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(The essay below is excerpted from the revised and expanded edition of
Pronoia Is the Antidote for Paranoia)


THE LITERARY EQUIVALENT OF A SEX-CHANGE
(To read the entire text of this piece, go here.)

When I was 19, while other man-boys my age were dreaming of becoming doctors and lawyers and rock stars, a curious ambition overtook me: I decided I wanted to be a feminist when I grew up. As I pursued that goal over the years, I devoted many meditations to imagining what it's like to be a woman. While writing my second book, *The Televisionary Oracle,* I lived part-time inside the psyche of the heroine for five years.

But I have always been perfectly happy to be a heterosexual man. The prospect of dressing in women's clothes, for costume parties or any other reason, has never appealed to me. I'm mildly interested in the stories of those who have decided to change their sex with the intervention of surgery and drugs, but the fantasy of becoming a transgender person has never flitted across my mind's eye.

My identity as an author, on the other hand, has not been as clear-cut. I have sometimes felt like a storyteller trapped in the body of a journalist. On other occasions, it's more the reverse. I imagine I'm an essayist stuck inside the persona of a poet, or else maybe a scholar lurking within the form of a wacky visionary.

The confusion doesn't stop there. My heart tells me I'm a mystical seeker who was born to explore spiritual themes, even as my head says I'm an artistic intellectual whose task it is to illuminate the mysteries of concrete reality here on the material plane.

So while I've never dreamed of being a transgender person, I have sometimes fantasized about getting a mythical *trans-genre* operation -- a procedure that would cure me of the nagging sense that I'm not the writer I'm supposed to be.

My wish was finally fulfilled during the four and a half years I worked on my new book, *PRONOIA Is the Antidote for Paranoia.* It taught me not to struggle against my contradictions, but rather to celebrate them. It didn't give me the literary equivalent of a sex-change, but rather bestowed on me a poetic license to be the authorial equivalent of a hermaphrodite . . . .

Read the rest of this essay.

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