Introduction: “Some of the Parts” by T. Cooper, Akashic Books, 2002, is a novel told in four voices: It is three characters in first person: Isak, for whom the story opens with a gender question; Arlene, pill-popping mother of Taylor; and Charlie, Arlene’s brother and roommate to Isak and one character Taylor, a beautiful young woman for whom lovers and material comforts come easily in the third person. The story moves through New York, Los Angeles and ends in Providence, at Arlene’s home.

Krista McGruder: “Some of the Parts” has four distinct points of view, but with only Taylor told in the third person. Why, as a matter of technique, did you settle on the telling of the stories as you did? Why not an omniscient narrator, telling each of the characters’ stories?

T. Cooper: I like the variety that can be achieved by seeing a bunch of different sides to the same stories. By no means does each of the characters tell the same story, but they do provide different perspectives on some of the same things that happen to them. I think this technique can illustrate how little we who are supposed to know each other so well—friends, lovers, mothers, brothers—really often don’t know anything about one another. When I sat down to write this story, it sort of just came out this way, as simplistic as that sounds. I wanted to hear from all these different members of this new “family,” and I hope it deepens readers’ understanding of their motivations and interior landscapes and all that business.

I considered on several occasions changing it to the omniscient, but it just worked better for me when at least three of the characters could speak in their own “true” voices. It’s not just Isak who tells her story in the first person; the characters Arlene and Charlie do so as well. It’s solely Taylor whose sections are told in the third person, but they are very limited sections, very close to her. It felt right to keep the first three in the first person, but for Taylor, who’s in some ways a more distant and less easy to “get” character, it felt right to keep her in the third. It’s always a challenge to keep multiple first person narrators distinct, but I think it’s been done enough successfully that it’s just one of many interesting ways to tell a story.

KM: Other works that have dealt with gender identity include “Arcadio” by William Goyen and the recent “Middlesex” by Jeffrey Eugenides. “Some of the Parts” is similar to those two works in that the character Isak, like the characters Arcadio and Calliope, winds up working in a freak show. What other literary references or true-life points of reference did you have upon deciding to make Isak become part of a freak show at Coney Island?

TC: I think that the freak show is such a rich medium for looking at how difference is treated in the supposed “non-freak show” world. For me, it is a place where extremes get played out in a predictable way, and yet while normalcy is supposed to be upheld at the freak show, in my opinion, it really isn’t. As in, the people sitting comfortably in the audience could just as well be stars of the freak show themselves. To me, guys who sit on the phone and siphon retirement money from people all day on Wall street are freaks. As are the people loaded down with shopping bags, checking out the little girls twirling, jumping and dancing on ice-skates in the middle of the mall in Portland Oregon where Tonya Harding got her start (I saw this place while on my reading tour). I guess I’m just getting at the fact that the whole world is a freak show, and that sometimes the most non-normal seeming people are indeed quite normal, and sometimes even boring. Isak pushes all of the identity boundaries, and yet in many ways, her concerns and needs and fears and desires are no different from those of Arlene, a straight, white divorcee mother living in Providence, Rhode Island—someone entirely different from Isak. The freak show is one way Isak exploits or plays with her gender ambiguity—she also works as a gay male hustler, and models, pushing all these boundaries, and yet pretty much anyone can relate to aspects of her that are just under the surface—regardless of her superficial appearance.

As for inspiration for the freak show, I guess I mostly drew upon the experiences of people I know who perform in venues like these. For some people who are not easily defined on the outside, it’s a viable place to be paid for not fitting in to other people’s expectations for a human body. I’ve also performed a great deal as a member of the Backdoor Boys drag-king boy band, so I could certainly draw upon my own experiences playing with gender and performance, as well as the type of “transactions” with an audience that occurs at a freak show.

I haven’t yet read Middlesex, but it’s on deck on my nightstand. Some time ago, I did devour the wonderful Geek Love, the mother of all freak-show books. But my book only kicks off in the freak show, perhaps as a way to set a stage where the freak show does not necessarily stop at the door to it.

KM: You must have had a lot of fun writing Taylor, a ditzy beauty that charms a powerful Hollywood producer. Did you find it difficult to write this character, knowing that less-than-intelligent-acting characters can make for less-than-intelligent prose? Were you ever afraid that someone might criticize Taylor’s character as too silly, or too one-dimensional?

TC: I didn’t really care whether folks felt Taylor was too one-dimensional or silly because in my experience, there are so many people like her in the real world, that there’s a Taylor in pretty much everyone’s life. I did in fact want her to live the cliched Hollywood thing, to be one of those ridiculous people who is just good-looking and completely reliant upon others for survival, and thus totally unequipped for anything but trying to act. And badly at that. She was a fun character to write. She does, in my view, have this deeper “what the hell is missing?” thing going on though, like the other characters, but it is complicated by her past, as it is for everyone. A character like this tells us where we are these days just as well as questing, deep, intelligent-acting and introspective characters.

