How Writing My Young Adult Novel Helped Me Reclaim the Queer Girlhood I Lost

The years I suppressed my queerness are a loss that I’m exploring and grieving—if only through fiction.

I love my husband.

I love him specifically and singularly because of who he is and because of who we are together. I love his quiet thoughtfulness and his corny dad jokes, his serious eyes and the way his deep voice can get so soft when he’s putting our baby to bed. I love who he is with our dog—the way he heaps his affections on her so unguardedly. I love that he is deeply kind but not very nice and that he loves me well in the ways that I ask him to even when those things don’t come naturally to him. He works hard. He tries his best at everything. And he’s sexy as hell.

We’ve been together since we were nineteen—since the night we professed our feelings while drunk and messy at a house party and then sealed the deal with a serious and sober make-out session in the dining hall the next morning—and we have hardly spent any time as singles since we first got together. In those nearly twenty years, we have lived together, spent two years three thousand miles apart, broken up, made up, gotten married, adopted a puppy, bought a home, and welcomed our first kid into our messy, wonderful life together. And shortly after our first wedding anniversary, I told him I was not straight.

It was not graceful, or neat, my confession. I cried a lot.

I remember staring at these dried flowers from our wedding as I told him, thinking about how they’d bloomed and how they’d be exactly as they were now, forever. I remember wishing I could be that way—frozen at my most beautiful, instead of being this finicky, always-changing, sometimes-ugly (and always-confusing) human thing. We promised to love each other forever, and then there I was, feeling a bit like I’d inadvertently tricked him, like I was suddenly changing the rules. I felt like I’d tricked myself, too, but in a different way, because denial is a strange animal that makes you bury truths you’ll have no choice but to uncover later.

Not knowing this fact about myself—that I am not straight—until I was thirty is not so strange. There are dozens of stories like mine, both in popular culture and in my own personal life—celebrities, friends and acquaintances, old classmates and coworkers. So perhaps it shouldn’t have been as surprising as it was. But I was surprised. Aghast. Taken aback. And then it settled around my shoulders like a knitted scarf in the middle of winter and made so many things about my life make sense.

There was the middle school bestie who I shared a bed with half a dozen times. I’d hold her hand, and her sweet curls would be so close to my mouth I could almost taste them as we stared up at the stars and planets on her ceiling that shone with the eerie green glow every nineties tween has hoped to see after turning off bright lights. We’d share our deepest secrets before falling asleep.

There was the gorgeous friend from church whose house I would drive to almost weekly every summer. We’d watch movies or music videos from separate couches in her living room, something unnamable and warm simmering between us—so unclear but so palpable we barely ever touched. (She’s out now too.)

There was the girl in college I never spoke to but whose dance recitals I never missed, and the one I texted with intensely and incessantly, sharing parts of my heart I’d never had the courage to give to anyone before or after.

The dawning on me that my yearslong admiration of an actress or a singer is not because I want to be her, but because I could imagine being with her (what I like to call “The #LifeGoals or #WifeGoals Conundrum”). The voracious consumption of sapphic books and movies and TV shows. The looking back at interactions I’ve had over the years, recounting them (often in therapy) with the new knowledge of my queerness and having moments again and again where I find myself saying, “Ohhhhh. I did that because I’m kinda gay.”

It also shows up in the ways I talk and think about my current relationship. At times I feel inclined to use the word partner instead of husband when I’m talking about my husband. I roll the words around in my mouth, liking the feel of partner more, liking the sound of it: “My partner and I . . .” Maybe because it sounds slightly less patriarchal than “My husband and I,” and I’m a feminist. Probably because it sounds so much less hetero. Less like I succumbed to a default that was thrust upon me and more like I made a choice.

There will also always be this part of me that wonders what might have happened if we had met later or if we had taken a serious break in our time together, probably the same part of me that loves the sound of partner. I imagine who I might have dated, how I might be different, the ways in which my life may have shifted even if I landed where I am now anyway—if I’d known and accepted my queerness sooner.

It is dangerous territory to cross, isn’t it? To reimagine any aspect of your life, especially when you are as settled and as happy (and as grateful) as I am? To suggest that you want more or even to wonder at what more might have looked like when you already have so much? I have a great partner, a cute dog, a place to live, and a job I love. I have a beautiful baby. I almost feel indebted to the universe or whatever collision of fate and preparation and opportunity got me here. But I do wonder. I can’t help it.

