The Assay Interview Project: Lynette D'Amico
October 1, 2026

Lynette D’Amico is an essayist and fiction writer. She is the author of the novella Road Trip, the memoir-in-essays Men I Hate, and a recipient of a fellowship from the Vermont Studio Center. She holds an MFA from the Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College.
About Men I Hate: Can a lesbian who loves a trans man still call herself a lesbian? Against the backdrop of a traditional Sicilian American upbringing, Lynette D’Amico identified as a lesbian despite the expectation that life hinged on the man she married. As a teenager, she fled her St. Louis home in the dark of night to escape her fate. No boys allowed, until one day D’Amico’s life was completely upended when her lover and spouse of twenty years—P. Carl, the acclaimed author of Becoming a Man: The Story of a Transition—told her he was a man.
Seemingly overnight, D’Amico no longer recognized her spouse in photos of past vacations or of the couple celebrating their legal gay marriage. In Men I Hate, she asks: What happens when the people we are closest to change? As D’Amico tries to engage more deeply with the man she is married to, she looks at all the men—historical figures, politicians, men in her family—in search of clear dividing lines between good men and bad, between the men she loves and the men she hates. These lines dissolve as she writes her way toward an understanding of the words marriage, husband, and home—and how we reconcile who we are with who we become.
Julie Marie Wade: Lynette, I'm new to your work and thrilled to learn that we're pressmates on the 21st Century Essays Series at Mad Creek Books (The Ohio State University Press). Your memoir-in-essays, Men I Hate, was such an illuminating experience for me as a reader, writer, and teacher of memoirs comprised of discrete essays—and one of the reasons was because I didn’t feel like I was reading nine, discrete essays at all. Rather, I moved through the essays of this collection more as if they were sections (with sections of their own!) of one book-length essay. Time felt elastic to me as I read, more than in other collections in this genre. There wasn’t a linear progression from childhood into adulthood in a more classic bildungsroman style, the way other queer memoirs-in-essays like Ryan Van Meter’s If You Knew Then What I Know Now (Sarabande, 2011) or Julia Koets’s The Rib Joint (Red Hen Press, 2019) move. The past and present of your life, your coming-of-age, the years during your lesbian marriage, and the years during and after your spouse’s gender transition, were intricately woven and—I’m reaching for the right word--looped. I don’t mean simply that the writing is achronological but that I had the experience of being in many times and places at once as I read, and somehow, I was never lost.

So, I’d like to begin by asking if you knew you were writing a book when you started writing the nine essays listed in the Table of Contents—and if not, when you discovered that you were. Did you write these essays in an order that resembles the order here? And would you say this looping quality emerged naturally as you wrote, or was it part of your revision strategy to knit these essays so seamlessly together into what feels like a single literary garment?

Lynette D’Amico: I love that we’re pressmates at Mad Creek. On the Ohio State Press website for my book your book is listed in “Related Titles.” I love this question.

The book was very much written one essay at a time. The first essay I wrote was “The Stasi Men.” That essay was published in Guernica. After that publication, which among other things explores is it possible to be a good man in a corrupt system, I was contacted by a number of readers asking about my counter story to my husband’s gender transition. I wasn’t thinking of a book until much later in the process. Some writers think in terms of book length; I was thinking in terms of the next line, the next paragraph. It made for an excruciating and sometimes exhilarating process.

At the time I was in a writing group where several members of the group were working on long form projects: a novel, a memoir, linked short stories. Their example helped me to think in terms of book-length projects, which were formulated in various forms, such as an outline, or a book proposal, or charts and graphs. At a writing residency at Vermont Studio Center, where I was in residency with visual artists as well as other writers, I was visiting the visual artist studios, and so many of them had drafts on display, sketches, or a series of renditions of the same subject. There were many elements of discovery, but I was struck by the amount of planning and rehearsal of sorts that went into the creative process of these artists. I started considered the pages I was accumulating as one piece, but the first round of essays was very much drafted as standalone pieces.

