By Jayson Coleman
If you ask Andrew Patrie about how he is as a parent, he’ll be the first to tell you that he’s nothing special. But, balancing parenting and all its surprises with teaching and writing is already a lot, and that’s before you let your child, in his words, “lead the dance.”
I had the opportunity to interview Patrie ahead of the release of his newest book, Clumsy Love. Clumsy Love is Patrie’s first memoir, and it follows Patrie’s story as a father raising his transgender daughter, Simone, discussing the challenges of parenting but also the discoveries he’s made about himself, his daughter, and their relationship as a family. Through his own experiences, Patrie shows that showing undying love can come with plenty of mistakes which, while especially true of someone navigating through his child coming out, is a notion that can be applicable to any parent.
Jayson Coleman: What is Clumsy Love and what is it about?
Andrew Patrie: It’s a story about raising our transgender daughter. It begins in what would be the “present tense” of the book which is us travelling to Madison to consult about these puberty blockers, and the book ends, then, with us going back 18 months later to get the blockers put in. In between, then, it’s the story about her birth and what childhood was like. I have her permission to use her dead name, so the chunk of the book that’s set in the past, she is referred to as our son, so I wanted the reader to have that experience too of when there’s that shift when she goes through the name change. As we were struggling with all that, getting the pronouns straight, it’s like the reader would go through that in a similar way. It’s not really trying to tell her story, though, obviously she’s a character in the book, but the book’s about things that she allowed me to know. I want her to be able to tell her own story, and I hope she will.
JC: You’ve written lots of pieces for Volume One as well as a few poetry collections. How does Clumsy Love differ from those other things you’ve written?
“I’ve never done anything like this before, on this sort of scale, and the part that was daunting for me was that I didn’t know how to approach doing this.”
AP: I’ve never done anything like this before, on this sort of scale, and the part that was daunting for me was that I didn’t know how to approach doing this. Do you just start on page 1 and go until you’re done? And I learned that, no, you can do it in pieces. And then some of the fun is trying to find out how all these pieces fit. I learned a lot through this process, which was so different from just sitting down and writing for a couple hours to work on a poem idea. I showed up each week focusing on one memory, when that week was up, I was on to the next memory, so there wasn’t any time to go back or obsess over what I’d written. I got to have a narrative that makes sense for a reader. And so thinking about it that way, because I think I had tried to put things together chronologically, and BJ was the one who said ‘the reader doesn’t need to know your timeline, so if it makes sense, maybe break some of this up.’ That was, for me, also kind of a new thing, learning that you’re not being deceitful. It’s still the true story that these moments happened, but I put them out of order because it makes more sense on the page.
JC: What inspired you to tell this story? Were there any specific moments or experiences where you knew you had to get this story down on paper?
AP: I was at a writing retreat about writing for radio, where I was gonna write a short prose piece. I had a bunch of ideas, and one of them was this image I had of us at a hotel pool. Simone is in this bathing suit and gets into the water with these other girls. And this is a little bit after the name changing ceremony and her hair had been growing out, so it felt like a test to see if she’s going to be accepted or not. They were awkward at first, but then eventually they were playing together. And I just remember this image of where one girl made sort of a swing with her hands and invited Simone into it. That story ended up getting on Wisconsin Public Radio, and there was some good reaction to that, which was nice. And then I wrote a couple other pieces, one about Simone’s ninth birthday party and the third one was about blockers. So I just felt like we were charting these moments in our lives that we weren’t really finding an outlet for or advice for. We were just kind of going through it. And I know it’s not the only book out there about parents with transgender children, but I thought it could be another voice, another bit of light out there.
JC: What added difficulties are there with writing about someone as closely connected to you as your daughter? Or does it make the writing process easier?