These were the relationships that haunted me most as I relaxed into my queerness. I puzzled over how they might have been healthier, simpler, even sweeter had I recognized and accepted what I really wanted out of them.

It was the long-avoided exploration of the hazy boundaries in a few of my friendships that inspired my upcoming novel, Nothing Burns as Bright as You. Nothing Burns is a story about two messy girls in a reckless and somewhat-toxic relationship, each of them needing something nameless that they are finding in the other. But their codependency comes at a cost. There are scenes in this novel taken directly from my life: moments where I bumped up against what I wanted versus who I thought I was, what I was desperate for versus what I thought I should do.

Parts of the book poured out of me—I would sit down intending to write a single scene and I’d end up with lengthy poems spanning full chapters. And other sections were like bloodletting, slow and agonizing. While neither of these characters is exactly me or exactly anyone else, elements of the characters speak directly to elements within me and the girls and women I’ve been attracted to over the years.

During the pandemic, and thanks to therapy, being physically stuck forced me to face all the ways I’d been emotionally stuck for so long—stagnated in my passive acceptance of all the things about myself that didn’t quite add up. But the pandemic (and this novel) provided time to sit down and do the math, to actually make the mismatched equations of me and my life make sense. And for the first time, I was forced to show my work.

To be a #latequeer is to live with this duality: to love your life (if you’re lucky) and to wish you’d known yourself sooner.

While writing, I often thought of girls from my past—the ones I thought were pretty or the ones whose hair I loved to play with, or the ones who made me blush when they told me I was beautiful—and I’d hesitate, attempting to parse who were friends and who were crushes. And then there are the few I know I liked in a romantic way. The ones I held and touched like we were girlfriends, the ones I dreamt of kissing. The ones I tormented myself over. The ones I hated because I didn’t hate them at all.

There were some I violently pushed away. Friendships I destroyed because I couldn’t accept that I might have wanted to be more than friends. There were even a few whom I know I loved but to whom I never had the courage to say out loud that I loved them. On the page, these relationships emerged more clearly.

Nothing Burns as Bright as You is my feminist manifesto. It is the gay emo love story of my heart. It is painful and I hope people find it beautiful, because despite the story being made-up, every emotion within it is real.

Through writing Nothing Burns, I realized that my delayed realization wasn’t wrong or something obvious I’d missed. When I’m being generous, I think this happened for a reason. What is for you will be for you when the time is right or whatever, so one could argue that I came into my queerness exactly when I should have. When I’m feeling less than kind, I blame a complicated web of institutions and experiences: society, my religious household, biphobia, and heteronormativity. I was deprived of a wider worldview by what I was taught. I was shamed by what was expected of me. When I’m feeling funny, a small contingent of my friends and I, who have all experienced a similar delay in recognizing our own sexual orientation, call ourselves #latequeers. (Yes, with the hashtag.)

The years I suppressed my queerness are a loss that I will have to live with, but it’s one I’m glad I finally got to explore and grieve, if only through the lens of fiction. When I finished the novel, I found that I’d forgiven myself for the toxic roles I’d played, for all the ways I’d made or been a mess. The book provided enough narrative distance for me to see and finally process some of my clumsiest choices, some of my most latent queer thoughts and feelings.

You know how you can watch a movie and guess everything that will happen to a character, but they can’t yet see it themselves? That was how it felt as I reread the story I’d written. I was able to say, “Oh, you don’t even see what you’re doing,” and, more revealing, “Oh, honey, you don’t even know who you are.” But now I do. Some of my most heartbreaking relationships were unhealthy because I wasn’t ready for them to be better. I don’t think they could have been anything other than exactly what they were.

To be a #latequeer is to live with this duality: to love your life (if you’re lucky) and to wish you’d known yourself sooner. To want everything you have and to forever wonder about the possibility of what it might have been like to have something else.

I look at the flowers from my wedding differently now. They aren’t frozen at their most beautiful—they’re stagnant. They’re stuck. One day I touched them a little too roughly and petals fell away, littering my floor like confetti. I don’t want to crumble if things come at me unexpectedly. I want to be like the flowers in a field, alive and wild, changing with the seasons of my life the same way they change with the weather. Maybe wilting sometimes, but always blossoming again when the time is right. So far, I think I’m doing okay.