On “Kindred Spirits” with Andrew Joseph White
By: Helena Edge
Barely South Review had the privilege of sitting down with NYT Bestselling author of Hell Follows With Us, Andrew Joseph White during ODU’s annual Literary Festival. Andrew, a native Virginian, has become an icon in the queer, trans, and neurodivergent community for his relatable portrayal of intersectional people. In search of kindred spirits, Andrew does not shy away from reality while exploring fantastic themes. He writes about fantastic monsters and real ones, the kind that haunt his characters—and perhaps his readers. In this interview, we asked Andrew to talk about the various inspirations that went into the writing of Hell Followed With Us, as well as his newest work, The Spirit Bares Its Teeth.
BSR: I want to start by asking about your writing process. How do you begin to come up with a story?
AJW: So, I come up with more ideas than I could ever conceivably use. I never finished anything growing up. I would flip from one thing to the other. When I wrote Hell Followed With Us, it was because I became really, really obsessed with it. And what I learned that I needed to do was get inspiration from everything. Video games, movies, books—everything. If I just took every idea just as it was, I’d maybe get 200 pages out of it, which isn’t a full novel. I have to blend a bunch of them together. I essentially let them sit in my head. So, that’s the brainstorm process. It’s incredibly chaotic.
Plotting is the worst thing ever. Before I start writing anything, I write a 10-page, chapter-by-chapter synopsis so I don’t overlook anything. I have to force myself to work it all out, take all the boring stuff out, and make it cool—and then take that giant synopsis, give it to the person I’m working with and be like, does this make sense? After that point, the book is between me and the devil.
In Hell Followed With Us, Benji, our main character, and Theo, his former fiancé, both grow up closeted in an extremely oppressive culture, but their journeys diverge when Benji leaves. While Benji finds refuge, Theo is left to steep in the ideology of the cult. Can you talk a bit about the lead-up to their final showdown?
Benji recognizes that he and Theo are the same person just in different situations. Benji realizes, I could have been in his spot if things had been different for me. Unfortunately, this is something that’s very real. Whether or not you get to exist as you are is based on whether or not your world hates you or doesn’t hate you enough to let that happen. The only reason that Benji got to get out was because his dad wasn’t fully entrenched in the cult. Theo did not have that. His mom was martyred on Judgement Day. His dad is the general of the cult. He wasn’t getting out. It’s tragic. Which is why Benji takes pity on him at the end. This also comes up in The Spirit Bares Its Teeth. There’s a very similar situation with Charlotte. It’s fine that you pity this person, but they are also the most dangerous person in this situation. You have to protect yourself first. You can’t save them if they’re trying to hurt you, which sucks.
The Acheson LGBTQ+ Center (ALC) acts as a place of refuge for Benji. In The Spirit Bares Its Teeth you write about “kindred spirits,” people who mirror Silas and offer support. In the midst of dark, intense storylines, you offer pockets of safety. Why?
I did not have any queer community to grow in. None. Absolutely none. On top of that, I didn’t figure out that I was Bi until I was 15 or 16, and the whole trans thing wasn’t until college. I had absolutely no community. And even in college, I never felt like I fit in with a lot of queer circles, especially as an undergrad when I didn’t have the chance to cut my hair. Also, autism makes it really, really hard to interact with other human beings. I have no in-person queer community at all, which means that every time I write a book, I am desperate to give the characters this. I’m jealous. It would be very nice, wouldn’t it? I’ve always been relatively well taken care of. Not my characters. They simply wouldn’t survive without a sense of community. Benji wouldn’t have made it through Acheson without the ALC. Silas would not have made it through Braxton’s if not for Daphne and Mary. It just would not have happened. I want my characters to have the thing that I did not get as a kid. Also, if you have a little bit of light, it makes the dark parts way worse. I just love making things terrible.
At one point, Silas is in conversation with another character, and he thinks, “I want to be close, and I don’t know how to be close unless I’m elbow deep in innards.” Silas often uses surgical metaphors, especially when he’s trying to process his feelings towards another person. Can you describe your reasoning behind this choice?
Autism. I pick a lens for them to see the world through. And that’s very often their special interest. For Silas, his special interest is surgery, and he filters the entire world through that, because it’s what he knows the most about. It gives him a solid grounding point, and he understands that when he doesn’t understand other stuff.
I do the same thing with writing and fiction. I filter my entire life through the lens of writing, of fiction, of art, because I can’t process the world in any other fashion. Silas is definitely in that same boat. Also, it sounds so cool when it’s written out, right? It gives him such a fascinating depth of character when he is so sweet and gentle. He only sees the world through innards and surgery, which is terrifying.
You explore a lot of intersectional themes and characters like Nick and Silas, young people who are trying to figure out who they are, which is hard enough without the confusing, frustrating feelings that come with being queer, trans, and on the spectrum. Did you ever worry that these characters wouldn’t be received in the way you envisioned?
