his less-than-lucrative career choice. But she’s drawn to him nonetheless. Following a truly great literary hand-job scene in the movie theater—Barbara spends the act soberly mulling her romantic options while Stephen is blissfully unaware—he proposes. Barbara accepts. “Thus are our fates sealed,” she admits. “Not when our hearts open to another person, but when we are confronted with that aspect of a person that is most intolerable to us, and we foolishly believe that we can fuck that intolerability away.” [Read: The cult classic that captures the grind of dead-end jobs] For Barbara, impending death does not inspire a moral awakening, and Rosenberg never gives the reader an origin story that would excuse her cruelty. She is simply not a nice person. Perhaps she sees her child as a bird because it’s easier for her to imagine J. as a creature than as a trans adult. Even her remorse quickly gives way to criticism; in one address to the bird, she apologizes for pressuring her child to have grandchildren. “Those were my dreams,” she admits, not J.’s. “The fact that you & I have a relationship again says more about you as a kind, loving human being (??),” she writes, with a note of incredulity that this should be possible, “than it says about me, but I am learning and trying.” This is a genuinely moving reflection—a lunge toward accountability, acceptance, and even praise. Then, shortly after: “I’m rethinking this apologizing for my dreams thing,” she writes, returning to her rigid distrust. “You’re up to something.” Traditional autofiction might have focused on J., but here, he’s seen only as a negative shape—a series of well-defined gaps in Barbara’s vision. Late in the novel, the reader is given a chance to examine J.’s personal diary, but even this is an incomplete and a possibly misleading look at the character. By focusing solely on Barbara and bypassing his namesake, Rosenberg gives Night Night Fawn a broader view of the world. It forces readers to reckon with the effects of Barbara’s cruelty, not only on others, but on herself. Genuine vulnerability means loving people for who they are, and Barbara cannot—a fact that isolates her. After Sugar betrays her, Barbara cuts her friend off for decades, despite missing her deeply. Her authentic affection for Stephen is tainted by her disappointment over his social status. And her attitude toward the bird prevents her from ever truly seeing her child—from ever truly being a caring mother. In her final days, Barbara still views herself as a victim: of Sugar’s betrayals, of the false promises of mid-century splendor, of Stephen’s generosity, of her child’s identity. She’s turned against the people who seem most invested in her—but they don’t turn against her. Stephen seems to have been an affectionate husband until the end. Sugar comes to Barbara in her time of need, and even helps keep hospice workers from entering the apartment against Barbara’s wishes. And the greatest expression of care comes at the very last moment, in a final, glorious moment of surreal grace at the end of the novel. It shifts our attention from who Barbara was to what Barbara was: a person, worthy of tenderness and care, deserving of the dignity she was incapable of showing to anyone else.