KM: The four characters’ lives intersect at the meeting between Taylor and Isak. At the end of the book, however, the relationship between Taylor and Isak is uncertain with Isak noting, “…all of this would be brief.” The relationship between the two women remains elusive, even to Isak at the end. How did you arrive at the point where you decided to leave so much open for interpretation in that relationship? Were you ever tempted to write a more “concrete” ending?

TC: I guess to me the ending feels a little more certain than what you’re describing, in that Isak does come to a realization about what kind of life she’s landed upon in Providence. I don’t think that that the above line necessarily refers to Taylor, but more to Charlie and Arlene—or the whole picture. That sometimes these moments are all you can hope for, and they can be good, if brief. Maybe everything’s not there, but it’s damn close, and that can be enough if you hold it up to the right light.

I was in fact tempted to write past the ending, and did start to, but luckily it was so horrible that I thought to destroy it all as quickly as it came out of me. I think I needed to do it to reaffirm for myself where the story ended, just as I needed to write a ton of “back-story” for each of the characters and throw it all away before setting them in motion in a story. I don’t think that Taylor and Isak should have a relationship, even though they might want to try. I’m drawn to those times when things just shouldn’t happen—sometimes they do and it’s a disaster, and sometimes they don’t and the disaster’s averted, or perhaps just refocused elsewhere… both scenarios are interesting to me; this one happens to be an example of the latter.

I think Taylor is just barely starting to figure things out by the end of the story, whereas the other three characters, older and somewhat wiser in many ways, are further along than Taylor. And I think Isak realizes this the minute she gets in the car with Taylor to drive cross-country with her. I think that relationship is precluded at that moment, so the ending feels more concrete to me as a result.

KM: Television plays a part in the friendship between Isak and Charlie. Are you or were you a Beverly Hills 90210 fan? How hard was it to incorporate cultural references into the narrative, knowing that many readers might not have the same pop culture knowledge?

TC: I was a huge Beverly Hills 90210 fan. I grew up in West Los Angeles, and went to a school somewhat like that one, and though I resisted vehemently for the first season, I did end up getting hooked on the show shortly after leaving L.A. for college. Who didn’t? It’s a dirty little secret many of us don’t admit to.

This type of show gets done and re-done in so many forms—boy bands, everything on MTV, reality shows, American Idol, whatever the latest obsession is. It’s all the same, even if the facial hair and clothing styles are different throughout the decades. It seems like it didn’t really matter which obsession of the year appeared in my book, because the inanity and the commentary on our culture is the same. I think a reader can pick up on this, can understand something about Charlie’s character through his obsession with 90210, even though he or she might never have seen the show.

KM: Who are your favorite or most influential literary influences?

TC: Virginia Woolf, Michael Cunningham, Grace Paley, Manuel Puig, Willa Cather, Jonathan Franzen, Kazuo Ishiguro, Philip Roth, Lydia Davis, Steven Millhauser, Sigrid Nunez, Marquez, Chekhov, Hemingway, George Saunders, Sarah Schulman, Faulkner—off the top of my head. These and so many others, I appreciate much of their work on so many levels—can always go back to them repeatedly. I’m influenced to some extent by almost everything I read.

KM: What are your plans for future fiction? Are you focusing on a particular project now?

TC: I’ve been working on a few smaller submissions for anthologies, but in the bigger picture, I’m in the beginning stages of a new novel, hoping to have a draft by the end of 2003. I’m planning on doing some historical research for this one (not involving Beverly Hills 90210, unfortunately), and so it sort of feels like I’m again in a situation where I’ve never done this before. I’m excited to work on something new so I can then be tired of it when it gets published two years from now.

KM: Now that “Some of the Parts” has been out for a few months, is there anything that you’d like to change or a character that you would write differently?

TC: On page 111, in Isak’s chapter entitled “Daredevils”: I would’ve added “bright” to the following sentence: “He was in a bright blue jacket, just standing there on the railing and holding on to the bridge.” You know, to contrast the bright blue of the jacket with the fact that the guy would be splat-red at the bottom of a bridge a few seconds after…

No—I don’t really know how to answer that. There are so many things I probably would’ve done differently if I were writing this book today. But I’m not, so perhaps all my unfulfilled desires for it will get worked out through the next project. By the time a book comes out, it feels so new to everyone else, but so old to the writer. I started SOTP over four years ago—wasn’t writing it the whole time—but people change, the world changes, you grow. Who knows…

KM: Now, to satisfy a purely personal curiosity…There are two dogs in the book, Bella and Mary. Do you have a dog? If so, does your dog give you any writerly inspiration?

TC:I most certainly do have a dog. His name is Murray and he’ll be nine soon. He’s a miniature pinscher, and he is turning into a mean old bastard in his old age. Murray, rightly appearing in my acknowledgements, is singularly responsible for everything I’ve done in the last nine years.

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