Jesse James Rose On Exploring The Complicated Process Of Healing In Her Memoir
Jesse James Rose’s heartfelt and exuberant memoir, Sorry I Keep Crying During Sex, shifts seamlessly between the eras in her life before and after a sexual assault. Before the assault: she’s blissfully in love with her new boyfriend, exploring her gender identity, and enjoying a thriving acting career in New York. After the assault, she’s heartbroken over her relationship’s demise and has moved in with her grandparents to care for her grandfather, who has Alzheimer’s. Rose boldly tells her story through a variety of formats: lists, theatrical scenes, DMs, and text exchanges, deftly playing with form as she investigates different areas of her life. Through it all, Rose, a noted transgender actor and activist, employs her storytelling skills to immense effect, writing movingly about trauma, relationships, and what true restorative justice could look like. Critics have heaped praise on the book, with Rolling Stone writing, “the cheeky title only begins to scratch the surface of the humorous and frank self-awareness that jumps out on every page of this non-fiction tell-all,” and Kirkus Reviews calling it “an intimate, emotionally honest patchwork quilt of trauma, compassion, desire, and identity.” Rose spoke with us about the process of inviting readers into her brain and the evolving process of healing.
I wanted to start by asking about the structure of the first half of your book, because you employ a lot of different devices, including DMs, scenes from imaginary plays, actual text exchanges you had, imagined text exchanges you wish you had. How did you arrive at this multi-genre format as the best way to tell your story?
A lot of it was how I remembered it. If I remembered, “These texts made me feel this way,” then that seemed like the right medium to put them in. A couple of them really ended up as happy writing accidents. A great example is the fight that I have with Finnegan when we’re long distance, which is the first play scene we get in the book. I had written that out as an exercise to chart what the dialogue journey was, and then I was going to write the rest of the prose around it. I just wanted to make sure that I knew what the journey was before I got started on the rest of the technical writing work. When I read the transcript of it, I thought, “This is complete. This is actually how I remember how this fight went, and this is how I understand it best, just through the dialogue. I don’t know that we actually need anything else.” Instead, we get to put ourselves in both my head and in Finnegan’s head.
Most of the book is just trying to get people literally inside my own brain. The most personal mediums are not often the ones that we translate work into, but they’re the original form—text messages, Grindr chats. I want this book to feel like we’re sitting at my house at 11 PM, I’ve handed you my phone, and I say, “Okay, look at these texts. What do you think? Look at the screenshot of this chat. Can you believe?” Instead, I’m just doing that in a book format.
I like writing in a lot of genres. I don’t like sticking to one. It was also just fun for me to be able to play around and tie it into how I remember those things happening. Also it gives people a chance to really sit inside my own brain. That felt like a little gift to the readers: “Here’s what goes on in the inside.”
You immerse the reader in so many specific emotional moments. I ended the book feeling like you had arrived at a space where you could grant compassion and grace to some of the people who had harmed you. I was curious if you could talk about how you arrived at that emotional perspective to tell your story.
There’s a couple of things. The first is that when I think about my experience of healing and when I was diagnosed with PTSD, I had an awareness that I had something to heal from. I was aware that I had something, now I know it to be PTSD. That’s obviously largely what the book is about—a big PTSD trigger episode, drawn out over a couple hundred pages. Because I was aware that I had some things to heal and because human beings are complex, we sometimes know what those things are. We have random insights or we have random wisdom that will sometimes propel us to have sympathy or compassion for different people that have caused us various harms, or for ourselves for causing other people harm. In my example, even though I was still being triggered by so many of these events in my real life, I also knew that there was compassion and grace to be given to the other people involved with the story. One of the things I found interesting when I reread parts of the book was how much sympathy I would give my rapist versus how much sympathy I would give to my ex, who I was in love with, right? Like I famously was not in love with my rapist, but I was in love with my ex. I thought that was interesting from a writer’s perspective. I didn’t realize that was my own behavior. I thought, “I need something in here where I can chart through some of that and name that accurately and honestly,” because I thought it was fascinating.
I think another part is that when we get to the end of the book, and I don’t think this is a spoiler alert, but we haven’t fixed everything. I would not say that I am a healed person by the end of this book, but maybe a particular part of me is ready to take the next step of healing, which I think is crucial. I really did not want to write a book where it was like, “Here are all the awful things I went through, and here’s how I healed from it,” because that felt boring and prescriptive. I can’t tell anyone how to heal from something, I’m still working on stuff myself.
If you take the structure of the book, the first part is kind of like a dump of sorts: “Here’s what’s going on in my brain from moment to moment, second to second. Here are the thoughts.” Then part two is where we start to swirl and get triggered, we bounce back and forth, and we can really get to the unknotting of so many of the core issues themselves. In part three, we’re trying to unkink the rest of those issues now that we’ve pulled the knot apart. But the idea is there are many knots in this particular issue, so you’re only pulling apart one of them, and you have to do this many, many times. I wanted to come to a sense of clarity or forward movement. I wanted to come to a sense of healing, but I didn’t want to prescribe what that looks like. I just wanted to offer that this was one part of the many ways in which I am still healing from these events in my life.
I wanted to ask about the author’s note that wrote, because you’re very honest about what is in the book and what isn’t in the book, and how this might not be the right book for a reader at this specific point in time of their life. Who do you hope finds this book?
I hope anybody who can get something out of it finds something out of it. I wrote this for other survivors. I wrote this for other people that were tired of the narrative of, “Oh, we’re just going to push through this.” Instead, I wanted to write something where the invitation was to sit and be really mentally ill together for a little while for the purpose of collective healing, because I couldn’t find a book like that. I’m always craving art pieces that are honest, as opposed to sugarcoated for the purpose of giving some sort of glamorous ending. I wanted to toe that line a little bit.
