Authenticity and the sense of selfhood — both concepts which author Isle McElroy knows a little something about, after years of probing their own relationship with gender expression. And that honest familiarity shows up in their work: Their first novel, The Atmospherians (published in 2021 by Simon & Schuster), is a light-handed satire of the wellness industry, and the harms it poses to the individual. Their second work, also nonfiction, is People Collide (published in 2023 by Harper Collins), which offers a thoughtful glimpse into the impact gender, sexuality, and the norms that come with both have on lived experiences — all through the lens of an unconventional body swap conundrum. During their time in Las Vegas as part of the Black Mountain Institute’s Shearing Fellowship, McElroy sat down with Desert Companion Managing Editor Heidi Kyser to discuss the city, their work, and how inspiration strikes in unlikely places. An edited version of that conversation follows.
Isle, you’re in Las Vegas until the end of the academic year. Can you talk a little bit about how the city is informing what you do, and vice versa, what you're doing while you're here?
I hope that, like in two or three years, I will be able to sort of take some distance from my time here and see the ways that being in Las Vegas has sort of potentially changed my writing. I have a newsletter through Substack that I call The Scoop, and in that newsletter, I've been writing a little bit about what it's been like to be in Las Vegas. ... My Vegas diaries, as I've been calling them, is just what happens when a sort of night starts out with maybe a happy hour drink, and then you meet a new friend and wind up spending the night hanging out with a random person at just different bars across the city, and that's been really exciting and fun for me. I also think that it's such a long-term work of writing or any art making, right? Like, you never know when you're going to need to pull from something you've seen five or 10 years ago, five or 10 minutes ago.
And I want to talk about your writing a little bit, but without getting into one or the other book, I want to address the appearance of eating disorder. Specifically, bulimia makes an appearance in both The Atmospherians and People Collide. Why include that theme? What’s the significance of it?
It’s always been a major part of my vision. I mean, to sort of say the obvious part, I've struggled with eating disorders for most of my life and I think it's something that, even as I might be past the most dangerous aspects of it, especially with something like bulimia, it's something that has fundamentally shaped my views of the world. In The Atmospherians, my feeling at the time of writing it is, I believed that eating disorders were largely a way to sort of control a vision of the world. And Dyson, who is the most prominent secondary character in the book, he's the best friend of the narrator, and he decides to start a cult for men. Dyson is also someone who struggles dramatically with eating disorders. What he is trying to do is, in some ways, normalize a behavior that he knows is abnormal and that he knows is harmful to himself. And through the creation of this cult, even though there are so many other aspects of it, he is given the capacity to try to normalize this thing that he cannot in any other way see as being condonable or normalized. And that, to me, seemed like the mindset of how it sort of feels to have an eating disorder.
I also feel conflicted about my expressions of them, because it's also something I've written about for the Atlantic. A few years ago, I wrote a piece about how writers can write about eating disorders against the danger of potentially romanticizing them, and I think it's something that anyone who is writing about it has to be very well aware of. And I think in The Atmospherians, I tried to satirize it so much, or to make the book absurd enough where sort of some of the fundamental aspects could be in there without it potentially falling into the traps of giving someone a potential roadmap.
But in People Collide as well, one of the biggest reorientations that I tried to make in both of those books was that I tried to focus on the way that the people in these characters lives have been harmed by the harm that they are causing themselves. I think a lot of focus can be on the potentially grotesque aspects of it, which is something that people with eating disorders can potentially want to write about themselves as a chance to write about it without engaging in the behavior, at least. That's how I felt myself, especially early on when I was writing. It was an opportunity to engage through the literary practice rather than through the actual physical practice.
Speaking of The Atmospherians, the protagonist, Sasha, is a sort of toxic character. And I wondered, why have someone who really is a bit unlikeable carrying the story?
I think that she is toxic. I agree with that. And I think that a lot of that toxicity that plagues Sasha is something that I hope to show is a result of the context of her life, and that I don't think that she is just a fundamentally toxic person who has sort of arrived, like ex nihilo. She is someone who is an influencer, and then she says something to a follower that creates a huge backlash. And even in that backlash, I think I wouldn't say that she is fundamentally toxic. I think she is defending herself and what she thinks is right.
But as for writing about likable or unlikable characters, I was recently talking to a student about this. Over the past decade or so, there has been a trend of what has been understood as flaws, and characters, to me, seem extremely anodyne expressions of flaws. They were like, ‘Wow, I love too much.’ Or like, ‘I pushed back against the bully too hard, and then I got expelled from school.’ It's like okay, great, you're a hero. It’s sort of like when you watch a superhero movie and it's like, ‘Great, they're going to win.’ And I think those expressions of unlikable characters have never really interested me. I want someone who is making decisions that might potentially be toxic, that might potentially be wrong, that might make them unlikable, but that are expressions of humanity. And I think that literature is one of the rare places where we are allowed to engage with those parts of a person and give that person the ability to speak. I will say I do not think that literature is a space to run wild and allow the most unhinged and cruel people to exist. I think that that, to me, is not the point of literature. But I think there is a space of humanness where I think Sasha hopefully resides, and where I think, to a lesser extent, even like Eli in People Collide resides as well.
Moving on to People Collide, two people switching bodies is such an interesting way of exploring many things, including embodiment itself. And yet, thinking of past examples, the only ones that I could recall were much more about roles than individuals. How did you land on this body switching idea as a vehicle for this story?
The magical, surreal, speculative elements of my books always emerge out of a deeper character issue, right? So I have these two characters who are clearly not connected to each other. In the opening scene, Eli is lightly lying about where he is, why he's running late, his own sense of envy towards his wife, and these characters are disconnected. They aren't able to maintain the intimacy that they once had, and the body swap is an opportunity to force them into an intimate relationship with each other in ways that they didn't previously have.
The question of this book is about intimacy, right? What happens to a couple in the their first year of marriage? For this couple, not only their first year of marriage, but they're living abroad because Elizabeth has a teaching fellowship in Bulgaria in Eastern Europe, and they are forced to reckon with who the other person is in a way that they didn't previously have to. They have lost touch with each other, in a way, and this swap that they go through forces them to reconsider what their intimacy looks like. I also started writing this book in the early days of the pandemic, at a time when I was as touch starved as everyone else, and felt very alone, and I was very curious what it meant to write about intimacy at a time like that.
In Elizabeth’s body, Eli does things she wouldn't obviously, but I noticed them from my point of view. He leaves her hair messy and drinks beer, for instance, things that she would never do. I couldn't help but laugh with a little bit of envy at these moments. What were you saying there about gender and the permission structures we overlay over gender?
It’s a moment where Eli is confronted both with what he believes is his care for Elizabeth and the limits of that care, and where his own sort of selfishness intrudes upon that right. I think Eli is a lovable character, but my goal in this book is to show the many ways that he's pretty selfish and the ways that he's not really showing the level of care that he wants to believe that he is capable of doing.
But as for the gendered expectations, even as Eli is coming to terms with a new expression of gender, there are things that he does not want to give up. He’s being dragged into this new understanding of gender. And really, I think there is a kind of expansiveness in the way that he is even thinking about the gender that he is existing in when he is Elizabeth, right? He does not feel this need to completely conform to a kind of femininity. Hopefully he just winds up being himself throughout it.
