Author, actor and content creator Jesse James Rose became a writer first on her Instagram, writing long captions detailing her healing process from an assault and building an online community. “Sorry I Keep Crying During Sex” is her first book, a memoir that goes beyond prose to mine text messages and Grindr DMs. We spoke with Rose ahead of an Oct. 21 reading in Somerville. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
When did you realize you wanted to write a memoir?
Right after the assault happened. I somehow had the foresight to know that this was going to be a huge part of my life. This was 2018, right in the middle of the #MeToo movement, so I was acutely aware of the impact of sexual violence on people. I’ve always been a writer, but as I got older I didn’t really have something that I wanted to write about. I thought to myself, maybe I will want to write about this one day. I tucked it in the back of my mind, because I had a lot of life and healing to do in between that moment and where we are now. Eventually it became something I couldn’t ignore, especially when I was undergoing some intensive therapy, I felt like that dust in my own brain about the experience was settling in a way it never had, and the only way to capture it was to write it all down as it was happening.
How does your memoir defy genre?
I use a bunch of mediums. It starts out much more fragmented, kind of Tumblr-blog style, and by the end it morphs into full prose, and within that morph we get Grindr chats, we get text messages, we get scripts, we get a whole bunch of mediums that feel like they’re the backlog of my own brain. If I tried to describe to you the texts I had with my ex, that wouldn’t be as fun as if I gave you my phone and said “read this”; I want the book to feel like I’ve handed the reader my phone. In the same way that I can only understand some of the fights that I had with my ex or some of the imagined conversations I bring in to the piece, I can only understand those through a heightened theatrical medium, because it’s all about the dialogue – so writing that in the form of a play script made so much sense to me. Other times you need to understand what’s going on in my head and in my body, and so those are times when I give you those descriptions. Other times I want it to feel like you’re scrolling the internal Twitter feed of my head. Often we’re confined to chronological storytelling, and nothing about this is chronological or expected.
I’m very proud that people are calling it genre-defying. I wanted it to be a lot of mediums put into one – that feels like a real hallmark of queer literature. As a transgender person, I defy so many constructs that have been handed to us about the binary, about autonomy, about health care, so for me to be able to represent myself that way through literature feels like it’s a real honoring and truthful acknowledgment of who I am and the possibilities for creative freedom in the literary world.
How did you decide on the title?
It was literally what kept happening. If you read the book, you’ll see how many times I try to hook up as a way to [pass through] the experience of the really awful assault, and how many times that ends up with me just crying and making it even worse – and it comes from a very specific moment between me and my ex that I chronicle in the book. I was so afraid that it would make it unmarketable, that somebody who held the pursestrings would say “How about another title?” and I would have to say no. I was really lucky that my agent and my editor and my publisher think it’s a great title, and I do too. I hope it makes people pick up the book, because it’s something that so many people experience. The range of responses I get when I tell someone what the book is called is always so interesting to me, because it’ll range from “Oh, okay,” to “Oh my gosh, me too, girl.” It’s much more of a universal experience than perhaps people want to admit to themselves. That’s why you have it as a book, so you can read it when no one’s watching and get out of it what you need to there.
What’s the importance of being so blunt and honest about these issues?
The opinions that I value the most are from the people that will say what they feel even if they know it might not be what I want to hear. That doesn’t mean that I surround myself with critics, it just means that if I’m asking for advice or if I’m asking for criticism, I want to be around people that are able to give it to me. At this point in my life I don’t have any way to be other than unabashedly honest. I’ve found so much value in that kind of vulnerability.
I started writing Instagram captions about my healing experience dating all the way back to 2018, in the era of filtered Instagram posts, where Instagram was inspirational, it was aspirational, it was travel influencers and Facetuned girls. And I was posting selfies of me crying, saying “Here’s what I’m going through. Here’s the honest version.” It was the first wave of authenticity for content creators, and it built me a very small audience at the time compared to what’s on my corner of the Internet now, but I found so much value in that – the couple thousand people that followed me would share their own stories, or say something like “I feel less alone when I heard you say this” or “I went through something similar, here’s what helped me,” and so that kind of radical honesty that I was trying to bring to the table ended up serving me really well in a healing way. It opened up the discourse for everyone to be honest, so I found that it was a real bedrock for connection between me and the people around me that I didn’t even know had experiences like mine, because we’re told to be silent about them, and I’ve just decided that that doesn’t work for me, and I’ve always been that way.
Jesse James Rose reads from “Sorry I Keep Crying During Sex” at 6:30 p.m. Oct. 21 at All She Wrote Books, 75 Washington St., East Somerville
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