We chat with author Katherine Packert Burke about All Us Saints, which is a literary family drama packaged as a two-act play, offering brilliant and scathing commentary on the cisgender gaze.
Hi, Katherine! Could you tell us a bit about the inspiration for this novel?
This book arose out of the way Ed Gein’s murders in the late 50s have gone on to permeate film culture. Gein, among other horrors, was reported to be building a skin suit out of women’s corpses so that he could “become his mother.” The fallout from this is familiar to almost anyone: it was a direct inspiration for Robert Bloch’s novel Psycho and Hitchcock’s film adaptation, for The Texas Chain Saw Massacre‘s house of human-skin lampshades (and the cross-dressing Leatherface), and—naturally—both book and film of The Silence of the Lambs. That a single, obviously ill, person could be responsible for such a legacy struck me as both incredible and sad. It’s unclear what, exactly, Gein’s relationship to his own gender was, but it’s hard not to see him as someone who might, under other circumstances, have been like me. Someone who, in the conservative Midwestern milieu of the 50s, had no idea what to do to feel like a woman besides sew a skin suit out of dead women. And so I wanted to write about such a legacy, and think about the complications of True Crime as a genre and its various legacies (for example, the woman whose story kicked off the Satanic Panic married the man who helped her tell it), and the way these stories reverberate through both culture and family.
All Us Saints is structured like a play, made up of two acts and an intermission, and narrated with a focus on the environment and physical actions. What made you decide to frame the book this way and how does that structure inform the story itself?
The thing about a play is that you are confined—either as an audience member stuck in your seat, or as an actor who cannot move or turn past a certain point without disappearing and your words getting lost. The very first attempt at writing this book began outside the house, with characters trying to go about their normal lives; it didn’t work at all. The play structure arose out of that feeling of confinement, and a desire to force characters to externalize their worries and their traumas instead of just mulling them over endlessly. The ritual the family does—narrating the night of the murders—arose out of this need: to have characters speak the thing aloud. Beyond that, the children grew up in a theater family, with playwright parents. Having the book structured like a play is a reminder that, though the parents are absent, they continue to shape their children’s lives. It is only in the interstices (the prologue and intermission) that we can get away.
The dramatis personae lists all characters by name except for one—”The Monster”—but we learn they do have a given name in the text. How does this title function for you in the story and what does the word monster mean?
The initial thing that prompted this was that Michael Meyers, the killer in the Halloween franchise, is credited in the first film simply as “The Shape,” even though his name is said over and over throughout the film. My monster is more human than Halloween’s Shape, but I wanted the dramatis personaeto be just as much a part of the inescapability of the structure as the rest: they are called a monster by the book because the book (like the house, like the family) is a structure with no space for them. But there is power in identifying with the monstrous. Susan Stryker’s “My Words to Victor Frankenstein…” is an important touchstone for all of my work; there she writes: “Monsters, like angels, functioned as messengers and heralds of the extraordinary. They served to announce impending revelation, saying, in effect, ‘Pay attention; something of profound importance is happening.’”
Can you talk a bit about how you got from Still Life to All Us Saints?
Still Life is, at its core, a book about what happens when you leave; Saints is a book about what happens when you don’t. I’ve seen people talk about Still Life as “autofiction,” a term that it consciously asks to be placed alongside, but it was always also a genre experiment. Apart from my first published story in 2016, I’ve never written anything else that asks to be read as autobiography. Still Life was an attempt to plumb the conventions of the genre and see what I could do with them. AUS is maybe a little less clear in terms of the genres it’s working in—I would call it a gothic novel, but it also has the theatrical elements, and true crime, and other touchstones that will be more misleading if I name them (Columbo, for instance). But at their hearts, both books are about the stories we believe, and how those stories mislead us. They just get at those questions by different means.
All Us Saints is a trans story, and it’s also quite a dark story. Do you think that trans literature has particular responsibilities toward its readers?
A few years ago I wrote an essay about rereading Nevada, and how reading trans lit in 2019 scared me so badly that I half-closeted myself again. I failed to say it there, and I wish I had: it isn’t trans lit’s job to make transition easier. Trans lit has the same job all literature does: to give an honest glimpse of some corner of the world. Half a dozen years past those dark times, I now find it more “affirming” (define that as you will) to read books about gay men torturing each other to death than I will find any book about coming out; eventually you have to stop coming out, and live your life, and answer the question, now what? Trans lit offers some unique possibilities in that regard (thinking, for example, of Anton Solomonik’s story “Cassandra,” in which a trans man and woman cross-dress as their assigned genders at birth) which I think writers should take full advantage of. But otherwise, it’s just a matter of saying, This is how things look from here.
Who is your dream reader for this book, and what questions (or answers!) do you hope they come away with?
My ideal reader is one who can brook a little discomfort. No one in the book comes out looking particularly good, but I find them all lovable in their own demented ways. I never write toward answers but I do like to play in the space of a few questions. For me, anyway, this novel is about the following: when must people die? how does cisness make the world we live in—not only individually, but geopolitically? And is there a way out?