I love your use of the term loop, that perhaps the essays and the book itself loops around themes and settings, images and time. I was thinking about circling when I was revising. I often work with a question and write towards an investigation of that question rather than a conclusion or any kind of answer. This is a form I came across when I read Elissa Washuta’s White Magic. A collection of essays that are innovative in form and subject. I’m much more interested in the form than I am in some of the subjects, which include Twin Peaks, crystals, tarot cards, and Oregon Trail II. In an interview in The Believer, Washuta says, “writing is for me a process of finding things and collaging things,” and that reflects my process. I have a subject and then I wander around trying out different things to say about it.

The effect in White Magic is incantatory, like we are moving forward while circling back to the beginning. In my writing I think the effect can sometimes be maddening for the reader, “What is the point? Can’t you just say what you mean?” I’ve learned—from readers, from writers who point me in a direction but don’t hold my hand on every page—that I have to invite my readers to follow me, or I’m just talking to myself.

I’m so glad you mentioned Elissa Washuta’s work! We read together last spring at an event hosted by the Poet’s Corner called “The Lyric Essay: Shapeshifters of Language.” I learned so much reading and talking with Elissa and from the other featured writers, Jill Talbot and Annaliese Jakimides.

Genre is a perennial question for me, and I want to know how my fellow writers think about it, interrogate it, or even set it aside entirely as they make art. And almost always, to my great delight, genre resists singularities. For instance, the Poet’s Corner, which typically focuses on poetry, was hosting an event centered on the lyric essay, and at one point in the program, Jill Talbot (whom I’ve always considered an exceptional lyric essayist) revealed that she had never thought of herself that way and was surprised to be included on a panel of lyric essayists at all.

So, I’d like to ask how you think about “memoir” and how you think about “essays” in the broadest sense and the “lyric essay” in particular. Do you consider Men I Hate a lyric essay collection in addition to a memoir in essays? Certainly, collaging and collecting are facets of the lyric essay that I recognize and embrace, and I often find that lyric essays move in analogous ways to artists in other disciplines, like the visual artists at your residency. 

Sometimes I think of myself as a “lyric detective,” investigating questions, circling around them just as you describe here, but doing so in a way that prioritizes prosody and imagery. Does this resonate with your experience, and/or what analogy would you use for what it means to be the kind(s) of writer you are?

This question makes me sweat a little, Julie. I have such a hard time saying what something is, including my own work. I’m honestly not that interested in genre or differentiating genre. I tend to work backwards: I write toward a subject, I accumulate some pages, and at a certain point, I think about what this wants to be and I start shaping it. It’s not a very efficient process. I’ll also admit to being impatient with too much narrative, to the extent that my first drafts can be all atmosphere and image. There are so many ways to tell a story. My preferred way is to focus on language and rhythmic and sonic patterns. What relates to how I work is something Ellen Bryant Voigt says in her essay “Language, Literacy, and Literature” in The Art of Syntax: Rhythm of Thought, Rhythm of Song:

As soon as a group of words makes tentative sense, we file it away temporarily… and look for the next one. In language as in music, repetition—whether lexical (the same words) or grammatical (the same function for the words) or syntactical (the same arrangement of the words)—also ‘marks’ or punctuates phrases or chunks. As in music, these smaller units can be grouped into larger chunks, paragraphs, or stanzas, to form astonishingly elaborate, but comprehensible structures. (Voight 11)

I like to build patterns or riffs—lexical or imagistic—that lay down a sensory trail for the reader to follow through the text. Well, maybe I should say that the goal is that the reader will follow, which sounds similar to what you refer to as “anaphoric refrains,” an expression I didn’t know because I am craft subliterate.

In regard to Men I Hate, it didn’t occur to me that the collection might be categorized as a “memoir,” until I was considering how I might put the essays together into a book, and to be honest, the word “memoir” seemed to have a bit more marketable cachet than “essay.” As you said in the brilliant Poet’s Corner conversation, “when I call something this [poem, lyric essay, hybrid] how does it change the way I see it”? and sometimes you don’t know and sometimes the publishing doors that are open, whether those doors are open to lyric essay or memoir, influences what I call something.  Quoting you again, “Sometimes things are being published in places as things that I wasn’t sure they were.” I too, feel like I’m “living in a more open genre space,” and I like that openness.

