We chat with author Isaac Fellman about Notes from a Regicide, which is a heartbreaking story of trans self-discovery with a rich relatability and a science-fictional twist.
Hi, Isaac! Can you tell our readers a bit about yourself?
Notes from a Regicide is my fourth book – it’s a trans family saga about trying to figure out who your loving but withholding adoptive parents were, and finding out more than you expected about a revolution (and the local art scene) in a far-future fantasy city. As for my other work, The Breath of the Sun is about problematic lesbian mountain climbers, Dead Collections is about a trans archivist who’s a vampire, and The Two Doctors Górski is about…I mean, it’s about emotional abuse in grad school, but everyone’s a telepath.
I work in the fascinating field of historical archives. I used to be older than I looked, and now I’m even older.
When did you first discover your love for writing and stories?
I started writing as soon as I knew how to print, and I was one of those imagination games kids – I always wanted to embroider on any fact or scenario you handed to me, to make it more of a story. In my day job as an archivist, I still have to watch out for my tendency to hallucinate details that I want to be true about history.
Quick lightning round! Tell us:
- The first book you ever remember reading: Ursula Le Guin and S.D. Schindler’s Catwings is an early memory for me, but the first books I remember really connecting with were Tolkien’s The Hobbit and Wil Huygen and Rien Poortvliet’s Gnomes. I have no idea what I made of the more adult stuff in Gnomes. Knowing me as a kid, I’m sure I flew serenely past.
- The one that made you want to become an author: When I was 14 or so, the Great Gatsby taught me that the ceiling on English prose was insanely high, and Fitzgerald’s life taught me that you can drop dead at any time. This continues to inform my work and to keep my therapist employed.
- The one that you can’t stop thinking about: There are a lot of books like this, but my abiding favorite is Pale Fire by Vladimir Nabokov, which I’ve read several times and have a different opinion of each time.
Your latest novel, Notes from a Regicide, is out April 15th! If you could only describe it in five words, what would they be?
Tragicomic art-and-revolution saga.
What can readers expect?
To make some new friends and watch them get crushed by the wheel of history. No, it’s a book about people who’ve been through a lot, who struggle to be close as a result, and who don’t always know that love is enough. Some of the things they’ve been through include the paranoid obsessions of princes, art-scene drama, and government-by-corpse.
Where did the inspiration for Notes from a Regicide come from?
It’s a book I’ve written twice, first in 2013 and then in 2020; these are not characters who were willing to let me go. In terms of my own transition, they showed up before I came out, they helped me come out, and then I returned the favor by bringing them back to life. The first major image in the book was from a dream, but the rest was inspired more by 19th-century literature like Les Miserables, gay fiction like the works of Alan Hollinghurst, and campy tales of creative envy like Amadeus, though I hadn’t seen Amadeus at the time and was only going on what I thought it’d be like. (I was right, btw, everyone should see Amadeus.)
Were there any moments or characters you really enjoyed writing or exploring?
I feel very close to all three of the main characters – Griffon, the morose journalist who’s more cutting than he seems; Etoine, the neurotic painter who’s less cutting than he seems; Zaffre, the painter who’s 90% less neurotic than her husband Etoine but 300% more mentally ill. I’ve seen them all through the worst moments of their lives, and I’ve let them all get to a point where they can joke about it. My favorite character, though, is Etoine. I’m very attached to what TV Tropes calls the “performer vs. technician” story, where you have a rivalry between an artist who’s obsessed with instinct and one who’s obsessed with mastering technique. The thing is, the role of the technician is more fun to perform, and precisely because I’m a performer myself, I prefer to write about technicians like Etoine.
Did you face any challenges whilst writing? How did you overcome them?
When I set out to rewrite this book, I gave myself the challenge of combining a new framing device (Griffon trying to solve the mystery of his parents’ lives) with an old plot (Etoine and Zaffre caught up in their revolution). The two take place in very different science fictional futures, since the world has broken up into isolated city-states. The place where Etoine and Zaffre are from is a lot more fantastical, with forgotten technology and a bizarre, moribund government. Griffon comes from a far-future New York which is relatively culturally recognizable. I had to create two futures that felt at home in the same book, and there was no way to bridge them except to try and create characters who felt complex and lived-in enough to follow from place to place. There were no shortcuts. The book lives or dies by the characters.
What do you hope readers take away from Notes from a Regicide?
The book has a pretty shameless message: it’s worth trying things that you honestly believe are impossible, whether that’s remaking society into something kinder or just connecting fully with the people around you. All my books are about hoping against hope and pushing back against entropy, but they’re also about what that costs, and how hard it really is.
What’s next for you?
I’m on submission right now with a historical fiction manuscript about a closeted trans woman astronaut in the 1960s, and I’m writing a hardboiled mystery about being in therapy.
Lastly, what books are you looking forward to picking up this year?
A couple of my friends have incredible books coming out soon: Mattie Lubchansky’s Simplicity and Caitlin Starling’s The Starving Saints. I was just in a panel with Elaine Castillo, whose Moderation I can’t wait to get, and for very different reasons I’m also looking forward to Strange and Perfect Account from the Permafrost by Donald Niedekker and Herculine by Grace Byron.
