CR 030: Edward Underhill on Writing, Identity, and Time Travel
The author discusses his enchanting new novel, “The In-Between Bookstore.”
If you had an opportunity to travel back in time and speak to your younger self, what would you say? That’s the central question in Edward Underhill’s latest novel, The In-Between Bookstore. It tells the story of a trans man, Darby, who—recently fired and on the cusp of turning 30—is no longer sure he wants to live in New York City. In search of a fresh start, he moves back to his small Midwestern hometown and revisits one of his favorite old haunts, the bookstore where he worked as a teenager. But when he goes through its doors, he lands back in 2009 and comes face-to-face with his pre-transition 16-year-old self. A poignant story of self-discovery, friendship, and family, it was, Underhill says, a joy to write. “It was a book that I genuinely never thought I would have the chance to actually write,” he said over a recent Zoom call. “But there were aspects of it that I was just like, ‘This is why I love reading. This is why I love writing.’ And getting to elbow my way in and out of other genres was fun.”
Underhill, who is trans and queer, writes stories about trans and queer characters, though he stresses that that’s not the focus of his books. “I don’t want the identities that I write to feel like they’re just dropped in for no reason,” he says, “but that you read them because they are good and fun stories. Part of the excitement I felt getting to write The In-Between Bookstore was that this was the kind of stuff I loved reading as a kid, these high-concept stories where it feels like there are high stakes and there’s a lot of angst, and you have a time traveling bookstore and also, the character happens to be trans. That is important, but I’m not interested in writing just about how hard that is, or just about why people should think that our stories matter. I’m interested in writing stories about time traveling bookstores and also happen to have [the character] be trans.”
I recently spoke with Underhill about his writing process, researching time travel, and how he juggles his work as both an author and a composer.
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SANDRA EBEJER: I read that you’re a composer and you studied music in college. When did you begin writing books?
EDWARD UNDERHILL: I’ve actually been writing stories longer than I’ve been writing music. I started playing cello when I was five, and I started making up musical things around that time, just improvising on my cello. I started writing stories—in the sense of actually writing something down on paper—by the time I was 10. And I started writing in a more concentrated way about the same time I started composing in a more concentrated way, which was in high school. In both cases, I definitely bit off a little more than I could chew. My first thought was not “I’m going to write a short story” or “I’m going to write a little piece of music for piano.” My first thought was, “I’m going to write an entire novel and I’m going to write an entire symphony for orchestra.” So I guess I just don’t know how to do anything that’s short and uncomplicated. [Laughs]
The In-Between Bookstore is your first novel for adults. Where did the idea for this book come from, and why did you decide to write it for adults as opposed to younger readers?
Back before Twitter was a raging hellscape, I remember seeing this question going around that was basically, “If you could tell your younger self anything, what would it be?” Of course, there were a lot of people saying lighthearted and joking responses like, “I would give my younger self the winning lottery numbers” or something like that. But I was struck by how many people shared deeper, more vulnerable things, and especially how many queer people I saw saying, “I would tell my younger self we’re gay, we’re trans, we’re going to be fine.” And this was definitely a thought that I had myself. I certainly talked to other trans people who have had this feeling of being glad for the journey that we’ve had, but also feeling like maybe something would have been better if we could have figured this stuff out sooner. I have definitely thought, “I wish I could have somehow told my teenage self, ‘There is a reason that you’re feeling this way. There is language that you don’t have that can give you a new kind of identity that you’re looking for.’” And because of that idea of going back and talking to your younger self, to me that meant that it needed to be an adult book, that I needed to have this adult character going back and working through some of this stuff. This was a lot of stuff that I have also wrestled with—trying to make sense of where you come from, and how to reconcile growing up in a place that didn’t always make space for you but having some emotional attachment to that and the complex and gnarly feelings that evokes.
After reading your bio, it seems that there are quite a few parallels between your life and Darby’s life. How much do you pull from your own life when writing your books?
