Kristen Arnett loves messy queer women.
A librarian who affectionately refers to herself as “dad” and makes a truly expansive range of ravioli jokes on her popular Twitter account, Arnett’s big break was in 2019 with her debut novel, Mostly Dead Things. That book focused on a taxidermist’s daughter grappling with her father’s death, surrounded by the mess of family drama in the middle of the unforgiving Florida swamp.
Following up a New York Times bestseller is no easy task, but in With Teeth, released this month, Arnett continues her signature brand of unabashed queer chaos bubbling just beneath the surface.
In With Teeth, Arnett once again takes on messy women in Florida, this time through the lens of parenting. Sammie, the protagonist, is thorny and difficult, an unreliable narrator who sips mimosas at her kid’s swim practice and feels the weight of perception and expectation from every angle. Her wife Monika is a career-driven butch with a close-up view of Sammie cracking at the seams. And their son, Samson, is something else entirely, maybe a force of evil or maybe simply a strange kid navigating the mayhem around him.
Imagine a Stephen King thriller meets We Need to Talk About Kevin but with lesbian moms in the U.S. south, and you might be able to nail down what With Teeth is all about. A car ride turns into a tense battle of wills between mother and son that leaves lasting scars; a trip to the 7-Eleven drips in self-conciousness of how queer mothers are percieved; a pussy pic from a new lover becomes the catalyst for a family reckoning; and a raucous ending leaves the reader wondering who to believe about anything—both in the book’s family and your own.
In the midst of With Teeth’s launch week, I reached Arnett at her home in Miami to talk about the book, shitty gay moms, queer questioning and, of course, 7-Eleven.
I’m curious about what made you think of writing about queer parenting in the way you have in With Teeth.
I was thinking a lot about specifically queerness and how it sits inside of central Florida. I am a Florida writer, I consider myself very much to be a place writer, and Florida is a state that’s like a very conservative state, a very red state. It’s a state where a lot of times queerness is pushing up against morality, police and things that are happening in government on a national level, but very much on a local level.
I’m from Orlando and there’s tons of queer people who live here. I mean, we have theme parks—queer people love to work at theme parks. We have a lot of queer people in central Florida but there’s not like a ton of queer spaces, or queer-defined spaces. We as queer people kind of like to take over spaces we have locally, like gay IHop. It’s not because the IHop is in itself gay. But everyone that works there is queer, the people that go in are all LGBTQ+—like it’s gay IHop.
And so I was thinking a lot about the idea of how community is so important for queer people, and how in Orlando so much of that is defined by the spaces that are there which are very oriented towards, like, young, single queer people. We do have a couple nightclubs and bars. And I thought, you know, that if you’re a person who wants to have children, how do you fit in those spaces? And there’s just no space for it.
What if maybe you’re just a shitty gay mom—sometimes moms are shitty. Are gay women allowed to be shitty moms, or is there some kind of standard? Motherhood is already this thing where it’s like you’re being viewed all the time. And then in Florida, there’s this idea that you have people looking at you, waiting for you to fuck up because you’re doing something that’s wrong and it shouldn’t work. There are a lot of conservative people who think lesbian parents, two women, shouldn’t raise a son. And then the additional kind of stress and overwhelming feeling of, like, no, I really can’t fuck up because if I fuck up, then I ruin it for everyone else and every other queer parent.
I get very obsessive about what I feel like I want to write about, and so I became very, very intensely devoted to thinking about these concepts, specifically in Florida.
You were talking about obsessiveness. I’ve read a lot about how much research into taxidermy you did for your first book, Mostly Dead Things. What kind of research did you do ahead of this book?
It was a different kind of research for me. I’ve never done taxidermy. So when I was doing that kind of research, the book very much started from my librarianship—because I’m a librarian—so it started from a place of [being] very research heavy. I wanted to get the physical aspects of taxidermy exactly right. I wanted somebody who has performed taxidermy to read the book and not know that I haven’t done it. So it came from almost a scientific kind of viewpoint.
This book obviously didn’t involve the same kind of research. I wasn’t doing a dissection of children—that’d be a different book entirely.
I spent eight and a half years as a children’s librarian at a public library doing storytime. Working in the public libraries is its own animal. I feel like the research I did [for With Teeth] was very much internalized and based on having these experiences. Because I am a librarian and because I’m also a writer, I journal and I have a lot of things like backups of emails and everything I’ve ever done for storytime. I have archives of things that I have worked on and created.
