Fiction and the Archive: An Interview with Juliet Jacques
In February 2025, we sat down with Juliet Jacques, author of Trans: A Memoir (2015), Variations (2021), and The Woman in the Portrait (2024), among other works. We discussed her work, its scope, and its influences. We talked about trans experience and how that shapes and is shaped by fictional writing, the influence of political and artistic movements on Jacques’ own fiction, modernist film and literature, trans and LGBTQ representation in the media, and much more.
The emerging theme of the interview is that of the archive, which here stands as something to be researched, re-purposed, and invented anew, all with the aim of creating both a new aesthetic and drawing important political and cultural lessons.
The interview was conducted by Joel Evans (School of English, University of Nottingham) in the company of a live audience. Transcribed here is only a part of a wide ranging and fascinating discussion. We start here with a question on how Jacques places herself as a writer:
J. Evans: One of the things that occurs to me about your work is that it seems so grounded, and examines so many different places in, the UK, both in Variations and in The Woman in the Portrait, for example. But then you seem to be influenced quite a bit by the European tradition in fiction. Do you think of yourself as an English writer, or do you see yourself as being part of a broader tradition?
J. Jacques: Well, sadly I don’t have much choice but to think of myself as an English writer. That’s where I’ve lived my entire life and English is the only language I speak fluently. So, in a way that’s what I have to write about. I had the idea for Variations when I was in my early twenties and decided I wanted to write something that represented trans and non-binary people in literature and did so using a variety of different characters and forms. The idea I had in the mid-2000s was that all these stories would be set in the present, but in different places across the world. But I realised after that this was not quite the right way of approaching the project: it would involve writing about places I’d never been to and that I didn’t have anything other than a very second-hand knowledge of. It was only on the second attempt to do the project which I really began in 2014 and 2015 that I realised, no, all the pieces should be set in Britain, and the scope should be temporal rather than spatial.
But a lot of my favourite writers are European. French, German and Russian literature in particular have all been a very big influence on me, and I read a lot in translation: I read Czech and Polish authors, various writers from Central and Eastern Europe, and also post-colonial, African literature too. So, I look more away from anglophone writing, and more towards European and African writing. I’m particularly interested in the European modernist tradition.
You mentioned my book, Monaco, earlier, which is labelled a novella although really it’s a short story with lots of pictures that make it look longer. Monaco is set in Europe’s most silly country, which of course is Monaco – which, if you imagine Disney and Gucci combined to make a big theme park you’re somewhere there. So the story is set there, and it draws quite a bit on the work of Guillaume Apollinaire, who was a French poet raised in Monaco in the early twentieth century. The book is about this photo-journalist who contrives an assignment in Monaco because she’s sort of guiltily intrigued by the place. The narrative unfolds as she moves around the principality, taking photos. In The Woman in the Portrait, I have stories which are also set outside the UK – one is set in inter-war France and another is set in inter-war Germany. But mostly my work is set in England because that’s the place I know and that’s the place I feel most qualified to write about. I know the social and cultural history of the country, and I’ve also got a sense of what it’s like to live here, what it’s like to navigate the country’s health system, and the county’s public and media sphere, which I’m sure we can all agree are great, no problems there.
JE: We’ll come back to the media toward the end, maybe. To go back to Variations in particular though: if one had read just that book and maybe your memoir, they might – quite rightly in many ways – describe you as someone who writes trans fiction or fiction about trans people. But there do seem to be a lot of other, recurrent elements that crop up again and again in your work. I’m thinking of history here in particular (which you’ve just touched on), but also the theme of the archive – a lot of your work seems informed by going into archives or fictionalising archives, which then leads into a very particular aesthetic around things like metafiction, documentary realism, and then in the later work autofiction. Could you talk a bit about how these tendencies emerged together? Are they inter-related, or are some of them standalone preoccupations?
