The Memoir Land Author Questionnaire 184: Lynette D'Amico

"This subject of this book was thrust upon me when my lesbian lover of 20 years transitioned from female to male and began to live as a man. I'd planned to coast to the end of life, no boys allowed."

Since 2010, in various publications, I’ve interviewed authors—mostly memoirists—about aspects of writing and publishing. Initially I did this for my own edification, as someone who was struggling to find the courage and support to write and publish my memoir. I’m still curious about other authors’ experiences, and I know many of you are, too. So, inspired by the popularity of The Oldster Magazine Questionnaire, I’ve launched The Memoir Land Author Questionnaire.

Here’s the 184th installment, featuring Lynette D'Amico, author most recently of Men I Hate: A Memoir in Essays. - Sari Botton

P.S. Check out all the interviews in The Memoir Land Author Questionnaire series.

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Lynette D’Amico. Photo by P. Carl

Lynette D’Amico is an essayist and fiction writer whose work has appeared in The Gettysburg Review, The Ocean State Review and at Brevity, Slag Glass City, Short Reads, and Guernica. Her novella Road Trip was short-listed for the Paris Literary Prize. At age 70, she published her memoir in essays, Men I Hate, which won the 2024 Gournay Prize for a first book of essays from Mad Creek Books. She is a recipient of fellowships from the Vermont Studio Center. She holds an MFA from the Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College. She makes her home in Rhode Island with the writer P Carl, but she has a prairie eye. Find her at her website, lynettedamico.com and on Instagram at @scilianblade2.

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How old are you, and for how long have you been writing?

70. My husband and I joke that I learned I had won the Gournay Prize from Mad Creek two days before my 70^th birthday, so age 69.99 was a turning point.

I’ve been writing since my 20s, so fifty years.

What’s the title of your latest book, and when was it published?

Men I Hate: A Memoir in Essays, published Feb 17, 2026 by Mad Creek Books.

What number book is this for you?

Two.

How do you categorize your book—as a memoir, memoir-in-essays, essay collection, creative nonfiction, graphic memoir, autofiction—and why?

Memoir in essays. I wasn’t interested in writing a chronological, conventional memoir. I don’t really think that way. I wanted to explore different aspects of my subject through different lenses. For example, I knew I wanted to write about women’s anger, my own anger, which I did in the essay “The Burning Bed.” I also wanted to explore how my definitions of home evolved through living in different cities in “Cities and Bodies in Motion.” I had a list of subjects and I wrote toward or from those subjects under the overarching topic of Men I Hate.

These essays are an attempt to convey my personal struggle, hope, and confusion to come to terms with what it means to love a man, to love men, to make sense of men. This subject of this book was thrust upon me when my lesbian lover of twenty years transitioned from female to male and began to live as a man. I had planned to coast to the end of life, no boys allowed.

My husband, P. Carl, wrote a memoir about his gender transition at age 50 called, Becoming A Man: The Story of a Transition. My book was written to be in conversation with his book to a certain extent.

What is the “elevator pitch” for your book?

Men I Hate asks the question what happens when the people we are closest to change? Can a lesbian who is with a trans man still call herself a lesbian? Compelled by questions of identity, class, and queerness, Men I Hate, explores what we mean when we say the words marriage, husband, home, and how do we reconcile who we were with who we are becoming.

What’s the back story of this book including your origin story as a writer? How did you become a writer, and how did this book come to be?

My husband, P. Carl, wrote a memoir about his gender transition at age 50 called, Becoming A Man: The Story of a Transition. My book was written to be in conversation with his book to a certain extent.

I am primarily a self-taught writer, until I went to grad school at age 55.

I started writing essays as a way to memorialize something, like 80s gay culture, or to ask myself questions about something such as what is our responsibility to our neighbors, to our community? Or how do we grieve the unbearable? What is left to us after an end, or the end?