It’s a complicated question, because I am often pulling pieces of myself into the characters that I write and into the settings that I write, because I’m writing books from an emotional place. I’m looking for some kind of emotional truth when I’m writing, and then I have to build a plot around that. And I think that for a lot of the things that I write, I’m trying to fill in gaps between things that I have read. In the queer literature that I’ve read, a lot of it has taken place in big, blue coastal cities. So when I wrote my first YA book, Always the Almost, I wanted to write about a trans kid who was in the Midwest, because that was how I grew up. I wanted to write a story that could remind people that queer people don’t exist in one specific way or in one specific place, and the Midwest is very complicated and diverse.
I think there are pieces of me that are in The In-Between Bookstore that aren’t pieces that have found their way into my young adult books yet. And some of these—like complex feelings about home—is absolutely stuff that I have wrestled with. There is a certain catharsis in getting to write about that and getting to emotionally process it for yourself. I think some of those things find their way into my stories without me even necessarily intending to put them there. Some of it is just like, well, I could talk to a therapist, or I could write a book. [Laughs]
Did you enjoy writing about time travel? Was there a lot of research involved?
The logistics definitely melted my brain more than once. I tried to approach the time travel so that it felt organic to what the story needed. I did do some research, but just to get a sense of, where is the science at? Because in the modern age, you can’t have a character who thinks they might be time traveling not immediately Google, “Is there any chance that I’m time traveling?” Otherwise, I tried to treat it like a logic problem—how can this make logical sense within the world that I am building so that it feels like it has enough rules to be plausible, but not get so bogged down in science that it takes away from the forward momentum of the story? I did a bit of research, but a lot of it was just thinking through various story problems, which was where the logistics would melt my brain a bit. I would be super into the scene I was writing, and then I would be like, “Oh, crap. This logistical problem has come up, and I can’t go anywhere until I solve it.”
One of the early ones, for example, was that everybody these days has a smartphone. So if you walk into a bookstore and you suspect you’ve time traveled and you see your younger self, I knew the first thing Darby was going to do was take a picture of that person and be like, “I’m going to show this to my mom, and maybe someone can explain what the fuck is going on.” So, [I realized] I had to get rid of his phone somehow. That became the problem to solve—how can I make the logistics of this story work in ways that feel plausible, so that Darby doesn’t have access to his phone? What I eventually landed on was when he goes through the doorway into the bookstore, he’s going through some kind of portal, so we’re just going to say that the energy zaps his phone. It runs out of battery. With stuff like that [it was], what’s the explanation that feels natural and organic but isn’t going to involve me writing three paragraphs of why this makes sense and taking away from the momentum?
In addition to The In-Between Bookstore, you have another YA book coming out in May. What is your writing process like? How do you juggle it with your work as a composer?
I work all the time, but this is also how my brain works. I grew up losing myself in stories, whether they were things that I was reading, things that I was watching. As a kid, I was constantly pretending to be someone else. So having my brain get lost in worlds of pretend, in a way, is a thing that has been happening for years. When I was more focused on composing, and I was basically working 80 hours a week on TV shows, the stories I was building in my head became my own escape space to play around in. There’s so many computers I was using for composing [and] eight years ago, they weren’t as fast as they are now. When I decided I wanted to get more into writing and try to get something published, I would write by hand in a notebook for the 20 minutes it took them to power up in the morning. There was something freeing about that, because that was all I had. I had 20 minutes. I could either sit there and stress about whether the words I was writing were perfect, or I could just put words on the page. I think that was a useful experience for being able to let go and trust in the process. I was going to be able to fix whatever I had eventually; it didn’t have to be perfect the first time.
How does it feel to have this book released a week before the inauguration?
In many ways, not great, but this is the world that we live in right now. It’s a scary time to be a trans person in the United States. It’s a scary time to be writing trans books in the United States. I have been lucky that my team has seen the heart of this book and has been behind it 100%, but it feels like an odd cognitive dissonance to see that happening and then also be aware that there are libraries that won’t stock it because they’re worried about blowback, and there are media outlets that won’t cover it, because it’s just too risky to talk about a trans book right now.
And then the cognitive dissonance of, yes, in some sense, I set out to write a trans book because the main character is trans, and you can’t take that identity out of someone’s story and expect it to be the same story. It is a part of who a character is; it’s a part of who I am. But also, so much of my day is, I’m getting up in the morning and I have to put on pants, and I have to go feed my cat because she’s yelling at me. That’s my existence, and that’s the existence of the characters I write. We’re not sitting there being like, “How can I make myself very political today?”
