After ending a decade-long relationship with a dominatrix called Daddy, Emerson Whitney decided to reply to an ad in the paper and go storm chasing across the US with a group of strangers from Essex. Daddy Boy recounts the trail from motel to motel, searching for the perfect storm, whilst interpolating meditations and theories on the nature of truth, Whitney’s early life, and his relationship with kink.

We caught up with Whitney as Daddy Boy is published via Cipher Press, discussing the difference between memoir and autobiography, his absolute need to chronicle his life, and living as a disabled person in the United States.

Barry Pierce: What are you categorising this book as because calling it a novel doesn’t feel correct?
Emerson Whitney: True, it is a memoir for sure. I struggle between the words ‘memoir’ and ‘autobiography’ because I find that there are groups of people who see those terms as interchangeable and there are those who see them as very different. The idea that you write one memoir in your life, or you write one autobiography in your life is something that I’m always kind of working to dismantle. For me, at least, I’m just kind of in a lifelong project of using the ‘subjective I’ in my work. So there is that, and everything in the book is true, but, like, what is truth? What is my memory and what isn’t?

BP: I like that you kind of play with the malleability of truth in this book. You make many references to purported memoirs, like Michael Ondaatje’s The Collected Works of Billy the Kid and Gertrude Stein’s The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, works that blend fact and fiction to make this strange third thing. What draws you to this form or, actually, what pushes you away from just writing a novel?
EW: I would love to be pushed into it. Like, spiritually. Not materially. I don’t know about that. I wish that was a move my body/mind took, but I really struggle with it. When I think about doing fiction it’s almost as if there are too many options. It’s like, there are infinite things I could do. It’s too infinite for the way I feel comfortable writing. And so when I use the anchor of what I experienced, I feel as if I get to really expand within that, in terms of I get to play with language more. Because I have the constraint of ‘I’.

BP: When you decided to do the storm-chasing trip, did you know that you would eventually turn it into a narrative?
EW: Yes, I think so. But I always feel like that. I feel everything’s a book. I was talking about teaching with a friend recently and I was like, “Well, if a job came up at that school, I would love to teach it because I had all sorts of weird stuff happen to me at that school. And that would be a great book.” I’m kind of doing it all the time, embarrassingly or not.

BP: Do you plan your life in a way knowing that you’re going to get a book out of each chapter?
EW: Yep, I do. Like I do, and I don’t. I guess life is a book to me. And so no matter what I’m doing, I’m reflecting on it in writing, because writing is just my thinking anyway. So if writing is really my thinking, then I’m always writing, for sure.

BP: Does it ever reach a point where you just want to go on a holiday and, like, not write about it? Not think about anything?
EW: Nope. So, like, I had a really good weekend. There were a lot of people in this stock tank hot tub that I built. It’s a wood-fired stock tank hot tub. I’m very proud of it. Anyway, a lot of people were sitting in it and I noticed no one took any pictures all weekend. And of course, now that everyone’s gone from my house I’m like, “Ah, I should’ve taken a picture.” But then I’m like, of course, how nice is it to not interrupt whatever we were laughing about. And that feels really different. That kind of interruption or lack of presence that I noticed with my phone feels really different from, I guess, what I mean about writing. 

Maggie Nelson said to me once that writing is mediated reality, which I think is true to a great extent. But that’s happening when I’m editing. When I’m editing, I do feel that sort of shift where I become a curator. But when I’m writing in the day, it’s actually when I feel like I drop into my selfhood or my body or the group, or whatever it is that I’m doing. I feel like I’m there. I’m more present. 

BP: Would you consider yourself a chronicler then? Do you have this idea that some day you’ll come to the end of your life and you’ll have this full bookshelf that’ll be “the life of Emerson Whitney”?
EW: Yeah, I do think that. And it’s not on purpose, I don’t really know what else to do. I’m just very curious about what is next.

BP: You mentioned Maggie Nelson there, and I do think her work is in the same realm as yours. Do you have any direct influences on your writing or anyone who you’d consider an antecedent?
EW: I would be so honoured to be in lineage with these theorists and makers, like I was actually holding a Fred Moten book yesterday and I was thinking about his poetry and his theory, when people are doing that hybrid of theoretical engagement and wordplay, that’s where I find myself. I definitely am one of those folks who thinks of poetry and theory as the thinking of being. I am so honoured to, like, be alive while Fred Moten is making stuff.

Maggie, for sure. Like, when I read Bluets I was sort of like, oh, shit, yeah, that’s actually really good.

BP: I want to get into the S/M side of the book. I’m quite intrigued because there’s been a lot of really interesting fiction and nonfiction about S/M recently. I want to know your relationship with that world and how it has become so central to your life?
EW: It was, and is, a way of engaging with my body and other people and sex and with queerness and with gender and all that stuff. And through a specific framework that is about power to some extent, or it was for me, and like yay, like, it helps me, it’s so helpful. There are a million ways it was helpful. When I was putting the book out, I was worried that it was somehow going to say something I didn’t mean, which is that I find kink and that whole world to be so beautifully supportive of people who are experiencing difference at so many levels.

BP: As a writer living with disability, and that being quite a major part of your writing and your identity, I’m  curious, how does a disabled writer live and work and thrive in the American publishing industry? Or just in America in general?
EW: So, my specific relationship to disability comes from a family of like, immigrant people, of people who were racialised as brown, who were also racialised as white. My grandparents’ generation did not have access to saying that they were disabled. They worked in coal mines, they cleaned the banks at night, they were working-class human beings. So the idea of being disabled was like, not offered to my grandparents’ generation. And it wasn’t offered to my mom. And it is now on offer for me for the first time in my family, and we all have the same disability. So it’s been a really important part of my life to try to see that as a political reclamation, that I’m claiming disability as a way to acknowledge what it means to be in capitalism.

My mom passed away a year ago last week. And, you know, in looking through her life, I saw my life, and there’s nothing I can do but work at being like, this is how I will continue to live. She died by suicide. She died as a housekeeper making $17,000 a year for the wealthiest family in this area who have a 380-acre estate and billions of dollars, and, you know, I just watched my mom not be able to be disabled, and to do what she needed to do to be OK. I was told that I am the most of her that’s left in the world so I’m going to do my very, very best to try to do what I wish she could have done, which is rest and be fucking disabled as hell.

Daddy Boy is published by Cipher Press and is out now.