Sometimes I am writing in response to a heart text, a book or a story that I carry like a talisman. In the case of Men I Hate, the collection started with the first essay in the book “Changing the Story.” After the 2016 election, I couldn’t read anything except social media rants and opinion screeds. In the devasting wake of the first Trump presidency, I found it unbearable to be around men, to consider men, to try to parse out the good men from the bad. I just felt raw. The first book I could read after the election and during my husband’s transition was Austerlitz by W. G. Sebald. The idea that history can co-exist with the present, that history is not necessarily true but one version of a truth was comforting to me as I was considering what my husband’s transition might mean to my identity, as he was parsing his own personal history, which included seeing himself as a man through various stages of his life, including our gay marriage, and reality was being denied and redefined on our national stage. I felt like I was unraveling. Was I still gay? Were we still a lesbian couple? If not, then what were we? Were we anything anymore? I started this book asking myself questions, questions I thought I had answered but suddenly felt entirely new.

Order the book…

What were the hardest aspects of writing this book and getting it published?

One of the hardest aspects in the beginning of accumulating pages was to start thinking of these essays as a book, which I didn’t do, until later in the process. Some writers think in terms of book length; I was thinking in terms of the next line, the next paragraph. It made for an excruciating and sometimes exhilarating process. When it occurred to me that the essays I was writing could all be titled “Men I Hate,” I revised with that in mind. The last couple of essays, “Men I Love,” and “Becoming Queer,” I wrote to fill out the collection.

One of the early essays, “The Stasi Men” was published in Guernica. After that publication, I was contacted by a number of readers asking about my story. When I had a substantial pile of pages, I started the agent query process. Writing the book proposal forced me to consider what I was doing, what I was writing, and how I conceived of readers beyond my long-term, devoted writing group.

Agent interest was nearly nonexistent, which I get. Agents are generally looking for career writers, or maybe writers with a substantial social media platform. I was posting photos of my dogs on social media, which didn’t translate to an impressive social media presence. So from the agent query stage, I next entered the small and independent press query stage.

More and more small presses don’t accept unagented queries, or they consider open submissions for a very limited time period once a year. Miss the window to submit, and you have to wait another whole year for the next submission cycle. I had actually submitted to the Gournay Prize the year before I won the prize. In that year I revised the manuscript, so I withdrew it from consideration, and submitted it again the following year. Better luck next time came true for me.

Men I Hate asks the question what happens when the people we are closest to change? Can a lesbian who is with a trans man still call herself a lesbian? Compelled by questions of identity, class, and queerness, Men I Hate, explores what we mean when we say the words marriage, husband, home, and how do we reconcile who we were with who we are becoming.

How did you handle writing about real people in your life? Did you use real or changed names and identifying details? Did you run passages or the whole book by people who appear in the narrative? Did you make changes they requested?

Men I Hate started as a response to my husband’s gender transition. When I started writing it didn’t occur to me to consider the questions “what do we owe the people we are writing about” or “what is the line between my own story and my husband’s?” I was desperate to tell MY story, my version of the impact of my husband’s gender transition on my nearly life-long identity as a lesbian. All my friends were asking me questions, my therapist was asking me questions: “How are you feeling about your husband’s gender transition? How do you make sense of your husband’s transition? How has his transition changed your life? Are you still gay?” I started writing these essays to help me clarify my own thinking.

My husband was exploring his own experience with the romance of manhood in his writing. I was likely so angry for so long that I only saw this story as having one side, one perspective, and that was mine. The question for me was: Didn’t I have the right to the material of my life? In the process of writing, I came to realize that stories that don’t contain counter stories are ultimately false or incomplete. I think there are multiple stories within any “true” story. If I choose to write something that involves another person, I’d better have done the work to become aware, to have asked the questions, to have considered the consequences of what I’m writing. Because ultimately it’s not about who has the right to write about things, places, experiences, and other people. Rather, I would say that it’s about how we take consideration of others, how we treat others, how we value them as fully human.

The only person who read the whole manuscript—beside my writing group—was Carl, my husband.