I did not know I was autistic when I started writing Nick. I started talking to a bunch of my friends, and they were either like, oh, that makes a lot of sense, or we thought you already knew. I did all of my research, wrote Nick like me and then crossed my fingers and hoped. Which is not the way that anybody should do anything. This is incredibly ill informed. And then I got a bunch of responses rolling in that this was the best autistic representation that [they had] seen. I got peer reviewed. I was definitely afraid of how Nick would be received. Nick is very no nonsense in a way that if you’re autistic, you get it. But if you’re not autistic, you might be like, that’s a weird stereotype. Why? That’s a little harmful. Why would you do that? Nick was very heavily based on me, and I was very afraid that people would take him negatively. I was worried about Silas being read as too immature. That’s definitely a big fear, because I know that autistic characters tend to read young to people who aren’t autistic. I was also worried that people were going to think he was too creepy with all of the surgical stuff.
One of my favorite books of all time is My Heart is a Chainsaw. The main character, Jade, reads 100% autistic. She’s obsessed with slashers, and I’m like, this is so special interest coded, and then I went through the reviews, and everyone’s like, the main character is a dangerous freak. Now, it’s like, oh, you’re autistic, so clearly you don’t know enough about yourself to be able to transition. That’s what the antagonists in The Spirit Bares Its Teeth think—that you’re sick, so you can’t know yourself.
A conversation occurs between Silas and one of his kindred spirits in which they talk about stories and how they shape a person. At one point, it is said, “It’s difficult when the story isn’t one the world wants to hear.” Why do you think it’s important to tell the world stories it may not want to hear?
Because I didn’t have them growing up. I had my first gender crisis at 16 and immediately bottled it up. There were no books about trans kids, especially not in the YA sectors. I was a very picky reader. I only wanted to read horror or sci-fi. And all of the trans books were contemporary issue books. I don’t want to read about a kid being sad for 350 pages because their parents don’t accept them. I want to read about a kid being sad for 350 pages because someone is actively trying to murder them. All of the autistic rep I read growing up was the main character’s sibling. They were a side issue, or a side plot, or an obstacle. And if I did read a character that was like me, it wasn’t named that. The character was just weird. The author clearly wasn’t trying to write an autistic person. And now, if we want to combine the two…there was just nothing. If I had had these books earlier, I would have had words for it, maybe I would have figured it out way earlier. Or, at least, maybe figuring it out wouldn’t have been so difficult.
The dedication in The Spirit Bares Its Teeth is “For the kids with open wounds they’re still learning to stitch closed.” Who were you picturing when you wrote this?
I write all of my books for my 16-year-old self. I was not a very angry child. I was very passive. I was very quiet. I didn’t realize that I was pissed off until I transitioned. I love my parents to pieces. They’re amazing. They have been with me pretty much every step of the way. I’ve gotten so lucky in every aspect of my life. But at 14, I was still like, what if I set myself on fire so I didn’t have to have a face anymore? It was gender dysphoria and autism that we didn’t know about. That dedication was for those of us who are still trying to figure out how to deal with the things that we thought about ourselves when we were kids. One of my running jokes is that, like, if you feel like these books resonate with you, I’m sorry. I’m sorry that we live in a world where my books mean something to people. We deserve better. And yet, here we are.
You’ve done many interviews. Is there anything you haven’t been asked in the past that you’d like to answer now?
Why doesn’t Benji turn into a human again? This is the question. And my immediate response is always, because turning him back into a person is the coward’s way out. That is a complete negation of everything this book was written about. I read the Escape from Furnace series when I was in high school. Halfway through the series, the main character turns into a monster, and at the end of the series, he learns that he’s going to be saved and turned back. And I was devastated. Devastated. He spent so much time yearning for his friends to accept him as the beast that he is, and then it’s all just undone. I felt cheated, you know? At the end of the book when Benji doesn’t turn back into a person, people found that really surprising. That definitely plays into the trans allegory of it. Just, like, you are this thing and there’s no going back. If people hate you, what are you going to do? You have to survive this now, because it’s the only way you can survive. I feel like this comes across in my first two books. By the end of the books, the world is barely better. Because so much is based on systemic and large-scale harm. It’s going to take the rest of their lives to fix this awful thing that has been put into place. They might not see it done away with in their lifetime. And that’s just the reality of trying to change big things in the world. America is obsessed with the chosen one narrative, when really, it’s hundreds of thousands of people working together.
You have another book coming out soon, Compound Fracture. Is there anything you can tell us about it now?
Compound Fracture is my third YA book with Peachtree Teen. It takes place in West Virginia, in a fictionalized version of the county that my family is from. The book is very heavily steeped in labor riots and Appalachian leftism. I wanted to take a modern, realistic approach to this sort of situation. The main character’s great-great grandfather was executed by law enforcement because he was the leader of a labor strike. For hundreds of years, the families have been going back and forth because this awful thing happened. The main character gets brought into it very quickly and very brutally. It’s an extremely political book, and the main character is trans and autistic. His great-grandfather is also trans, so I get to play with historical queers too. It’s a lot, but I’m very excited for it.
Helena Edge is a native East Coaster and second year MFA candidate at Old Dominion University. She is the author of several published short stories and one thesis in progress. She has a passion for ghost stories, steampunk, and YA queer narratives. Her favorite characters are the ones who can’t be saved.