I’d like to think I write like I garden. Through many geographical moves over many years, my priority is always to start a garden where I’m living. In my gardening practice my interest is not so much how closely my garden adheres to the plan in my head, or the sharing of the harvest, although I do like handing overflow cucumbers and tomatoes to the neighbors and cooking for friends and family from the garden, rather, for me, gardening is a process of trial and error, research, experimentation, disaster and glory. In a new place I like to think of gardening as making views, as part of a creative process, a version of shaping and editing.

I love the garden as your analogy for writing, and of course I love that gardening is a practice that appears within your book in literal as well as symbolic terms. I feel as if I have stood in some of those gardens and admired what you are growing in different places and seasons of life, the flowers and vegetables as well as the words.

I’m not a gardener, despite my admiration for the gardens of others, and sometimes I wonder if this has to do with the fact that my mother was the perennial president of the West Seattle Garden Club, the epitome of a “green thumb.” Was part of my rebellion against her a rebellion against what she loved most? Likely.

I want to ask you a bit about your origin story as a writer across any and all genre spaces. This conversation is already so richly intertextual, revealing how much you’ve read and thought about the craft of other writers. Was there someone in your family or your life at an early age who urged you toward reading closely and writing creatively? Did you write to rebel against someone who said you couldn’t or shouldn’t write? And can you pinpoint when and how you came to work in the “self-referential arts,” a phrase I love and continue to borrow from Paul John Eakin’s Living Autobiographically, as opposed to working in fiction?

The subtitle of Eakin’s book is How We Create Identity in Narrative. What’s especially interesting to me is how we create identity in unconventional narratives, achronological narratives, and, also, most especially, in what you call “rhythmic and sonic patterns” and “atmosphere and image.”

I guess what I’m really trying to ask is: how has writing helped you identify who you are and who you want to be?

So much of my identity was formed in opposition to my mother’s. She valued “housekeeping” and decorative arts, a well-kept house and beautiful table settings. When she bemoaned that her sterling silver silverware was incomplete because she didn’t have soup spoons, I unhelpfully pointed out that since the sterling was only used for holidays and we never had soup for Christmas or Easter, what difference did it make? She saw a complete sterling service for eight as a marker of her success as a homemaker, as a trophy of sorts. We were at such odds in our values and viewpoints that we lived as strangers to each other for many years.

I don’t know Eakins’ work, but I am intrigued by the practice of autofiction and what I’ve heard called “living autobiography,” or “fictionalized autobiography” that Deborah Levy and Rachel Cusk practice to a certain extent, and maybe Chloe Caldwell and Miriam Toews. I think there is perhaps a version of identity creation in every artistic practice, whether table settings or flower arranging or song writing.

I wrote poetry first, although I was clueless about how to do that. I just read the usual stuff growing up: e.e. cummings, William Carlos Williams, Langston Hughes. I remember so well losing myself in lines: “mud luscious,” “far and wee,” “raisin in the sun.” I copied out poems and read them aloud to myself. This is maybe such a predictable story, but some saint of a librarian put a copy of Reflections on a Gift of Watermelon Pickle, a well-known collection of poems for young people, into my hands, and that book became my talisman. I read it over and over. I was a kid who was sensitive to the sounds and rhythms of language, which led me to song lyrics and the range of vocal performance. How do we learn how to feel? It was one thing to parse the lyrics of “Eleanor Rigby,” and then it was another thing to listen to the driving acoustic guitar of Richie Havens on his album Something Else Again. The latter was a bodily experience that I couldn’t completely translate.

I didn’t know anything until I started writing. It’s the way I think. And I didn’t learn how to shape my thinking on the page until I went to grad school.

I never read or even knew about Reflections on a Gift of Watermelon Pickle, and now I feel cheated! But “mud luscious”—there’s a phrase that will stay with me forever. The sound is so potent it’s almost onomatopoeia.

