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Swedish-American author Alvina Chamberland has written or co-authored numerous books in Swedish, but Love the World or Get Killed Trying, her debut English-language novel, is already recasting tired, old literary tropes about the so-called “limits” of autofiction—not to mention the limits placed on LGBTQ+ individuals, and trans women in particular, in the publishing world. In the book, Chamberland tackles the braided issues of desire, consent, lust, violence, and shame while shuttling the reader from the Icelandic wilderness to the streets of Berlin, the nightlife haunts of Paris, and beyond.
Vogue recently spoke to Chamberland about her path to autofiction, taking inspiration from writers including Jamaica Kincaid and Ingeborg Bachmann, and the uneasy relationship that many straight, trans women share with the straight men who love them in private yet refuse to claim them in public.
Vogue: How did you find your way to autofiction?
Alvina Chamberland: I would say I found my way toward autofiction through some of my favorite authors whose work has been very autofictional, like Sylvia Plath, and then there are authors whose work is semi-autofictional but not really autofictional, like Jamaica Kincaid or Clarice Lispector, where it’s a bit more unclear how much of it is autobiographical, but it’s clear that it’s largely taken from their own lives. I found a lot of those writers to be the most experimental in an interesting way. It’s the most authentic voice because it’s close to our own experiences of life as messy and nonlinear and not plot-driven. I mean, there is the beginning, middle and end of our lives, but it’s not a beginning, middle, and end that follows a dramaturgical arc. And that’s something that I always want to stay away from in my writing; I want to be one with the mess, and one with the realness and the truth. I feel that autofictional words tend to be like that, more than, for example, autobiographies or memoirs or traditional novels. So that’s the main really important reason I wrote this book as autofiction. Another reason for me to use autofiction instead of memoir is that I wanted to have the freedom to not just be controlled by exactly what happened and in which order. I wanted to be able to play with the order of things, and even make up some things. The internal world is just as real as the external and deserves just as much place, which is something I find it easier to do via autofiction.
I was so struck by the constant uprooting in your book, and the sense of existing in a lot of possible contexts that change quickly. What was it like to craft that narrative?
One of the themes of the book is traveling alone, and this traveling-alone genre can be very male-dominated, like with Jack Kerouac and On the Road and the beatniks and all that. The thing is, as a woman, and as a trans woman, especially, those experiences of being on the road while traveling alone are just so different, because it’s impossible for you to be a passive observer of what’s going on. What’s going on is the people around you are always observing you and interrupting you, and the book is filled with interruptions, especially from straight men who want sexual things from the protagonist, who is based in my experience. I think taking in new places opens up the mind to more creativity and to new insights and new thoughts and dreams and fantasies and even theoretical ponderings or emotions, so that’s why I wanted to do that, but include the interruptions as a part of that instead of just seeing it as a problem. I think you miss a lot of knowledge when you’re passively observing, rather than constantly being forced into an interaction. There’s also a knowledge that comes from these experiences, and that’s something that I wanted to convey.
In terms of the changing of scenery, it was important to me to represent the divide between nature and city that maybe, again, becomes extra clear for a trans woman getting overwhelmed by all this sexual attention from straight men that is so ephemeral and that doesn’t last, because they’re so afraid of doing it publicly. And the stress of that versus being in nature, where no one’s around you. One of the main things about the book is this divide between how trans women get so much short-term sexual attention, but so little long-term romantic affection that is done publicly. The desire is very much there; that isn’t the problem. The problem is that men are ashamed of this desire and scared of what other people will think.
You spoke recently at the LA Times Festival of Books about how there’s not enough of a canon when it comes to trans women authors, but are there any trans women authors who particularly inspired you in the writing of this book?
Well, unfortunately, not while I was writing, because I hadn’t read her yet; I’ll get to her in a second. My lineage for my work is predominantly cis women, and it’s one that includes Jamaica Kincaid, Arundhati Roy, Marguerite Duras, Clarice Lispector, Sylvia Plath, Ingeborg Bachmann; these are the people I’ve been in communion with as I formed my own voice, so to speak. What I did finally read, though, because it came out in Swedish in 2021, is Bad Girls, or Las Malas, by Camila Sosa Villada. Just as I like to call my book “magical brutalist,” I would call hers the same, because we’re both working with these more fantastical, lyrical, ecstatic, poetic elements and putting them into reality whilst being very, very brutal about how violent that reality can be. I think Bad Girls is a masterpiece; it’s different from mine in the subjects that it tackles and the perspective that it tackles them from, but I felt that what she wrote is such a masterpiece in what it’s trying to depict. I have had several experiences that are closer to what it depicts, which is this community between trans sex workers, but I felt that she did it so well that I don’t have to do it. [Laughs.]
Love the World or Get Killed Trying is less about trans community than the soul-search of a woman who happens to be trans, and that means that a lot of those experiences and thoughts are filtered through that lens, but in general, it’s more about exploring universal introspective themes of longing and love and death; these kinds of themes that are common in literature, but that trans women have not been given the right to explore because we’re always pigeonholed into talking about trans issues.
Is there anything you particularly hope people take away from this book?
The first thing is the literary craft. I really want people to see it as a work of literature and see my talent as a writer, instead of just saying, “Oh, it’s important that a trans woman wrote this work.” That’s the first and foremost important thing, and so far, reactions I’ve gotten have brought me a lot of joy, because I was afraid it wouldn’t be so. The second thing is the relationship between straight men and straight trans women, because it’s one that is so infected and there’s so much heartbreak and so much violence and misunderstanding and misconception. The desire is everywhere in a trans woman’s life, but publicly it’s almost nowhere. This hypocrisy and this discrepancy needs to end, and I hope my book can be a part of that, not necessarily in the way that a nonfiction book would be, but through the way a fiction book can do that, which is to be so brutally vulnerable and emotional and true that a bridge is formed between different humans with vastly different structural positions. I haven’t compromised with anything that I’ve written in the book; I have been extremely true to my own vulnerable humanity, and I think that’s why I’ve had many straight, male readers of the book who actually loved it. I think they maybe would not have accessed a nonfiction book in the same way, because nonfiction doesn’t do that amount of emotional building of bridges, which I think is ultimately what has to be done in order for structural bridges to be built.
