In Conversation with Tobi Lakmaker
“The sexual partners themselves aren’t such a crucial part of the story I would say, but I do think that Sofie’s inability to formulate her difficulties with having sex point to a more uncomfortable, more silent layer of who she is – and maybe therefore all the more important.”
Thank you so much for talking to us - we loved The History Of My Sexuality! Your debut is incredibly intimate. What made you want to start writing something so personal, and was it a cathartic process?
It was most certainly not cathartic. This might be a dull answer, but I was solely focused on writing something that felt good enough. I had the absolute conviction that if I succeeded in this, the quality of the story would function as some sort of protection regarding the intimate parts of the book. I kept thinking: the only thing that’s truly embarrassing is a poorly written story, the rest I can handle.
Often it felt very confessional and like a stream of consciousness. Did it fall out of you or were you quite critical when reworking the text?
The working process of The History of My Sexuality consisted of two years of doubt, then making a plan within thirty minutes and eventually writing it in about eight months. So it didn’t exactly fall out of me, but the writing felt very intuitive and I find it difficult to imagine that my following books will be written in the same way.
The title suggests that the novel is about sexuality, which it is, but it delves into topics of grief, anxiety, loneliness, and gender, to name a few. The sexual partners were often fleeting and didn’t get a lot of airtime. Did you feel like these characters were important to the story you were trying to tell, or more of a mode to understanding how Sofie was feeling?
The title is, in a sense, badly chosen. It was basically a wink to Foucault, but I more or less forgot that if you’re trans, like me, people tend to forget about Foucault and just focus on the term ‘sexuality’. The sexual partners themselves aren’t such a crucial part of the story I would say, but I do think that Sofie’s inability to formulate her difficulties with having sex point to a more uncomfortable, more silent layer of who she is – and maybe therefore all the more important.
The History of My Sexuality was originally published back in 2021 and now you’re coming back to it a couple of years later. Did you make any changes or edits to the book during the translation process to bring it to a different audience? And is it exhausting to come back to work and a part of your life that you have moved on from?
Except for a few sentences that contained some explicitly Dutch references, and about two sentences I really hated, we haven’t altered anything. And I wouldn’t say it’s exhausting, as it’s my debut and therefore honestly interesting to see how these audiences are different from each other. But it is weird, of course, to have written such a personal book and still be regarded as some sort of extension of this story. The protagonist of my book is way more outspoken than the person who wrote it, and I’ve become only less outspoken in the years after. So this discrepancy has only grown, but I still have to relate.
You wrote the book in Lockdown. Did that contribute to its sense of interiority? And how do you think the book might have been different if we had been out of a pandemic?
While trying to write my debut I worked as a pizzamaker, which I was still able to do during the pandemic as we also did pizza by delivering. When the Lockdown started, I quickly found a nice, monotonous rhythm – mainly consisting of pizzas and writing. My mother had just passed away, but luckily I had the most tender manager ever, so the restaurant was a very safe and warm place for me. The isolation of the pandemic might have helped me in the sense that they say you have to write with the doors closed, and rewrite with the doors open. I’m pretty sure that my doors have remained closed all the way, haha.
Your honesty and observations of the people that come and go within the book are refreshing, and often that is quite critical. What were people’s reactions to reading about themselves in the book?
It was weird, actually. There were some people I more or less destroyed in the book, and I was certain they would never speak to me again. This felt as a relief by the way; I was glad to get rid of them. Strangely enough, they were the ones that wanted to become even closer afterwards, whereas some people who I thought I wrote pretty friendly about, were furious. The only conclusion I’ve drawn is that you’ll never get rid of narcissists by writing about them.
Throughout the book you reference several literary inspirations, which all are all white cis men – Freud, Kafka, Wolkers, Grunberg, etc. Were these canonical references something that you were exploring at the time or was there a different purpose to including them in the book?
There is of course a certain paradox in the book: Sofie is heavily critical about the literary canon, but meanwhile only quotes white cis male writers. The most honest answer is that my own frame of reference at that point was just very dominated by those writers and books. So I felt an urge to resist, but I accidentally did this by also giving a sort of ode to the very same literary figures.
What’s next for you? Do you see yourself sticking with non-fiction?
I don’t see myself sticking to non-fiction, as I’ve never regarded The History of My Sexuality as such. Firstly, I was quite convinced my second novel would focus on football – not on the rules of the game, of course, it would be a story about a young girl in a boy’s team wanting to become a professional. I like sports as a theme in literature. Anyway, this is not what I’m going to do. Regrettably, I feel the urge to write something extremely personal again. So that’s what it’s going to be.
…
Read our review of The History of My Sexuality in our Innocence Issue, out now.