Graduate school is something a lot of my students, including those who are in graduate school, want to talk about. What are “reasonable goals” (so-called) of a graduate program in creative writing? Can writing be taught, or is it more about accelerating a process already underway for a diligent reader-writer? Sometimes the question is even raised, “Does graduate school have more to do with making connections with other writers and less to do with the craft of writing itself?” I’m always inclined to say that whatever else graduate school offers—or doesn’t—mentorship should be somewhere at the heart of the enterprise.

In Men I Hate, near the end of the collection, you wrote about a transformative teacher-mentor and about returning to graduate school after many years out of school:

“School had always been a mystery to me […] I thought it was too late for grad school. […] I thought because I was already so old, fifty-five, when I started my MFA at the Warren Wilson Program for Writers, I already knew everything. In my personal essay that accompanied my application, I said I wanted to go to grad school because at long last I saw ‘the value of formal training in my chosen field, the necessity of credentials, and the importance of being connected to an academic institution or a professional organization,’ but what I really thought was I’m too old for this shit.”

I love the candor here, and I love the meta-thread, the fact that you choose to address your education as a writer in the book itself. In addition to being mentored well by a particular professor, what do you know now (about reading, writing, thinking, being, et al.) that you didn’t know before you started graduate school? Are there specific sections of this book—or maybe even all of this book—written in or because of your time at the Warren Wilson Program for Writers? Or, put another way, how would Men I Hate be a different book if you hadn’t gone to grad school?

Working toward my MFA at Warren Wilson changed my life. I became a writer at Warren Wilson and the friends I made there continue to sustain my work. Every writing group I’ve ever been in post grad school has been with Warren Wilson alumni. Grad school pushed me to consider the pleasure of difficulty—reading books that maybe I never would have encountered otherwise, how to hear feedback, how to practice revision from big picture to sentence level to word choice, and to find my readers. Grad school let me imagine a different kind of life. I had been working in advertising for a lifetime. I called it a “toy” job since I never felt like I was working very hard and I had a lot of time (five weeks’ vacation!) and space (use of printers, copiers, scanners, and all the graphics and design apps) around me to play. I had trouble in every job with the parts where I had to show up on time and go to meetings and participate in team building. It also has followed me that from advertising where I would write the rationale for concepts after I had devised the concept, that I don’t say what I think I’m doing until after I’ve done something. I’m writing essays about graveyards and gardens now, but I don’t know what this work will be yet. It was valuable for me to get clear of grad school too, to realize pretty much right off the bat that I had good instincts, but it was true that I didn’t know anything. I learned what I could from brilliant and generous teachers and colleagues.

One more point about grad school: I never said one word out loud in my years at WW except in one-on-one settings. True story. I did written comments in workshops, and I always opted out of reading my own work out loud. When I had to deliver a lecture as part of graduation requirements, I had a script. I was so stricken with self-consciousness that I couldn’t speak without knowing what I was going to say beforehand. It was the whole shame thing of being working class and queer and unfamiliar to myself in a setting like grad school. Who knows if I would ever have written a book if I hadn’t gone to grad school, but I gained a vocabulary to talk about what I was doing, what I hoped to do, and I found models of work I wanted to emulate.

In and out of grad school, I feel a responsibility to offer what was offered to me, to support other writers, whether by buying their books or attending a reading or participating in a panel discussion, and to read generously. I try to track influences in my work, so I can acknowledge what I was reading, what I was thinking at the time. In Victoria Chang’s Dear Memory, she says of her work, “Each book isn’t just a book, but a period of life, a period of learning how to write.” I like that.

I like that, too. And I agree with that. And I also like that this question feels like the question you were waiting for—such a rich outpouring of examples and insights, my favorite of which might be “the pleasure of difficulty.” Oh, that will have to be our unofficial title for this interview!

Men I Hate is a book that could only have been written by someone who values difficulty, complexity. We’ve talked about how the structure is recursive, achronological, looping, and importantly, does not resolve in order to conclude. You described Elissa Washuta’s work early in this interview as “moving forward while circling back,” which of course is what your own project does.