AP: I’m pretty comfortable with laying it all out when it comes to myself, but I have a wife who’s not necessarily that comfortable. And of course, there was a lot of concern about how Simone would react to this. She knew I was writing this book and that I was gonna use the dead name, so she heard little bits and pieces, but it wasn’t until last summer that she read it finally. She liked it and gave me her blessing. And it was interesting because I said, “what’s your favorite part?” And she said, “oh, the bar scene,” the part where I’ve made a poor decision. So, I thought it was hilarious that the part she liked most was a scene that has nothing to do with her. So, she was okay with things. But I’d be lying if I said I still don’t have the concern, given the current social climate, of outing someone. It’s not someone else’s business to do that, even if I am her father. But Simone’s been out since 2016 so I think we’re past that concern. But also, just the oddness of taking people you know, making them characters, but trying to be as truthful as possible while being respectful of what’s being shared. I wanted to be honest, but also protective of Simone.
JC: Clumsy Love is about a very personal but also thought-provoking topic. Did you learn anything about yourself or your relationship with Simone while writing the memoir?
AP: I can’t say I learned anything about what it’s like to be trans, because I’m not, but in some of the research, it was fascinating to see what the science says about this. There was this study done where they did autopsies on the brains of cisgendered men and woman but also trans men and women, and they found that the brain of a trans woman looked identical to the brain of a cisgender woman. And in terms of my relationship with Simone, I think I was able to suddenly see patterns. She and I have very similar personalities in terms of our reactions to things, and we have a similar sense of humor. My adoption is also brought up, which I originally wasn’t enthused about because I felt it was its own story and I didn’t want to muddy the waters too much, I wanted to stay focused on the parenting. But, as an adopted kid, I talk about feeling a bit estranged from my own parents growing up, and I found out that originally, I was born with a different name. Suddenly, I’m finding all these great connections to Simone’s story. I know they’re not the same, and I’m very careful to point that out in the book, but it made me realize maybe there’s a way to connect and talk to this kid that I hadn’t thought about before. I also started to realize how much having Simone in our lives made me appreciate parenting more, and it made me think more about my parenting.
“I’ve never wavered in my love of Simone, but I’ve not always expressed that love as I should have.”
JC: Why is the book titled “Clumsy Love?”
AP: I’ve never wavered in my love of Simone, but I’ve not always expressed that love as I should have. Or, in my attempts to express that love, it’s kind of come out garbled. I’m a big Three Stooges fan, and in one of their episodes, they talk about “we always get it right the second time.” I started thinking about that with Simone. There was always my first attempt, which oftentimes is awkward and clumsy, and then I can go from there. So, I think that’s where the title felt right, that it has been clumsy. I thought that’s something most parents or readers could relate to, but then adding the element of your kid saying “hey, I’m gay” or “I’m transgender,” it added an extra layer of clumsiness of how to navigate this.
JC: What do you hope a reader would take out of Clumsy Love?
AP: Simone wrote the foreward for the book, so I know what she’s hoping people will take out of it. But I guess my goal with the book always was to just attach a human face to this issue that most people probably know from scrolling social media or whatever talking heads they’re watching on cable news. It’s easy to lose that dimensionality, especially when the issue is oftentimes told in the most extreme version. So, I thought it’d be nice to tell the story of just one family and how they were responding to this. You strip away the politicking and see we’re just people who happen to have a transgender daughter.
JC: In our current social and political climate that is very hostile towards and largely unwilling to understand transgender and gender non-conforming people, what impact do you think this book and your experiences shared within them may have on whoever’s reading it?
AP: A couple summers ago, I got invited to be on an ACLU panel talking about my experience as a teacher with banned books. And as I was leaving, as I was on my way out the door, I heard Simone say something like, “yeah, you go get ‘em straight, white, hetero savior!” which was great, it was the absolute perfect thing I needed to hear. Because I feel like I’m not comfortable being any kind of spokesperson. I’m not a queer person, I’m as straight as they come, straight white guy. But I thought, for better or worse, tonight I’m one of the people they’re getting, and I’ll try to do my best. I’m hoping that, as someone who’s not claiming to be any kind of spokesperson, saying “hey, this is one story,” but that maybe it can connect or resonate with other people in a similar situation. And I feel like maybe that is a political act in the sense that it’s trying to push back on certain narratives that are out there. I just hope it’s a little bit of love. Might be clumsy love, but there’s a little bit more love in the world with the book out there.
Click here to pre-order your copy today.