Who is another writer you took inspiration from in producing this book? Was it a specific book, or their whole body of work? (Can be more than one writer or book.)

Books that were significant to the writing of the individual essays include:

“Changing the Story”

This essay is framed by Austerlitz by W. G. Sebald, and attempts to echo that our conception of history as a linear progression of events that can be objectively known, is incorrect, and that our history is rather an accumulation of interpretations and subjective experiences. In particular, it is the experience of looking at photographs that seek to illustrate this point; that photos are subject to interpretation. Just as looking at photos of my gay wedding, of my spouse before transition doesn’t “prove” anything, except maybe that photos are fictional, as the photos in Austerlitz are fictional. Indeed, the “photos” in “Changing the Story,” are imagined.

“The Man Next Door”

In an early draft of this essay it was built on quotations from So Long, See You Tomorrow, a tender and nostalgic nonfiction novel, about a murder on a tenant farm outside of Lincoln, Illinois, in 1923. The second half of the book is a fictionalized account of the murder from various perspectives, including the viewpoint of the farm dog, Trixie. Maxwell’s book asks the question “Can what is done, be undone,” which was my question in this essay.

“Cities and Bodies in Motion”

This essay is built on a quotation from Calvino’s Invisible Cities, which does not appear in the essay:

On the day when Eutropia’s inhabitants feel the grip of weariness and no one can bear any longer his job, his relatives, his house and his life, debts, the people he must greet or who greet him, then the whole citizenry decides to move to the next city, which is there waiting for them, empty and good as new; there each will take up a new job, a different wife, will see another landscape on opening his window, and will spend his time with different pastimes, friends, gossip. So their life is renewed from move to move….

“The Stasi Men”

My Berlin book club read Anna Funder’s Stasiland: Stories from Behind the Berlin Wall, which contributed to this essay.

In addition, there are so many books that I read during the time I was writing the essays in Men I Hate that ignited a thought, connected dangling threads, or introduced me to a new line of thinking. A few of those books were:

Abandon Me and Girlhood by Melissa Febos

Happily: A Personal History with Fairy Tales by Sabrina Orah Mark

In the Dream House by Carmen Maria Machado

Visitation by Jenny Erpenbeck

Where Reasons End by Yiyun Li

What advice would you give to aspiring writers looking to publish a book like yours, who are maybe afraid, or intimidated by the process?

Do it anyway. What I hear often from writers who have a story to tell and are stuck is that they are intimidated by their subject. There is a subject keeping them up at night, burning them alive, but they are worried about betraying family and friends, worried that their ex will read it, that they will be cast out of their community… Write it anyway.

For queer and trans writers, immigrants, writers of color, our voices were never meant to be heard anyway. To try and speak, to write, is a betrayal of the status quo, it’s a betrayal of go along to get along. I have a friend who wrote about her relationship with being Mormon and also a feminist and her father who had Alzheimer’s—two seemingly unrelated subjects, yet both forbidden subjects in her religious practice and in her family. When you write memoir you break the contract you signed when you were three years old, when you were a little kid, promising not to ever, ever tell the truth: about Uncle Louie’s alcoholism, your sister’s drug addiction, your abortion—“Keep it in the family.” Especially for New Englanders, where I live now, family secrets are supposed to go with you to the grave. In a family the truth can be life threatening. Families tell you that if you ever tell the truth about the family, the long bony hand of judgement will come out of the sky and strike you dead.

Tell your story anyway. Not telling your story might kill you just as dead as spilling it all. I’m not big on asking permission to write what I want to write or to beg forgiveness either. If what you’re writing is not controversial, like an overview of where your family lived and when, that you can ask your family members to read. But if you’re writing something they deny ever happened, or something you know they don’t want you to write about, my suggestion is to keep it to yourself. Don’t prematurely share material that you are in the middle of generating. Sometimes even the most benign detail will piss off a family member reader: “I never owned a red baseball cap, you always hated swimming, dad wasn’t drinking the night of the accident.”

