Grace Byron occupies a curious position in New York culture: she is a rising star in a collapsing industry. A journalist and cultural critic for an array of the US’s most eminent magazines, she has built an impressive reputation in a relatively short time. Her criticism is incisive, enjoyable, densely researched, and published at a speed I personally find unfathomable (start with her recent cluster of New Yorker pieces on the Trump administration’s persecution of trans people, or her LARB piece on Lorde’s Virgin). But, as Byron puts it in our interview, “for most trans people, ‘staff writer’ as a job just doesn’t exist anymore. That used to be one of the three aspirational trans girl jobs, right – DJ, coder, staff writer. But the whole industry got decimated.”

This predicament partially inspired Byron’s debut novel, Herculine, which follows an unnamed trans woman caught in a familiarly crushing collapse of paths and options. Herculine’s narrator has been fired from her dead-end store job, is struggling to break through as a writer, and her last remaining friend with benefits (who wasn’t even good at it) has broken things off. She’s also harbouring a barely-processed traumatic history and has a habit of hallucinating demons, a relic from an intensely Christian childhood that included a stint in conversion therapy. When her charismatic ex-girlfriend, Ash, calls her with a proposition – leave New York and join Herculine, Ash’s utopian trans girl commune – she hesitantly accepts. But her car mysteriously breaks down shortly after her arrival, and it soon becomes apparent that her demonic hallucinations may, in fact, have been real.

Herculine combines the honed social realism of Torrey Peters and Emily Zhou with the splatterpunk flair and power of Gretchen Felker-Martin’s novels. It’s an intricate study of how we narrativise trauma, how we practice faith, and how we build – and mishandle – community, but it’s also a gripping thrill-ride into the unknown. And it may or may not feature at least one demonic bug-pregnancy.

Over Zoom, we talked to Byron about the publishing landscape in 2025, subverting the ‘Trans Girl Sob Story’, and writing demons.

Before we get stuck into Herculine itself: this is your first book, and you’re publishing within what might fairly be called ‘trans lit’. How are you feeling about the landscape of trans publishing right now?

Grace Byron: I feel neutral… it feels like things have levelled out a lot. There was this ‘explosion’ in the wake of Detransition, Baby – a lot of book deals happened in the year or two after that. But now the right has taken hold of so much of publishing and wider culture, so the real question now is if those book deals continue in the next couple of years. There are a lot of great trans writers coming up, which hopefully continues. But I think the landscape has shifted – there’s more trans nonfiction coming out now, and a lot of trans people are writing about transness through adjacency, in less direct ways. They want to write more cis characters, they want to play beyond the constraints of easily digestible trans narrative. You can see that in books like Stag Dance, and in [Davey Davis’s upcoming novel] Casanova 20.

The first part of Herculine is set mainly in New York and follows a girl who is peripherally in the arts scene. I wanted to ask about prestige, which is a big theme in the book: it explicitly describes prestige as hollow and precarious, and as a bad substitute for real power, but the protagonist is seethingly jealous of anyone who has it or who has more of it than her. Why did prestige feel like an important thing to talk about?

Grace Byron: To me, Herculine is probably set before 2019, before the collapse of the media bubble, in a period where one of the paths to ascendancy was to get a staff media job. That was one of the three aspirational trans girl jobs, right – DJ, coder, staff writer. That’s not really an available route anymore. All of the trans people I know who once had a staff writer job don’t anymore. There are a few LGBTQ+ pubs where a few trans people still work, but overall, the whole industry got decimated. So, the book’s reflecting on wishing to have even that smaller sense of security, even as it was never actually that secure, it was always precarious.

There’s a lot about that in Harron Walker’s book, Aggregated Discontent. But I think that Herculine is about someone who has a lot of ambition but no accomplishments, and who wants to be accomplished. A central narrative compulsion of the book is envy, both in terms of gender envy – envy of both cis women and trans women, the things that they have, their access to economic and romantic resources – and then also career-wise, she has no ability to actualise her desire to be a writer, she doesn’t have real connections or power. Prestige may be a hollow substitute, but when you don’t have access to real power, any hollow substitute is better than nothing.