In terms of the relationship between content and form—something I have always found to be a core tenet of literary, especially academic literary, conversations—I wonder if you think about your approach to essaying as an inherently queer approach. “Queer” is one of those words that applies to me as a lesbian, of course, but it’s a word I’ve had a mixed relationship with, maybe a kind of power struggle with, over the last quarter century or so. Does queer get to determine how I write as well as what I write about? And if I’m never going to write a “straight narrative,” so-called, because of my gay life, does that mean I can’t write a straightforward narrative because of my gay life?

Men I Hate explores your own lesbian identity, including within a long lesbian marriage, which then becomes a different kind of marriage after your wife becomes your husband. Does that content, particularly being a spouse during a spouse's gender transition, demand things from you that different content might not? Do you think of queer in aesthetic terms, as in a queer approach, or does that feel out of step with your thinking? I’m asking here not only because I genuinely want to understand the relationship between your content and your form in this particular book but also because I want to better understand how my fellow queer writers are using and reckoning with the use of this slippery, shapeshifting, multi-valent word queer?

I so get your question about does being queer determine how you write and what you write about. I think I resisted even considering that question for so long. Every time I came out in some context I heard: “Not everything is about being lesbian, Lynette.” “We’re not talking about your identity.” “This has nothing to do with whether or not you’re gay.” Well, yes it does. It all does.

I had all these questions in the original proposal for the book, (which I wrote after I had written the majority of the book, by the way, the primary purpose of which was to help me focus and consider these essays as a book-length project): How is queer thematic? How is it structural? How do trans and queer intersect? And I got a lot of feedback to take all that out, that a proposal or author questionnaire is for prospective agents and marketing and nobody was going to respond to the queer questions. Except the queer readers I was hoping to reach, right?

If one writes from desire, from a place of longing and obsession, how can a queer writer escape queerness in form and content? For me queer isn’t a boundary, but rather an opening I can access as an artist that a straight writer maybe can’t. I think of it as a kind of complement to imagination and curiosity. Other adjectives can do this as well. I also always write as a Sicilian-Italian woman of a particular generation, as a Midwesterner, although I’ve lived in New England for the past decade or longer.

To tell you the truth, Julie, it was the word lesbian that I had issues with, which might be a generational difference between us. There was a time when I used lesbian as distinct from and separate from gay--when I was hanging in wimmin-, womyn-, womon-only spaces. Queer was a little bit of a relief to me and felt more inclusive in terms of gender, less reductive. My husband’s queer students have their own expansive vocabulary—Sapphic or WLW or other terms that usually come from some show we’re not watching.

This is so interesting for me to hear, Lynette. I also struggled with the word “lesbian” for a long time,” and even now I instinctively prefer “gay” because it’s a word that conveys joy—exactly how I feel about being gay (and lesbian/queer).

“Sapphic” might be my favorite alternative to lesbian of all, though I never think to use it in a self-referential way. Maybe I should. As it happens, I mentioned Sappho and shared some Sapphic fragments with my students last week in my summer poetry class—during our unit on lyric poetry—and one student who asked this blunt and wholly unexpected question, “Why should we care about the pieces of Sappho’s poems if we only have access to like one of her complete poems?” I like a question that makes me think on my feet, and no student had ever asked me such a candid question about Sappho before.

I found myself replying: “The parts show us something about what is possible for the whole, even if we don’t have access to the whole. These pieces or fragments are part of what we mean when we talk about the ‘granular’—getting down to the nitty gritty in any context. But instead of analyzing a complete text, which literally means ‘break down’ into pieces, we’re working from the pieces up, toward a conception of the whole. If Sappho can make this potent an image in a few surviving lines, what do her sonic and aesthetic choices suggest about the complete poem to which that image belongs?”

Your response here makes me think that queerness or gayness of Sapphic-ness is like this, too: a part of who we are that gestures toward the whole without being the whole. Being gay isn’t all I am or all I write about, any more than it is for anyone, but there certainly isn’t any possibility of ascertaining an “all” without it. At the same time, I suppose “all” is never completely possible to ascertain either, even with the whole text and whole person in front of us.

So let me ask you this by way of a penultimate question: I routinely ask my students to identify “heart passages” from the poems and essays they read, including whole collections—what piece or part is emblematic of the whole for them. In Men I Hate, what is your “heart passage,” the piece of part that you feel most proud of writing, perhaps? We could even call it a lyric thesis. Let’s say it’s the passage you would give to someone if they said, “I can only read one paragraph or section, but I want to read a paragraph or section that captures the essence of your book.”