JJ: Well, I do try to bring these things together, but as you suggest there’s also moments of tension and fraying, and these moments are often what makes the work more interesting. You need an element of risk in your writing. If something is easy to write, and comes together easily, you’ve probably done something wrong. Every time I’ve written something and thought that it was surprisingly easy and then given it to a friend or a colleague, they’ve always come back and said, you know, you’ve really screwed this up. So there’s always an element of tension, and Variations is a great example. I really could have gone into this project thinking it might not work at all. In fact, I did it as a PhD and approached two universities with the initial idea. One of these just looked at the proposal and just said look: it’s not going to happen, it’s not going to work. So I was like: right, I’ll show you.
But it did feel a bit like a high wire act trying to bring in these elements of history, metafiction, and some elements of autofiction which are present in Variations too. As you say, there are plenty of metafictional elements in that book, so for example there’s a story set in the 1990s called ‘The Twist’, which is about a group of filmmakers making a film about a recently deceased trans woman, which is written as a film script about the making and unmaking of that film, and then the making of a different film. The story has that title in part because I was playing with this idea of the twist in plot. At the time, I was thinking about this in relation to the film The Crying Game, which was marketed as having this big twist in the narrative – and if you want to know what that twist is, there’s an episode of The Simpsons where they give it away, so watch that. But the title also plays with the idea of a trans body being marketed as a kind of twist in itself, and then the screen play within the short story has all these different, winding twists to the point of absurdity.
JE: It’s a great story.
JJ: You asked about documentary realism as well. There’s a story in Variations which is set in the 1930s, which its based on the true story of someone called Colonel Victor Barker, a trans man who married a woman and then got done for perjury and sent to prison in London. His life spiralled from there really, and in the late ‘30s he ended up being involved in a kind of proto-reality television. He lived in an enclosure on Blackpool beach and make a kind of exhibition out of himself and his relationship with somebody. Now, in the biography of Colonel Barker that’s relayed in just one paragraph, so I decided to write about and expand on that, because it was just so interesting. This is what became the story ‘The Exhibition,’ which is cobbled together from invented newspaper reports, letters from Lieutenant Julian Cooper (a thinly veiled, fictional version of Colonel Barker) to various impresarios, lovers, and pretend lovers. The story also includes a report from the Mass Observation group who were around in the ‘30s and grew out of the Surrealist movement. This group would go to big and small public events and just document the opinions of the public in really granular detail. So, all of those things are there, and there is a very broad range of literary interests that come in.
I think what links it all together is my profound interest in European modernism in particular – which brings with it an interest in the ways in which literature can engage with contemporary politics and technology, and a thinking through of the affect these things have on form. One reason Variations is structured in the way that it is, is because a few years earlier I was also thinking of just writing a non-fiction history of trans and non-binary people in Britain, which led me to think about what would it mean for that to be written by someone who is a transexual woman, but who is fairly middle class and who is white – what would it mean for someone like me to try and write something definitive in that way? And the more I thought about it, the more I realised that I didn’t want to do it, and decided to do something that was more polyvocal, maybe an edited collection of essays, and indeed things have been done like that since. But I thought, with Variations, it’s a work of fiction, so you can bring these different voices in, and because there is so little British trans fiction I was hoping to open up space for other writers.
JE: Going back to what you were just saying now about being influenced by the European, modernist tradition and the political potential of art, I’m wondering to what extent that links in with the whole notion of performance and creating situations: so, for example, the whole idea of the exhibition in Blackpool seems a bit like an alternate version of a Situationist experiment, in which a type of art-work is created in the moment which is at the same time deeply political. And I did notice that in your most recent collection, you mention situationism…
JJ: Yes, that’s a big influence…
JE: But then there’s also that preoccupation that the group had with going into film archives and splicing bits of film together, which seems to offer itself as an analogy to how your own fiction is put together, but also links perhaps with your broader work in film too, which again draws on archival material. So, two questions there, I suppose: one, relating to art, performance, and so on, but then another about the extent to which your film practice links in with your writing.