And sometimes in spite of all our efforts, we will inevitably break our own rules and cross certain boundaries. It’s important that we forgive ourselves and keep writing.

The most important thing is that I don’t want to be ashamed of my existence. I don’t want to lie about it. I didn’t write the book to be hurtful to people, but sometimes the truth can be hurtful.

What do you love about writing?

I love the rare moment or two when words and sentences and paragraphs seem to be coming together in some kind of coherent, associative form. I think of one of those string maps with photos and newspaper clippings and colored yarn, everything is connected. I love it even more when I get a glimpse of the relationship between image and theme, and where the past is reflected in the present.

What frustrates you about writing?

I am most frustrated by being pressed to have my writing “make sense.” It’s the where are we in time and space question and how do I take the reader with me. I can be impatient with the logistics or I miss them entirely. At this stage of the game, I know that unless I bring my reader along, I am only talking to myself.

What about writing surprises you?

It still surprises me that in spite of the near chronic frustration with the process and the nearly nonexistent reward in terms of actually publishing anything, it’s my favorite thing, and the way I make sense of the world.

I think there are multiple stories within any “true” story. If I choose to write something that involves another person, I’d better have done the work to become aware, to have asked the questions, to have considered the consequences of what I’m writing. Because ultimately it’s not about who has the right to write about things, places, experiences, and other people. Rather, I would say that it’s about how we take consideration of others, how we treat others, how we value them as fully human.

Does your writing practice involve any kind of routine, or writing at specific times?

I try to write first thing in the morning, often while still in my jam-jams from my bed. I at least open up files and check in where I stopped the day before. After about an hour, I meet a friend on zoom to do yoga together. I try to set an intention in yoga to get back to the page sometime that day. If I can anticipate that I need or want a longer period of time to focus, I go to a coffee shop for a couple hours.

What has worked really effectively for me is to do a writing residency or retreat. I generated drafts of a couple of the essays in my book at a residency at Vermont Studio Center, and I’ve done writing retreats with my writing group, and a couple of times I’ve taken myself to a cheap road side motel and just locked myself up for a few days. I don’t open the drapes or turn on the tv, I stay in bed and work.

Do you engage in any other creative pursuits, professionally or for fun? Are there non-writing activities you consider to be “writing” or supportive of your process?

I’m a gardener and avid home cook. I think both past-times contribute to my writing process. Gardening anchors me to where I’m living. I’ve moved around a lot and lived in several different parts of the country, in several different growing zones. The first thing I do in a new place, a new state, a new city, after I find the post office and grocery store, is plant a garden, whether that is in my yard, or at a community garden, or planting pots on a balcony. Gardening is a process of trial and error, experimentation, disaster and glory. In a new place I like to think of gardening as making views, as part of a creative process, a version of shaping and editing.

I’m also what likely would be considered an inefficient cook. I don’t do a lot of planning or meal prep. I plan meals by walking around the grocery store. Recipes don’t really inspire me, but fresh produce from my garden does and whatever looks good at the store or the famer’s market does. I like putting things together and I like recreating recipes that I tasted at a restaurant, like the beef short ribs and polenta from Broadway Bistro in Providence, or the fennel and blood orange salad I tasted at some Italian restaurant.

Finally, I love hosting dinner parties, dinners where the focus is on the food and the conversation. Rules-based dinners are of less interest to me—no dairy, no mushrooms, no olives—why bother? Just like in my writing. I am so much improvisational than planful. Combining ingredients together, paying attention to presentation, texture, as well as taste, are my values in cooking, just as in writing.

What’s next for you? Do you have another book planned, or in the works?

I have a new collection of essays in process: working title The Scheme of Spaces, about my personal experience with the built environments in various cities where I’ve lived or visited framed by my lifelong passion for gardening and the natural world.

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Check out all the interviews in The Memoir Land Author Questionnaire series.