Andrea Lawlor

Andrea Lawlor is an American, non-binary author, known for their debut novel Paul Takes the Form of a Mortal Girl.

Quotes

• I tried outlining, tried to understand three-act structure, tried to impose a plot, but kept coming back to my sense that I just needed to follow Paul, that my structure was going to have to be a little queer as well ... I realised my reluctance had to do with my understanding of how people change, how I've changed – really slowly, recursively, making the same mistakes over and over.
  • On composing the structure of Paul Takes the Form of a Mortal Girl, from an interview with Jordy Rosenberg (2018)

• Sex is a part of life. I think pleasure's really important. I feel that our queer and trans cultural heritage is to prioritise pleasure and self-fulfilment, self-knowledge and art and humour – those seem like really good things to me.
  • Interview in The Guardian (2019)

• At 18, 19 queer theory felt really glamorous and the place to get answers, and I feel like I understood about 1% of what I was reading. Barthes really spoke to me, Judith Butler's work felt highly important and I'm sure I still don't really understand it and that's become OK with me over the years. Queer theory was just really cool.
  • Interview in The Guardian (2019)

• Coolness is a big problem in queer life, always being attracted to the shiny thing and not always necessarily being kind.
  • Interview in The Guardian (2019)

• Finding a word that fits right is not my biggest concern, but I think it's a valuable thing and non-binary is useful. For me I say 'trans-ish'. Transmasculine works for me, if trans is a real umbrella term. I've got a number of friends my age or older who have a similar gender situation, who are using they/them pronouns or have switched recently. I'm just really grateful to young people for making that a viable thing. Pronouns have not been a place where I've put my energy and yet I've benefited from other people's energy.
  • Interview in The Guardian (2019)

• My kid's still pretty young, but my partner and I feel strongly about trying to make as much room as possible for liberation in terms of gender and socialisation, so that our kid doesn’t have to essentially have their spirit crushed at this early age. I think there's all these ways in which little kids get boxed in. Maybe it's a gift of being in a queer family, that you get a little more space to just be a person or a creature for longer. And it's all going to come in, we're not bigger than socialisation, we know it. But trying to make that space feels like a part of parenting
  • Interview in The Guardian (2019)

• I feel really excited to have found a way to have an adult queer life that feels great and rich, really different from what I thought was possible and also specifically queer. Chosen family, kinship, living arrangements, parenting roles, it all feels like, 'So this is one thing you can do and you can do it in a queer way.' And that's kind of amazing. I feel that every good thing that has happened in my life has come from being queer.
  • Interview in The Guardian (2019)

• And then meanwhile, the AIDS crisis is going on. There's a ton of activism, and some of my friends were a little bit older and were already going downtown to Act Up meetings. So I started doing that and that was really how I came into queer life, through that kind of radical organising. That was a really exciting place, because it was people working together across their differences to make change. It was a coalition: lots of different people working together with a shared enemy. It's a model which is obviously super relevant today.
  • Interview in Huck (2019)

• It’s hard for me to understand when people are calling some of these trans exclusionary people, "radical feminists" – I really always bristle at that. I don't think they're either radical or feminists. It's a real misnomer from my perspective.
  • Interview in Huck (2019)

• ... we're in a rapidly unfolding global emergency. Why are we talking about this? You know what a pressing feminist issue is? Global climate change. Seriously, excluding trans women from spaces should not be near the agenda. It's obscene.
  • Interview in Huck (2019)

• I love the word queer, because what's useful about it is that it has the potential to be radically inclusive. I hope it signals an interest in, if not radical political thought, at least a destabilising. Destabilising binary ideas of gender and sex. I really struggled with this feeling of not being trans enough, I don’t feel like any of the words really work. I like words that leave things a little unclear. The main thing for me is if you respect people self-determination, and if somebody says they're queer, or they're trans, they are, and it’s not that big of a deal. And I will also say that having been in adult queer life for a number of decades now, most of the time, people who have some vested interest in saying they're queer or trans, there’s a good reason for it.
  • Interview in Huck (2019)

• I had never identified as a lesbian; I liked how the word "queer" signalled transgressive desire without gendering me. I hung out with lots of queer men, and found something closer to my reflection in gay male culture, probably because I could identify with the combination of queerness and masculinity more than with lesbian culture (though I was primarily dating lesbians).
  • In discussion with their publisher (2020)

• I like pleasure! I mean, I'm queer because I find it fun to be queer, not because it makes me feel virtuous to be queer, not because I was "born this way." I don't care at all about why I'm queer; I feel very lucky to have this life, and that's it. Of course, many of us have struggled mightily, and we also have access to such particular pleasures, so many cultural traditions centred around sex and art and beauty and new ways of doing things. As the Pet Shop Boys said, "we were never being boring."
  • In discussion with their publisher (2020)