JJ: I think, again, that’s where, for a trans writer and particularly perhaps a transexual woman writer in Britain, at the time I was learning to write, performance was incredibly important. This was still during the time of Section 28. I don’t know how many of you are familiar with Section 28 – there’s actually a story about it in Variations. But this was a piece of Thatcherite legislation, passed in 1988 as part of the Local Government Act. Section 28 was the clause that prohibited the promotion of homosexuality by public bodies: schools in particular, but also libraries, anything that was publicly funded. This was brought in after a several years long, anti-gay moral panic that was heightened by the AIDS crisis. No-one was ever prosecuted under this law, and the general conception was that it didn’t really do anything. But it basically meant that in schools you could have no productive conversation about any issues to do with sexuality or gender identity. As an example, I remember going to my local library in 2001 and seeing a book on San Francisco. I opened it up to find that all the pages about the LGBT culture there had been very carefully removed from the book. And it occurred to me initially that maybe that was just because someone wanted to go there, but no, it was actually common practice. In the Russel T Davis series, It’s a Sin, for example, they show people removing bits of books for exactly that reason.
So, really, if I wanted to find out about queer or trans people as a teenager, I had to do it either through the internet – which I did quite a lot of – or through television. The latter occurred particularly if I was staying up late and watching BBC2 or Channel 4, which, probably much more so than now, had quite a lot of queer programming, and would show films from all over the world that dealt with LGBT subjects. So that was how I learned about trans people, and I’d watch anything because I was so starved of material. I’d watch anything that touched on LGBT issues, and particularly anything that seemed to do with gender variance. So, I ended up watching lots of stuff about drag performers, and people who were seen as performers in their everyday life. Around the same time, Judith Butler was writing, and I wasn’t necessarily reading Butler as a teenager, but these ideas were in some way percolating through to some of the 90s trans writers I did read like Kate Bornstein or Sandy Stone. There was this general sense, then, that performance was one of the spaces in which trans and gender variant people could express themselves, both for themselves and for an audience. So that was something I was very interested in, and I was also interested in performative forms of art generally: I was very interested in theatre, I was in bands as a teenager and did some gigs—none of them really went anywhere, but I did play bass in various fifth rate punk bands. Sport was and is a big thing for me too – some people may know that I watch and play football and write about it quite a lot.
So, I’m very interested in ways of living that involve being in front of an audience. And a lot of the stories in Variations and in The Woman in the Portrait touch on that.
JE: Then there is the other question about film and the archive. Is that a cross over point for your work on film and fiction, because there are quite a lot of film scripts in the fictions themselves, for example.
JJ: Yes, there are film scripts in both Variations and Woman in the Portrait. Archive film making is a really big interest and passion of mine. I teach in the Royal College of Art in London, and part of that involves running a four-day short course about archive film making. So I give the students a long list of films that are made up primarily or entirely of found or archival footage, or that use other archives in quite interesting or creative ways, and we talk about different ways in which students might compose new works out of existing footage or combine that footage with new footage or other forms. We go to the British Film Institute which has a huge archive on the Southbank, and then they all come up with ideas for films and maybe even start to realise them.
In fact, I made a short film called You Will Be Free, which is made up of almost entirely archive footage, with any original footage being just shots of newspaper articles and still images. Over all the archive material I’ve added a new narration – and I have an actor deliver this. The film deals with the HIV and AIDS crisis of the 1980s and early 90s, particularly in the UK and the US. There’s lots of reasons why I like working with archive film. One is just because using stuff that has already been filmed is just easier than using something new, although I have made films where I’ve done that as well. But there’s so much existing material out there, considering we’re around 120 years into the history of cinema by now. I like the aesthetic of using this kind of material, and the potential of film to transport you into another place and time, and again you can exploit existing footage’s propensity to do that.
