Vanguard of the Supplicants (ft. Torrey Peters)

We were a little perplexed when Torrey Peters came groveling
before us to come on the show. She’d written a best-selling novel
with big topical themes--and other odd things like scenes,
characters, plot. Why did she want to talk to two people who’ve
devoted their own discourse to a seemingly shapeless,
semi-essayistic inventory of one Norwegian’s life?  


Torrey quickly provided her Scandinavian lit bona fides--which is
to say she gave us detailed accounts of her homosocial and
romantic adventures with various laconic Nords. We hear about
dreary ferry rides, a house of forlorn beauty she would never get
to see, Per Peterson’s candlelit dinner routine. These details
allowed Lauren to make the first-ever comparison between My
Struggle and Brideshead Revisited....


We tried to learn a little bit about the uses and operations of
so-called conventional writing. Were we wrong to call easily
translatable prose bland and insipid?  (Actually, it was our
pickly-prickly guest J Cohen who advanced that argument, and
Torrey has some grounded, considered rebuttals for him
here.) 


Still, we wondered, what had Torrey learned from the
Knausgaardian messiness? She showed us how his odd lack of
emotional differentiation helped her render scenes of
dissociation in Detransition, Baby. And why did she beg to come
on our show after all? Torrey told us that her Knausgaardianism
has estranged her from her own community--trans writers, it turns
out, don’t really want to talk about My Struggle. Which is
strange, since, as Torrey reveals, the series is a naively
rigorous documentation of the male code; its essaysistic form
allows us to see the anxiety and barely-concealed messiness of
male performance.  “There’s so much gender there,” Torrey
says (ie, dudes want to perform verbal guitar solos on Hitlerian
themes).


We also asked her to give the official trans community statement
on tinned fish and the hot girls who consume it.


NOTE FROM LAUREN: BUY OUR T-SHIRT! CERTAIN SIZES HAVE ALREADY
SOLD OUT. ourstruggle.store


PS. GET IN TOUCH! teixeira.lauren@gmail.com;
deohringer@gmail.com; and as always the Our Struggle hotline
443-584-6486 - call-in show records in August!