Q&A with Tyler Wetherall

 

Photo by Sammy Deigh

 

Tyler Wetherall is the author of the new novel Amphibian. She also has written the book No Way Home. She is the senior editor of the magazine SevenFifty Daily, and she lives in Brooklyn.

 

Q: What inspired you to write Amphibian, and how did you create your character Sissy?

 

A: I was precocious as a girl. As soon as I found out about kissing, I wanted to try it. But later, as a teen, there was a lot of sexual shaming at my school, and I learned there was a line between having desires and acting on them. Social censure in girlhood teaches us to curtail our sexuality in ways we carry with us for the rest of our lives.

 

When I first started writing the book, I was searching for the moment in my own story when shame became part of desire, and I wanted to make sense of that in fiction. 

 

The story follows Sissy and Tegan from 11 to 13 years old, as they depart the world of make-believe games and kiss chase for a girlhood that is rich with longing and underscored by threat.

 

In some ways, Sissy and Tegan came to me as two parts of a whole, which makes sense as so much of the book is about the power of formative female friendships.

 

As our narrator, I wanted Sissy to have a degree of naivete as she navigates the radical experience of growing into a new—and unexpected!––body. But she also needed to have her own kind of wisdom to carry the story for us.

 

Sissy is an outsider, having spent some years unhoused with an unstable mother, moving regularly to escape the attention of social workers, and so a keen and unique observer of the world around her. I found myself wanting to see the world through her eyes as I was writing, and I hope a reader does too!  

 

Q: How would you describe the dynamic between Sissy and Tegan?

 

A: I think many of us experience love first with our friends. When the idea of a romantic partner is still a daydream, our feelings for our female friends are very real and intense. We learn how to navigate those emotions, as if practicing for the real thing to come later.

 

I loved Lilly Dancyger’s book First Love, which is an ode to female friendships; she gives those relationships as much significance as romantic partnerships.

 

I think Sissy and Tegan are experiencing that intensity of adoration for each other, but they also both come from difficult homes and hardship. So while their connection is joyous and redemptive, it contains within it the seeds of its own destruction.

 

I hope the ending leaves the reader with, what to me, is the most important part of their dynamic: delight!     

 

Q: How was the novel’s title chosen, and what does it signify for you?

 

A: I wish I could take credit for it, but a dear friend, Georgia Francis King, who is also an editor and helped with multiple rounds of revisions, came up with Amphibian, and I immediately knew it was right.

 

There’s so much in it! Amphibians live between one state and another, and are often shapeshifting and strange—all very apt for puberty!

 

But also frogs recur throughout mythology, as symbols of fertility in some cultures or associated with licentiousness in others, not to mention all the fairy tales with frogs kissed and turned into princes.

 

It all felt so ripe with potential. Our understanding of what it means to be a woman is passed down through the stories we’re told, and many of these amphibious myths perpetuate toxic ideas of femininity and the social censure of female sexuality. 

 

Q: The writer Rebecca Stott said of the book, “As a tale of childhood friendship, it brims with sex and violence and threat, and moves to a crescendo of strange and magical beauty. I recognised the strangeness of my own girlhood in it, and I am sure that other readers will do the same.” What do you think of that description?

 

A: I was thrilled! Rebecca is a writer I deeply admire—all her books are fantastic, but I really connected with her memoir, In the Days of Rain: A Daughter, a Father, a Cult—so for her to put into words so succinctly what I was trying to do meant an enormous amount to me.

 

I wrote this book hoping it would resonate with people’s own experience, who, like me, might have found girlhood a challenging time—beautiful and yet full of small, often overlooked brutalities—and I think Rebecca’s words encapsulated that.  

 

Q: What are you working on now?

 

A: I have an outline for a new novel—something totally different than my last two books!––and I’m excited for the moment I can really get to work on it. 

 

Q: Anything else we should know?

 

A: I spoke to so many women in the process of writing this book about their stories, about their earliest memories of desire and shame, and realized how many of us are still trying to make sense of it. I’d love to hear from any readers about what the book brought up for them!

 

But, most of all, thank you so much for reading and giving me the opportunity to share this conversation with you. 

 

--Interview with Deborah Kalb. Here's a previous Q&A with Tyler Wetherall.