There’s lots and lots of works that I like that use archive film, either as it is or in creative ways – we talked about the Situationists and the way that a film maker like René Viénet would take an existing kung fu film or even a soft porn film and put new dialogue over it to illustrate class struggle or something like that. So, archive film is infinitely flexible, I think. But in terms of how that comes into my fiction writing, I do use some archival material that is real, but I also use a lot of material that is made up, and I have seen a couple of reviews of Variations that say: look, there’s a lot of archival material here and so I’m not sure how much credit the writer deserves for just putting it all in a book. The response to which, of course, is, no I made all this up! It’s just made in a way that makes it look like it’s not, which is kind of how a lot of fiction works!
So, I’m very interested in invented archives as well as real ones. And sometimes that’s something you have to do as a trans or queer, minority artist or writer: sometimes you do have to create your own histories. One of the films I always show my students is a film called Queer in Space: Kollontai Commune Archive, which is made by the School of Theory and Activism in Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan, a city I’ve visited a couple of times. The film imagines a queer-feminist, space-age, communist archive through repurposing these apparently found postcards, and writing new material and poetry that they claimed to have found in this archive. The film again very convincingly presents this as real, as re-discovered material. When I’m writing a story that takes this sort of approach myself, I have to think about whether it’s plausible that this kind of material could be rediscovered, and of course if I feel that it isn’t then I have to rethink my approach.
The title story in The Woman in the Portrait, for example, is set in Germany in 1920s and 30s. And it was really inspired by the fact that I got asked to do a talk at the Tate Modern. I was asked to respond to the there collection from a trans perspective and to pick out one item to do this. After looking through, I went back to the curator and said, well, I’ve been through the whole collection and there isn’t anything, so I’m going to have to make something up. There was a painting in the collection by a painter called Christian Schad, who was working in Germany in the 1930s, ‘40s and ‘50s. They had one work by him which was called Self-Portrait with Model. In this painting, you see Schad sort of looking at the viewer absolutely disgusted, whilst blocking off the midriff of a half-naked woman, who has a quite masculine looking face. So, I saw something in that and drawing on my own difficult sexual encounters with men, thought, well, this to me has all the hallmarks of someone who is disgusted with himself for being attracted to a trans woman. And of course Berlin in the 1920s was where the first reassignment surgeries were pioneered in the Institute for Sexual Science, and they quite famously had trans women working there. One of the first things that the Nazis did when coming to power was to destroy the Institute and burn its library – indeed, it is the burning of this library that those very famous book burning photos depict.
So, I thought, ok, this seems plausible to me that the woman in the portrait could be a trans woman. I looked into the history of the painting and it said that Christian Schad never said who the woman was. It’s not his wife – he claimed it was just a woman he saw in the street in Vienna. And I thought, that’s good enough. So, I basically invented these rediscovered diaries by a trans woman called Heike, who’s connected to the Institute for Sexual Science. That’s a technique I use a lot in my fiction, which is to look at a scenario and say, ok there’s something happening in this particular set of historical circumstances that I want to draw out. All the strands are there, and I’m not quite sure how to pull them out, but if I create a person and put them in that scenario, then they can all be drawn out by that person.
I wrote this set of diaries for Heike and invented a story about how they’re rediscovered in France, and how letters from Christian Schad to various artist friends had been rediscovered too. The story ends up becoming a story about the male gaze, and particularly how that intersects with transphobia, but also how that might have played out in a time when we don’t have a concept of the male gaze or transphobia. But then again, the story in this instance becomes about not just power dynamics and sexual relationships, but what’s happening culturally in the society. Weimar Germany has long been an interest of mine, not just for the early LGBT stuff but also German Expressionist Theatre, the films of Fritz Lang, or G. W. Pabst, or the general political situation in the wake of the First World War and the crushing of the German Revolution, and so on. All these things are present in the story, and the rediscovered archive becomes a way of putting them together.