I think that a part of it was just watching people with kids and how they move through space, how their bodies are and how in alignment with their children they are—or how sometimes they’re out of sync or like budding together in a physical kind of way. Those moments of working in a public library were less moments of, “Oh, look at this, a family coming together and just very much enjoying a love of literature,” and more like I’m watching people come apart at the seams.
So it was less heavily researched than Mostly Dead Things, but I think that made it more difficult. I wish it was something that I could have read, like a taxidermy manual from 1978: tell me how you got here, tell me how you make them out. Nobody really has, like, any idea about how to raise a child. People think they have ideas. I love the chaotic aspect of it. It felt deeply messy, so it really was like just diving into a mess.
One of the things I really liked about the book were those kinds of interstitial sections of perspectives from these tertiary characters, and the judgement or the perception they cast on Sammie. I grew up in rural Alberta, which is probably the most right-wing part of Canada. And it’s a similar kind of thing where queer people existed, but people just didn’t talk about some of these things. In the book, I think that comes through in the scene at the church daycare after Sammie leaves, and the daycare worker has all of these thoughts about who she is and why she’s there.
Sammie is, like, so deeply unreliable. I think she subconsciously knows that she’s sometimes lying, but for myself thinking about her as an unreliable narrator—she has to think that she’s telling the truth a lot of the time. I think she truly thinks that she has an idea about how the world is working around her, how people see her and the interstitials allowed for me to kind of play with that. The way that you think people see you and how they see you is sometimes accurate, but then a lot of times it diverges, like how the stories inside of a household diverge.
With that daycare worker, I was very much thinking of how, as a queer person who grew up in an evangelical space, going into that space I would maybe have my hackles raised; I’m already anticipating that somebody is thinking a certain way about me. And in reality, I have no idea what their personal story is or how they think about anything or how they see me.
I was really interested in writing the interstitial about the woman who works at the 7-Eleven. Sammie sees this woman, who’s another queer woman, and she’s like, “She’s judging me on my queer parenting.” And in reality, that queer woman that’s working at the 7-Eleven doesn’t even think that Sammie’s gay. You don’t even know how people are seeing you.
That was also just very funny to write, and I love 7-Eleven.
I have to note that American 7-Eleven is different from Canadian 7-Eleven. You can’t get booze here, and it’s quite tragic.
Wow, I did not actually know that. I call 7-Eleven my neighbourhood bar, so that would not work for y’all.
Another thing I really liked about this book, and that I also liked about Mostly Dead Things, were the moments that were so uncomfortable that you kind of had to laugh about them. I was reading With Teeth sitting across from my girlfriend, and I had to stop and tell her out loud about the scene of the vagina picture in the car. What role do you think that sort of “so awkward you have to laugh about it” stuff plays into your work?
I mean I love it. I think humour is so subjective, and in writing this particular book, I really wanted it to be deeply uncomfortable.
I compare it to this idea of being out at a bar and you hear an awful, awful first date going on next to you. Like, it looks like they’re having a terrible time, one of them is saying something and the other one is just a train wreck; you’re sitting next to it and you’re overhearing it and it’s deeply uncomfortable, but also it’s so engrossing that you’re internalizing it, like, “I can’t wait to tell people about this cringey and uncomfortable thing.”
It’s fun to be a voyeur of other things because then we can also be like, “Well, that’s not happening to me.” But also a lot of times those things are deeply relatable because we have had really deeply messy things like that happen to us.
So, specifically that scene—you’re like, “I’m a mom, and I’m dating again while I still live with my ex-wife in our house with our kid, which is its own mess, but I’m dating a person and they’re sending me very graphic pictures that I’ve asked them to send and I’m viewing them.” And then being like, “Oh god, did this teenager see it over my shoulder?”
And then it’s bookended by this moment where Sammie finally feels like she has alone time. I loved putting her in the hotel room where she ends up being like, “Okay, I’ve had some wine. I feel a little sexy, I’m going to take a picture of myself and then send it back.” But then she accidentally sends it to the wrong person.
Not all of us have done that, but I think that’s a fear that we have. To me, that’s deeply funny because it’s so mortifying. Aren’t things that are deeply mortifying also funny? There are the stories of my own life, where I’ve done things that are so wildly embarrassing, and those are the things that become touchstones to me, and things that are so funny.
I also found my own coming out process to be so deeply humiliating and deeply embarrassing, so I really relied largely on self-deprecating humour to handle that. I definitely fell back on, “Well, at least I can make a joke out of this, because if I couldn’t make a joke out of this, I don’t know what I’d do.”