The author’s note is very much directed to the folks who may be triggered by various things in this and who may not want to sit with that kind of difficulty. I’ve had such a range of experiences and responses that readers have told me about. I’m so grateful to early readers that let me know what their responses were. Some people have been like, “This is the book I was waiting for. This is the kind of thing I needed,” whether it was the queerness or whether it was the gender journey, whether it was the caregiving part, whether it was the healing from assault, or just going through a breakup while you’re going through other crap in your life. There’s a lot of different entry points for folks to relate to in this particular story. It’s ultimately just a story of somebody trying to heal from the shit in their life. That’s something that everyone can relate to, but not everybody wants to be told this kind of story this way. It’s been interesting because some of the earlier reviews have been like, “This is not a book for everyone.” And I’m like, “No book is for everyone!” (laughs) But nobody ever says that about straight writers. They say that about queer and trans authors who are doing something radically different than what the mainstream is.
To me, it’s always interesting to see some of those responses from a critical perspective, because I think most of it comes from an unintentional transphobia or an unintentional misunderstanding of a historically underrepresented identity that is now being brought forth in literature. On an individual basis, there are so many people that are survivors of sexual violence. The majority of human beings living today have reported experiencing some form of sexual misconduct in their life, which is a staggering amount of people. That means the majority of people in the world relate to this subject matter in some way. I’ve found that a lot of media irresponsibly throws in some sort of violent sexual assault narrative with no warning and with no care to the people who are reading it. I wrote this specifically for the people who have had those experiences, which means that I care about their experience of reading it. I want people to know what they’re in for so they can decide, “Yep, I feel like I’m ready for this,” or “Nope, I don’t know that this is for me.”
I want people to have agency over what they consume, to decide whether or not this is what they want to read, and that way they can be informed. I personally find, as a survivor, if I know what’s coming in the media that I’m consuming, I have a better time enjoying it as opposed to being worried about what’s coming next. The author’s note itself is just a piece of care for the folks who are often forgotten when it comes to content warnings and when it comes to difficult conversations. I think we really have a responsibility to let people know what they’re in for, because a surprise that’s traumatizing is not actually a surprise. It can just be traumatizing. I wanted to offer something that would be a little bit more intentionally invitational and something that would be kinder to the human spirits on the other side who are reading the book.
I wanted to ask about your grandparents. Caring for your grandfather and living with both of your grandparents is such a big part of the story, and your grandparents are such a presence in the book. Can you talk about them?
They’re a huge presence in my life. I got the really unique opportunity with this. It intentionally doesn’t say exactly when this happened in the book, but in my personal life, this happened during part of the pandemic when my career as an actor was not moving at all because everything was shut down. I chose to move in with my grandparents to help my grandmother take care of my grandfather. It was really about both of them. One of the frightening things about elderly citizens who are caretaking is that often the person who’s doing the majority of the caretaking goes first, and that was something that I thought about. I was like, “I don’t want that. I don’t want to lose both of them.” I moved in, in part, to help my grandfather, and then also in part to help my grandmother.
I’m close with my family. I’m very lucky to have a supportive family who understands who I am, especially my immediate family. I grew up in what I would consider a pretty queer-positive home, and I think a great example of that is nobody was surprised when I started becoming who I am. In fact, for the majority of my memories, people were encouraging. There’s always room to improve. I would never say my family is perfect, because I’m not perfect either, but I got dealt a really good set of cards in this particular area of life. It was kind of a no-brainer when I had the opportunity to help my family, because I was uniquely positioned to be able to do it. That scene in the book where I talk about how my grandfather was the first person to really take me to bookstores and help me invest in literature, that’s true. Everyone in my family is a big reader, we’re a very education-forward family. I come from a family where a lot of people are educators, teachers in sports, in collegiate level— you name it, there’s an educator somewhere. So that felt like a very natural thing to include in the book, because it was true. If I hadn’t gone to the bookstore with my grandfather when I was younger and been allowed to pick out a book as a gift and then go home and read that, I wouldn’t have the same love for literature that I do today.
And finally, what role the library has played in your life?
I grew up in a library. My mom was a teacher, so I would go with her before my school started. My elementary school started at a later time than when my mom was teaching, so I would go with her to her school in the morning and she would drop me off at the library. The librarians would take care of me. They’d pick up books for me to read. They’d talk to me. I was pretty self-sufficient as a kid, so it was kind just to make sure I was good and then they’d let me go. It was a way that the village helps raise the child. My parents were divorced, and my mom was a single mom for half of the caregiving, so she needed a village. The librarians in all of my schools and at the local library, they were huge influences in my life. The first books I wrote as a young person were at the computer in the library or the media centers at my elementary or middle schools when my mom was teaching and before my school had started. Libraries play an intimate part of my life, because they were the places where I got to express my artistic ideas. It was also a place that was safe to just be and exist. I think that’s a really crucial part of my queer identity, because there are so many places that we don’t get to belong and we’re not allowed to exist, especially in this particular moment. Having that foundation as a child, the fact that just one librarian might say to me, “Hey, I think that you might love this kind of book because you loved something similar. If you want to check it out, let me know.” Those became some of my favorite books because those librarians allowed me to be who I was and saw me as who I am. That made a huge impact on me. It allowed me a great foundation to be a creative person. The fact that I publish now is a huge thanks to the librarians when I was younger.
