Samantha Josephs gets dirty

Martha has it all: a devoted husband, Leon; a wonderful stepdaughter she bonds with and a circle of friends who always see her glowing at school pickup. She’s the perfect housewife, a dream that some trans women like her never thought she’d achieve. There’s just one problem: apart from Roger, the last remaining vestige of her pre-transition life, no one knows she’s trans.

In Samantha Josephs’s Carrying, Martha has to weigh the risk of her deception with how well it’s worked out for her thus far, despite faking miscarriages to make sure her husband, yearning for a baby, doesn’t get suspicious. With enough acting, she’s able to sustain her new life on this one big lie. That is, until she miraculously ends up pregnant—sans uterus—and must figure out if she’s a medical miracle or an abomination. Her pregnancy cravings and strange symptoms guide her toward a group that meets in the middle of the night to eat rotten meat and siphon gasoline, but is it worth it to sustain her seemingly picture-perfect life?

Xtra chatted with Samantha Josephs about how erotica informed her fiction, the allure of alternative medicine and the upcoming movie adaptation of Carrying.

I’ll start with a compliment: Your novel is disgusting. Tell me about what draws you into the horror genre.

Definitely the filth aspect. Often my number one goal in art is to give something people to talk about the next day at brunch. I think filth is a very fast way to get there. I really like the dissonance of some of the scenes where the most disgusting thing is happening, but it’s also very sweet and tender. Of course, there’s tons of filth icons I look up to outside of horror, like John Waters. I think filth connects to queerness, waking people up to these universal dirty sides that we try to hide.

You’ve written for podcasts, erotica and video games. How did that experience inform the novel?

The podcast taught me how to write really fast. I was working on audio dramas, so you need to end in a way where someone will pay to listen to the next episode. I wrote erotica for a straight men’s magazine, which was a fun one. The challenge was that there were pictures of breasts on the other page—how can you possibly get someone to read what you wrote? I just love the give and take in erotica. The goal is not to write the most pornographic thing ever. It’s actually not that sexy, even to straight men. You need to balance giving them the satisfaction they want, and taking it and hiding it and playing with it.

Carrying is not for squeamish audiences—the body horror is on another level. Martha’s body devolves with the pregnancy, but I found it fitting that this is happening to a trans woman, whose body has already been poked and prodded to the nth degree.

A lot of the symptoms in the book came from my various surgery recoveries, particularly facial feminization surgery: lips so swollen I couldn’t close my mouth, left eye swollen, almost barely able to talk. That was something I begged for and dreamed for, and then I spent a good week or two covered in bruises. Looking truly deformed with this hope that there’d be something beautiful on the other end. It felt like I was entering my new life, which brought me back to pregnancy—this other thing that everyone signs up for that you know will deform you and be incredibly painful, but you have this hope that on the other side you have this beautiful new life, literally.

There’s this “be careful what you wish for” theme running through the book.

I think that relates to my own experience of passing. At the beginning of my transition, I didn’t pass, and it’s very painful to not be seen as who you are. Walking down the street, people’s reactions were so intense because I didn’t look how they thought a woman should look. Now being on the other side and passing, it’s actually stressful and anxiety-inducing in some ways. 

I recently went to Alaska and this guy who was visiting told me, “Don’t suck your straw, it turns me on too much,” and in the next breath, “America is too liberal, I can’t say ‘faggot’ here.” I was like, “Baby, I say faggot all the time!” He obviously did not understand any of the layers of this. 

As fun as that was, it made me realize, because I’m attractive, this homophobic man who’s large and strong wants an interaction with me. Passing is not a field of daisies. It’s like a new minefield.

After Martha’s body is somehow able to produce this medical miracle, she turns to unconventional ways to sustain it, like rotten meat and gasoline, which make her feel better. I thought it was a clever and somewhat reasonable dig at distrust in modern medicine and why homegrown solutions are appealing right now.

I’m completely addicted to TikTok, where this plays out a lot. There’s a spectrum here—there’s more chronically ill people who are detailing their lives and their various treatments, which is pretty tame. Maybe trying a medicine for off-label use. And on the other hand, there’s this woman who throws herself down the stairs, the woman who talks about Lyme disease as galactic codes from the universe … What if we just believed them? These are people in pain, who are saying this eases their pain, and we are laughing at them because they’re stinging themselves with bees. They’re doing these things that seem insane to us, but we don’t know if they work. It’s so much more fun to actually believe crazy people.

A lot of Martha’s insecurity stems from wanting to hold on to this life that she’d been told is really unlikely for her. Did you ever find it sort of reasonable she’s trying so hard to keep it in her grasp?

Yeah, totally. To be a housewife is this impossible ideal that trans women don’t even imagine we could have—some guy would like us so much that we don’t even have to work. That’s my dream! When I was a teenager, I baked a cake for my brother’s graduation, and my homophobic, slightly senile great-uncle told me, “You’ll make a great wife someday.” Everyone else in my family was horrified, but I was like, “You see me!” Obviously there’s countless stories, both real or fictional, of the housewife role being a prison, but I was wondering if we could transcend that prison if we want it really bad.

I remember there being some dating-app discourse a while ago about not disclosing your transness to a partner being malicious or deceitful. Where do you think Carrying fits into that conversation?

There were two trans tropes I wanted to play with—the first being that trans people are tricking straight men into sleeping with us. Martha’s pretty obviously tricking someone into thinking something untrue. And the second is that on any trans woman’s comments, people will say “You can always tell.” And those two ideas can’t exist together—trans women can’t be tricking men if you can always tell. In the U.K., a trans woman not disclosing is considered rape by deception. There’s currently a woman sitting in jail for that. And when her photos were released, everyone was, like, “Oh my god, she’s hideous, you can obviously tell she’s not a cis woman.” So she’s simultaneously sitting in jail for tricking someone while also being humiliated for being obviously trans. This discourse is very real and affects people’s lives.

Another part that’s in there that a lot of cis people miss is that since trans women are women, we can’t trick someone into thinking we are who we are. Some of the inherent trickery aspect is that we’re supposedly men. The current narrative of transness plays out in the novel, where Roger doesn’t see Martha for who she is in a lot of ways; he sees her as an accident of her birth that she’s fought to erase, which isn’t something she chose. But Leon, her husband, genuinely sees her for who she actually is and who she chose to be, so that complicates the trickery narrative. 

Some pretty recent news is that Tommy Dorfman is adapting Carrying for the screen. Tell me about the screenplay and what movies you’re drawing from.

I’m writing the script, so it’s staying in-house. The biggest challenge is so much of the things we talked about—they’re in the narration, and you wouldn’t understand from seeing what is described. A big challenge is making those themes we’re talking about come out in a movie without having the narrator present. 

As for movies, I want the lighting and food of Maddie’s Secret. I love A Dirty Shame, a less popular John Waters movie, but one that has the “housewife going to secret sexy underground freak show” theme. The freaky pregnancy and birth of Titane. The very femme, colourful gore of The Substance. And Sick of Myself. It’s so fun to watch someone constantly lie.