It feels very natural to me, since I do consider myself to be a queer writer who likes to put that kind of like cringy embarrassing stuff in. I think writing about sex is just like, first of all, very fun, but also sex is messy and funny and sometimes uncomfortable.
A lot of the coverage of With Teeth has drawn attention to how unlikeable your protagonist is. What do you think of that?
I think it’s like such a weird binary to expect that someone’s good or bad and that’s just not reasonable when we’re thinking about people.
Everybody’s this gradient mix of everything—in moments that are kind and moments that are maybe not as kind, or moments that are tender and moments where someone’s just angry. The myriad human condition doesn’t lend itself to being likeable. I am a person and I’ll be honest, I do want people to like me. But to live inside a human body and to be a person is just to be a mess, just like a messy bag of flesh.
I am curious about what queerness means to you, when we’re talking about that kind of expansiveness of the self. Our society’s definition of queerness has shifted and changed so much, especially in recent years. What does it mean to you in your work?
It’s a thing that’s changing all the time and that I’m reconsidering. And that’s maybe the heart of queerness for me—this kind of adaptability and change. It’s not a static thing. When I feel like I understand something about myself, it’s an unlearning and relearning. And that feels like the root of queerness for me, a kind of unlearning and unmaking, whereas anything that feels really defined feels less clear to me.
I also think that I don’t really understand anything about myself as a person. I was about to say that I can only define my own queerness, but also… Can I? I don’t know. To me, queerness means to be a “other” in a way that is an unmaking or a continual trying to understand.
This is such a great question. Maybe it’s the way that I think about writing and also library work, where I think about these things in terms of how many ways I can ask a question. And maybe that’s how I think about queerness: I want to ask the question a million different ways until I figure out what it is that I’m actually trying to get at. But also I never actually get at the thing, I’m only generating more questions. So maybe that’s what queerness feels like, like generating a more expansiveness, if that makes sense.
It really does. It’s just something I like to ask a lot of different people because I think everybody has a very different answer, but they’ll often come back to that sense of not having answers. I definitely don’t understand anything. None of us do. What advice do you have for queer writers just starting out?
I know it sounds cliché, which is horrible, but I think the only thing we can do is write what we want to see, or write our own queer experience. When I was writing Mostly Dead Things, I wasn’t going into it with the feeling that everyone was going to like it. For myself, I’m writing it because I want to write the thing I want to read; I want to write the thing I want to see in the world. I think that all we can do is write the thing for ourselves and for our specific reader, and who your reader is differs from who you are as a person. I think there’s just so much more room for so many different kinds of queer work, and every year it’s really exciting to see new and different kinds of work come out that are not just coming-out stories.
Who is your ideal reader and what do you want to write more of?
As I’m growing as a person, I hope, forever, that I continue to also grow as a writer. This book was a very specific kind of book, and I want to continue to further grow into different kinds. I’m hoping my readership will continue to include people who read because I’m just stupid and funny online, but I also hope that I can grow readership from people who are willing to sit with me in discomfort—people who want to read about the daily life experiences of queer people, daily experiences aren’t necessarily defined like by queerness but are inherently queer.
I hope that my readers will be people who want to see that, and also people who just enjoy reading about Florida, because I think that is the thing I’m going to write about for at least the foreseeable future. I don’t want to box myself in and say I won’t write about other places, but I do deeply love writing about Florida. So I hope for people who want to read about the messiness of Florida, the messiness of people and also continue with me on a journey into further messiness. Maybe I want to write a messy lesbian ghost story or messy dykes in the theme park, like messy dykes at Universal Studios Florida.
You write a lot about lesbian bars, it’s kind of been a driving Twitter joke of yours lately. So what is your perfect lesbian bar?
Man, I mean, not to be like a cliché of myself, but my ideal lesbian bar would literally be like a 7-Eleven. I would love it to be a place where you could get a roller hot dog and also a four pack of shitty beer, and like, you know, kind of hang out there or outside and then maybe get a Slurpee. That’s my ideal situation for a bar because it also feels divey, which I love. I’ve got a million bar ideas. I don’t have any backers yet, but maybe one of them will stick.
But for myself, yes, I really would love to get a taquito and one of those weird pickles in a bag and like Gardettos [pretzels] and Steel Reserve [beer] all at once and have the cashier kind of bust my chops. I love that.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
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