I love how you talk about the possibility conveyed by fragments. I love how it offers an alternative view of broken or lost things. I’ve been in deep lately composing AWP “value statements” for potential AWP panels. What a great idea for a panel: “The possibility of fragments: Composing from scraps, parts, and shards from the archive.” I like to work from seemingly unrelated images and push toward meaning. In my essay, “The Burning Bed,” I had three images from a visit to Sicily: a bombed-out fountain, a one-handed clock face, and a headless statue. I wanted to explore what I could do with those images in the context of traveling to Sicily as a third-generation Sicilian-Italian American, and women’s rage, mine included.

You would think that your question about picking a heart passage would be a slam dunk, and maybe I’m making this harder than it needs to be. There are plenty of sections in the book that I like, that I labored over and feel… proud is so problematic for me. How about I feel like in the writing I recognized some of the people closest to me as essentially different from myself, in the unique ways peculiar to them, which is the best I can do.

To pick a passage that perhaps illustrates the complicated nature of my central questions: Can a lesbian who is married to a trans man still call herself a lesbian? And how is it possible to love men today? Can I love a man? Here you go:

For twenty years, I never had to think about my identity in relation to my marriage. I was queer in a queer marriage. Everybody saw me as queer. I saw myself as queer. What did I look like next to a man? Not myself, not queer. I needed to speak about his transition, but I wasn’t able to—not to our friends, my friends, my family. In spite of my husband’s talking and talking about his transition, I didn’t have language or vocabulary to respond, to say my own things. He was becoming the person he always wanted to be, the person he always was. But in some way, I thought his transition erased our history, my history, and invented a new present for me. “What do you think of my beard?” my husband would ask me. I had nothing to say. He was so happy. I put my hand over his mouth. “Stop talking. Just shut up. Shut the fuck up.”

Maybe I’ll just add that the questions are the interesting part for me, and I don’t entirely believe in or trust “answers.”

To me, your coda here about questions being the interesting part—that’s a lyric essayist’s credo! Elegant, compressed, resisting answers in favor of questions and perhaps using the so-called “answers” to articulate even more complex questions.

I can’t tell you how much I’ve appreciated every exchange (let’s not call it a Q&A) in this interview.

My last question is born of my own literary curiosity, which I suspect readers of our conversation will share. What are you working on now, and beyond any current projects in progress, what else are you thinking about working on, would like to work on, feels essential to you to explore in writing at some point. My favorite question to write on a whiteboard: WHAT COMES NEXT?

It’s nearly June as we’re concluding this conversation. What’s next from my gardens in Rhode Island are peonies and roses, a domesticated smell followed by the sweet spicy smell of clethra (Summersweet) and the surprising bell-like blooms of mountain laurel. The kousa dogwood is on the verge of blooming and nothing has been eaten to the ground yet or cooked by the heat. I just got my tomatoes planted—mostly volunteers from last year’s tomatoes so they might be Sun Gold, Juliette, and Celebrity. Beaches have opened and a lot of restaurants around here will be booked up for the summer with tourists. I’ll be cooking from the garden, I hope, if the turkeys leave me a few scraps. This is such a promising time of year, so many plans and new beginnings. I have a stack of books to read—lately I am obsessed with everything Han Kang has written. She has a little book called The White Book that is written in vignettes and fragments about the color white as a color of loss and mourning, specific to her sister’s death as a newborn. I am interested in how people survive after loss, such as the loss of loved ones, or a home, and how that relates to what is happening in our country to immigrants and women and trans and queer people and the natural world and universities… I’d like to start some fires, do a little burning, visit a few graves, and plant a fig tree.
Julie Marie Wade’s most recent memoir is Other People’s Mothers (University Press of Florida, 2025). A finalist for the National Poetry Series and a winner of the Lambda Literary Award for Lesbian Memoir, she teaches in the creative writing program at Florida International University in Miami and makes her home in Hollywood with Angie Griffin and their two cats.

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