Trauma’s like a bomb that you’re all passing around and it’s going to explode on somebody

Herculine is different to ostensibly similar novels in that it’s steeped in evangelical Christianity. That’s the source of a lot of the novel’s trauma, but it’s also the country the novel comes from. Reading it made me think about the work of Édouard Louis – there’s this sense throughout his work that you have to go back to the place that harmed you to understand its violence. You have to stop your trajectory of escape, in a way, and turn back, and go back to the place that didn’t want you there.

Grace Byron: Herculine is a book that’s often about nationalism, both Christian nationalism on the one side and also the potential to recreate a microcosm of nationalism in a separatist community, how you can recreate the same harms. You’re absolutely right that Herculine is steeped in that; I grew up with Christian mythology, I know the history and lore and textures of it, so I could play with it, in the same way that somebody else would play with Greek myth or Buddhist myth. It felt generative and interesting and fun to be like, what if this worst fear came true? What if you were healing from Christian trauma and literal demons showed up? I really wanted to open up those wounds.

There’s a line in the book – ‘Girls like Hazel and Xiomara didn’t scare me because they wore their desires on their sleeves. Arrow acted like she was above it all.’ It made me think about the carapace queer and trans people often create around themselves to avoid being exploited, and how that conflicts with the photogenic vulnerability that trans people often have to perform if they want to get their work commissioned.

Grace Byron: Some of that ends up getting worked through in the book. The ‘Trans Girl Sob Story’ is a genre that the book reflects on and is in conversation with. I’m trying to do away with the easily digestible trauma narrative by cutting it into pieces, or giving it a slant, or crossing it out. It felt important to me to avoid what you’d do in a typical trans memoir. I tried to write a typical trans memoir and I just couldn’t write it; I was so angry. I think that bitterness really comes through in Herculine, I think there’s a hostility to the reader at times, while still wanting to connect with the reader.

It felt important to write about trans vulnerability but also to show the hackles, to show the ways that trans people have to have the same conversations over and over again and are tired of having them, to give that perspective space and time. The one time the narrator relays her ‘straightforward’ trauma narrative, it’s in fragments, she’s dissociating, it doesn’t fully make sense. That is a large part of the book, the way that trauma is told. Trauma’s like a bomb that you’re all passing around and it’s going to explode on somebody. I think that felt more interesting as a method of storytelling than doing a lyrical, longing realist novel about transition.

While institutions may fail us, our individual bonds and communities are really important

Can you talk a bit about why the commune in the novel, the novel’s namesake, is named Herculine? It comes from Herculine Barbin, a 19th-century intersex woman whose memoirs were translated by Michel Foucault. Why her?

Grace Byron: There’s this allusion to a performative trans history that tries to claim ‘trancestors’, that tries to create a certain narrative of trans lineage where trans people have always been here the same way that we are now, which I tend to find gauche or naïve. It’s a somewhat flattened way of looking at the past. The name is a way to quickly characterise the members of the commune and their background and the positioning of transness that they’re invested in, a positioning that I, as a more bitter and cynical person, have trouble with. It’s like how the commune has their Rules of Engagement on their website. It’s corny. At least to me. As for the specific name, there are not that many proto-trans or quasi-trans gender-troubled people from the past whose names sound good as a commune name. Herculine is a feminisation of Hercules, which lends itself to another kind of mythology, and it’s a purposely feminised name, which signals a purposeful kind of gender trouble. And it just sounded good. It felt right.

You’ve mentioned bitterness and cynicism as aspects of Herculine, but the book never fully gives itself over to that cynicism. There’s this sense through the novel that while human connection is often disappointing, it’s still worth pursuing, worth making yourself vulnerable for. Where do you draw that sense of hope from?

Grace Byron: The protagonist finds it difficult to be in an institution like the commune, but she does really believe in being friends with trans people and having trans people in her life. That’s what ends up rescuing her, really. While institutions may fail us, our individual bonds and communities are really important. For me, what makes me hopeful is my friends, people I am in community with, when I see small acts of kindness, when people do big resistant things, when I see big protests for Gaza, when I see big protests for trans rights, when I see people from disparate groups standing up for people who are their neighbours, or people who aren’t their neighbours. People reaching across divides to go against the idea that there are people who are ‘in’ and people who are ‘out’, and to say that actually, we should all be ‘in.’ I think that I, kind of by accident, ended up writing a book about what love is not. Perhaps that creates a shadow of what love is.

Herculine is out now in the US, and published on November 6 in the UK.