Books

I ‘couldn’t possibly know’ I was a lesbian at 17. Now I’m coming to terms with years of compulsory heterosexuality

People of authority pathologised my sexuality by insisting it was a symptom of mental illness

Moïra Fowley: it was impossible for Eyes Guts Throat Bones not to reflect, in some way, my own desires, fears, wildness and queerness

Moïra Fowley
Mon Apr 17 2023 - 05:45

What does the end of the world look like?

In March 2020, I abandoned the book I should have been writing and wrote a collection of lesbian horror short stories instead. I had been, until then, a young-adult novelist. My first book, The Accident Season, was published in 2015, followed by Spellbook of the Lost and Found in 2017 and All the Bad Apples in 2019. All three are contemporary fabulism, and all are in some way about generational trauma, family secrets and the horror of being a teenage girl. So while threads connect my first three novels to this entirely different creature, the shift from young-adult fiction to adult literary horror was unexpected, even to me.

Eyes Guts Throat Bones is a book of 15 short stories about (queer, female) bodies and the end of the world. I wrote it in a deeply embodied way, listening to the bones and the guts of me and putting it all into story. It was impossible, then, for it not to reflect, in some way, my own desires, fears, wildness and queerness.

The world ends over and again in these stories. On a grand, cinematic scale and in smaller, more personal ways each story is concerned with a period of visceral change, even when they are not about the actual world ending.

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I found myself faced by people of authority who pathologised my sexuality by insisting it was a symptom of mental illness

What does the end of the world look like? Is it a global pandemic that keeps us locked away from each other for half a year? Is it a divorce? Is it coming out? Is it moving house when there is no house to move to?

How many times has your world crumbled on your tongue?

I surprised myself, writing about the end of the world. I found myself writing about the end of a myriad small worlds, teasing for the cracks that rupture worlds in the way you tongue a brittle tooth until the cavity breaks it. Without meaning to, I wrote from some of my own world endings. I poured the dust of each cavity into these stories. I soon realised when writing them that, through these stories about wildness, queerness, bodies and desire, I was also both exploring my pandemic anxieties and coming to terms with years of compulsory heterosexuality.

I came out as a lesbian when I was 15, 22 years ago. It didn’t end my world. I have a loving, supportive family and went to an open, progressive school. A lot of my friends were also queer. I had girlfriends. I cried to my parents about each broken heart. But at that time I was also, unrelatedly, suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder, and became deeply unwell. I found myself faced by people of authority – outside of my family and school – who pathologised my sexuality by insisting it was a symptom of mental illness, because I couldn’t possibly know I was a lesbian at 17.

A divorce is the end of a world that once was. But so, then, is coming out after realising the effect of 15 years of internalised homophobia, and being able to live authentically

It was strongly suggested to me, over and over, that in order to get better I should stop dating girls and start dating boys. I was a young, vulnerable person working desperately towards recovery, so little by little I internalised those messages, alongside a great deal of self-hatred. I started to date boys. I couldn’t deny that I was attracted to girls, and when pressed called myself bisexual, but shame hid in the cracks of the lie.

As the world ends, over and again, in my stories, that theme of compulsory heterosexuality is a fissure in the surface of unstable worlds. In A Different Beat a preteen girl in the 1990s comes to terms with her sexuality when she starts to believe she is haunted by the ghost of a member of her favourite boy band. Rath is a story about a dysfunctional friendship over decades, but also about repressed desires, and what happens when we try to contort ourselves into a shape that doesn’t fit. In the collection’s interval – a story set apart from the gathering of stories about desire between women, about appetite and embodiment and passion – a woman believes that her only option on the night the world ends is to spend it with a man. The story is titled Sad Straight Sex at the End of the World.

I met my ex-husband in college, a small handful of years later. We got married and had two children and were together almost a decade until our relationship ended for reasons entirely unrelated to my still-unspoken sexuality. A divorce is the end of a world that once was. But so, then, is coming out after realising the effect of 15 years of internalised homophobia, and being able to live authentically.

In so many of these stories the end of the old world is the beginning of a new one.

Just after my marriage ended, the house I’d been living in for eight years was sold, and the pandemic began, so when Ireland went into lockdown I went to stay with my parents in the west, to homeschool my children in the forest by the lake. The world was all endings. That was the beginning of Eyes Guts Throat Bones.

Like teeth that fall and fill your mouth in dreams, I tumbled into these stories of my anxieties, my grief, my queerness, my love, my loneliness, my desires, my darkness.

It became a collection of stories about the end of the world. In which forests devour their wanderers, in which the sun must be sung up from the sea every morning, in which a fence is all that keeps the monsters out. It became a collection of love stories to and about monstrous women. In which queer women are bad, and brutal, messy and dangerous, without being pathologised. It became a creature with teeth and claws.

Through lockdown and loss, through three house moves and one never-ending divorce, through homeschooling and school runs, through rethinking my entire future and falling in love, I wrote this creature, or it wrote me. It wrote itself through these world endings, it wrote itself from my body, it wrote itself as a body: a (queer, female) body as a site of appetite, passion, rage, desire and transformation, both the beginning and the end of the world.

Eyes Guts Throat Bones, by Moïra Fowley, is published by Weidenfeld & Nicolson