I know what you mean. I think you were successful in that, yes, the characters are trans, but that’s not the point of the book. It’s not the sum total of who they are.
Right. That was something I was thinking about a lot. I wanted this balance of the universal and the specific. Like, if you could tell your younger self anything, what would it be? That’s an extremely universal thing that all of us, I think, have thought about or wish we could do. And then the specific is that I am writing about this one character’s experience, and this character happens to be trans. With a lot of high-concept stories, you start with the big “what if” question, and the question pulls in a reader, and then you’re reading it to find out what this specific character does.
Have you found that the publishing industry has been open to your work?
Publishing is a business driven by money, so if they see that something is profitable, they will invest more resources in it. At the same time, the people who are working in publishing do want these stories. That was a wonderful surprise, to feel like editors are looking for these diverse perspectives. They want these books. And I was really worried about that after the election. I was like, “Well, that’s it. My career is done.” Instead, I got outreach from my agent, I got outreach from the editors I was working with, right away, to say, “We still want these stories. We are going to be championing these stories for as long as we possibly can.” There are so many amazing people working in publishing who want to try and get these stories out there, and who want to push them as I wish they would be pushed, which is, “This is a really great book. You should read it,” and not “This should be our diversity token book that we’re going to give a few resources to and then not do that much for.”
Who are some of your influences as a writer?
Oh, gosh. So many. I remember being a kid and checking out Howl’s Moving Castle by Diana Wynne Jones from the library. That was one of the first books that made me really want to write something like it. I’d never read anything that funny, I’d never read anything that inventive, and it was a book that made me realize the potential that you could do with stories, that they were limitless in really exciting ways. So that was definitely an early influence. But really, it’s almost every book I read. I mean, authors talk about, “You should read this book and this book. They’re so great, and you can learn so much from them.” But the thing is, I learn from books that I don’t like, also. I’ll read a book and be like, “This isn’t working for me.” That’s helpful. Why isn’t this working for me? What would I do differently? So, I feel like I’ve learned something from every book I’ve read, whether I’ve liked it or not.
I will say one other book that I feel like nobody has ever heard of. It was in my local library growing up. It’s called Pagan’s Crusade by Catherine Jinks, and it’s this incredibly anachronistic, YA before YA was a thing book. I had never read a voice like that. It was first person, present tense. It’s so snarky. I was laughing my head off the entire time I was reading it. But it also hit like an emotional gut punch. I had never thought about what you could do with voice in that way.
In keeping with the themes of the book, what would you say to yourself if you were able to travel back to your teens?
I would probably say, “You’re trans, and here’s what that means.” So much of what I wrote in that book was therapy, in a way. I would love to be able to go back to my younger self and say, “You need to trust the people around you more. You don’t need to absorb everything that society is telling you, like, ‘You can be trans, but only if you do it as a clean break, only if you cut everyone out of your life because you’re too weird, and no one will understand that, so the only option you have is to completely start over from scratch.’” I wanted the book to be a way to explore those smaller damages and how they add up, and the damages that queer people inadvertently do to each other by internalizing some of that stuff. I know I did that damage to other people, and I know other people did that damage to me. I let a lot of relationships wither because I assumed that no one could possibly understand what I was going through or would accept me or understand what I was telling them.
What do you want readers to get from this book, besides just being entertained?
I always struggle with this question because I’m someone who believes in death of the author—once I’m done with the book, once the book is out in the world, it doesn’t matter what I wanted readers to get out of it. It’s up to the readers to see what they see. But, certainly, one of the driving forces behind writing it was I wanted to write a book [about] empathy for our past selves, empathy for our present selves, empathy for the way people are messy and don’t always see or understand each other, and the ways that that’s not even necessarily anybody’s fault. It just happens. I hope readers can have empathy for these experiences that they might not recognize and be excited about the possibilities of that. It was a story I wrote to try to make sense of a lot of painful things in these characters’ past, but I also wanted it to be a story about possibility and the paths you take and the paths that you don’t, but that you have agency in choosing what you do. I hope that readers can feel some of that agency for themselves.
To learn more about Edward Underhill, visit his website.
To purchase The In-Between Bookstore, click here.
This interview has been edited for clarity and length.
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