Joan, the up-and-coming trans comedian who features in several stories in Sloane Murphy’s debut fiction collection, Shut Up, I Love You, I’ll Call You Tomorrow, always ends her sets with the same line: “Thank you, I’ve been an open wound!” In the story of the same name, Joan is newly on tour with Chris Panos, a well-known cis male comedian with a concerning number of right-wing bro fans. She manages to hold her own, sometimes winning audiences over, other times having to resort to punching hecklers in the middle of her performance (which results in her first viral online moment).
Joan’s stand-up is all about externalizing her inner turmoil—or at least appearing to do so. She often shocks her audiences by making them wonder if she’s “having a mental breakdown.” When Chris asks her to tone those parts down, she’s upset. To her, the parts where she’s verging on losing control are the most compelling bits. Most stand-up is boring, she believes, because the comedians “constrain themselves.” Performing to bigger and bigger audiences, and running an OnlyFans on the side, Joan appears comfortable with a high level of vulnerability and openness. But in her personal life, Joan is no open wound—she’s guarded, and overly aware of what others think of her. It turns out that it’s harder to be emotionally raw offstage and offline, faced with her friends, exes and assorted acquaintances who know her up-close.
Shut Up, I Love You, I’ll Call You Tomorrow is a collection of nine interlinked stories, set in Chicago in the 2020s, and brimming with trans-dyke-centred humour and pathos. The stories feature a cluster of largely white trans lesbians who all hang out in the same bars and apartments, dating, hooking up and cohabitating in a revolving door of drama, resentment and tenderness. The collection dwells in the many overlapping tensions of this social environment: public performance versus private feelings; selling out versus being broke; the risks of intimacy versus the loneliness of self-sufficiency; taking care of others versus taking care of yourself; working hard to “pass” as cis versus not giving a shit.
Interpersonally, the stories feature tensions between exes and polycules, often the result of the women being in such close proximity all the time. The kind of spill-your-guts bravado that Joan excels at in the spotlight is riskier at the bars, bathhouses and house parties that the Chicago dolls frequent, where everyone is in each other’s business and community doesn’t automatically mean kindness. Murphy also portrays the ongoing friction between the old guard and the newer arrivals to the scene. In several stories, younger girls show up in Chicago, wide-eyed and hopeful, from smaller cities they’ve grown out of. To them, the city is “some kind of paradise,” full of beautiful trans women and a thriving T4T dating scene. But the old guard have grown tired of having to mother the new arrivals. “I just wish that they’d learn to act like they’ve been somewhere before,” remarks Freddie, one of the local girls in “The Beer Drinkers Versus the Puppy Mill.” “Puppy” is her snide term for the newbies.
Freddie herself is hardly old. She’s still in her 20s, trying to figure out her own life, juggling parties, sex work and a fraught relationship with her own mother. Her friend Carolina, who has some serious life experience compared to the younger girls, including having been incarcerated in her early 20s, is frequently compelled to take care of the other women she knows, who are always calling and texting her with their emergencies. In “Our Lady of Perpetual Help,” one of the collection’s most moving stories, she hits her limit all at once, and flees to an isolated trailer in the Ozarks to get away from all the demands others have placed on her. Is it her fault for always putting herself in the mothering role? Is it the community’s fault for not considering her as a person who needs care too?
One of the collection’s strengths is that its overlapping tales allow the reader to develop a multifaceted understanding of various characters, across multiple stories. Murphy sometimes even switches the narrative point of view from one character to another in the middle of a story, so that just as we’re getting comfortable with one side of an argument, we are thrust into the opposing perspective. A side character with a brief cameo in one piece might show up as a main character later on, or vice versa.
Suddenly a character who was on the sidelines might snap into focus. Sibyl, who in one story is disliked for her obsession with thinness and prettiness, features as the protagonist of a later story, “Circles,” in which we come to understand her preoccupations a little better, how they come from her experiences of being trolled by transmisogynists online. At the same time, moving into the main-character position doesn’t absolve Sibyl of her cruel streak toward the other girls at a party, all of whom she accuses of being “clockier” than she is, during an ill-received outburst.
Sometimes meanness is just meanness, even if it comes from a place of fear and hurt, Murphy suggests. She doesn’t shy away from portraying these women as selfish, angry, unkind, flaky or delusional; this means that their moments of generosity, kindness and care toward each other are all the more impactful when they arrive.
The relationship at the heart of the collection is between Joan and Carolina, who, as we slowly discover across several stories, used to be married, and are now friends. They have baggage and are prone to arguing. After driving for hours to find Carolina in the Ozarks where she’s hidden herself away, Joan confronts her about her sudden disappearance. She reminds her friend that they had promised each other that they would both survive, no matter what. “We’re all fucking suicidal, Carolina,” Joan says. “You don’t get to do it though, neither do I.” It’s tough love, but, as we know from previous stories, neither woman is into sugarcoating things.
The collection is uneven at times, with some stories reading more like scenes out of a longer narrative than stand-alone pieces. The opener, “In Control of the Situation,” follows Agnes, who’s struggling with her addictions, as she meanders through a chaotic house party full of friends, hookups and exes. Like Agnes, the story itself doesn’t seem quite sure where it wants to go. However, because of the linked structure of the book as a whole, these mildly dissatisfying entries are still important parts of the world that Murphy creates. Even though it’s a little loose and unsatisfying, this first story still works well in terms of setting the scene for the rest of the collection. It introduces us to the web of characters, the parties they frequent and the ways in which they relate to each other.
“I don’t know enough about being a woman to like, be some sort of example of womanhood,” says Joan in “Thank You, I’ve Been an Open Wound,” when confronted with advice to lean into identity politics in order to build her career. The women in the collection aren’t generally looking to be models of womanhood—they mostly want to be able to afford their rent, have sex, hang out and not be harassed. At the same time, when the women around them are struggling, they do their best to show up and give advice, or DIY hormones, or a place to crash or a reality check.
Murphy doesn’t try to answer the questions her stories ask about whether it’s okay to sell out, what different generations owe each other or whether truth-telling is always better than platitudes. Instead, she shows us her characters living alongside one another, despite an overwhelming sense that the world is getting worse around them. As Carolina says to Joan, in a moment of brief respite, drinking beers with their feet in the lake: “There isn’t a future but we still have to live in it.” Based on this collection, Chicago seems like a pretty good place to do that.
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