Vanguard of the Supplicants (ft. Torrey Peters)

Our Struggle

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! [e-mail]; [e-mail]; and as always the Our Struggle hotline [phone] - call-in show records in August!