Alvina Chamberland, who won the 2022 Noemi Press Book Award in Prose for her English language debut novel Love the World Or Get Killed Trying, has written and co-authored numerous books in Swedish and has received a grant from the Swedish Arts Council.
Her English debut is a pitch-perfect work of autofiction about a trans woman navigating turning 30 years old.
We caught up with the author and asked her to fill out our recurring “A Life of Books” questionnaire so readers can get to know her, and her reading tastes, better!
Is there a book or series that, when you think back, helped define your childhood?
Yes, Sylvia Plath’s “Ariel”! This is maybe neither the expected answer or the “appropriate” one for children, but the fact is I was perhaps a little bit too mature and dark already at a very young age, and I remember being blown away by Plath’s poem “Lady Lazarus” when I was 8.
Would you want any children in your life (yours or relatives’) to read those too? Or, what’s your philosophy on what children read?
This is actually a bit difficult to answer, because on the one hand, I don’t want trans feminine children in coming generations to have to go through what I went through. And if they don’t go through what I went through, hopefully things won’t go so dark for them, and they won’t need poetry like Plath’s as a hand to hold in a world that misunderstands them… However, for those who still do go through similar things as me, yes, why not read Sylvia Plath? She certainly made me feel less lonely.
I discovered some of my favorite writers in high school. What writers did you discover then? Either ones that were assigned for class or ones you found on your own.
After spending many years kind of obsessing over the poetry of Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton (and in general my childhood was comprised of an obsession with various different special interests that I could repeat again and again), high school was when I started branching out and broadening my reading. I think that was when I discovered Alice Walker’s “The Color Purple”, Marguerite Duras “The Lover”, and Jamaica Kincaid’s “The Autobiography of My Mother”. Kincaid is so brilliant, reading that novel made me think that perhaps I could one day become an author, her outlook on life and literature seemed similar to mine, while the novel’s we were reading in school, a mix of older classics like August Strindberg (I lived in Sweden in high school) and contemporary popular literary fiction just didn’t speak to me. It’s very rare that it ever speaks to me. I’m very particular with what I end up loving.
Are there any books that you read while writing your debut that helped shape the direction you took your own book?
Yes and again yes, actually my method of writing is usually to read 5-10 pages in a book by one of my favorite author’s to see if a certain sentence or metaphor captivates me, and from that place I can start to expand and build a world, also paying close attention to what’s going on around me… What is the exact color of the tree’s leaves and how much wind can they withstand before falling off? Is a bustling train station really so different from a buzzing beehive? In the writing of “Love the World or Get Killed Trying” two author’s kept me the most company, Clarice Lispector and Violette Leduc, in particular Lispector’s “Agua Viva” and “Near to the Wild Heart”, as well as Leduc’s “Ravages” and “Mad in Pursuit”. Leduc’s novel “La Chasse à l’amour” has still not been translated into English, this is a scandal, and it must change! Can someone please translate it, and save me from thousands of hours spent trying to learn fluent French?
What is a book you’ve read that you thought, Damn, I wish that was mine?
I kind of have to stray away from the writers who I feel similar to then, because with them… I mean, it’s not that I feel I write as good as Clarice Lispector, I mean, in my opinion, no one ever has and no one ever will, but I definitely feel that I am of the same species as her (panther perhaps?), just a slightly less spectacular one (though hopefully still growing…) But one author who has written an amazing book that I could never come anywhere close to writing, is Svetlana Alexievich “Secondhand Time”, it’s just so well-crafted and tells the emotional history, rather than the play-by-play historical facts, of the Soviet Union and its collapse. Another fantastic author who wrote something I couldn’t is Camila Sosa Villada “Bad Girls”. I’m so stuck in the interior world, that I could never build the exterior landscape that she created when describing the immense and unstable, yet hardly fragile, sisterhood between sex working trans girls. I wish I had that skill, but I’m too stuck inside my own overflow of thoughts and feelings… for now at least…
What have you been reading lately that you can recommend to Debutiful readers?
I’m reading Jules Gill-Peterson “A Short History of Trans Misogyny”, and I recommend it. I recently also reread Ingeborg Bachman’s “Malina” for the fifth time, and well… If someone read something five times it probably means they recommend it… And I do… I also loveloveloved Pamela Anderson’s “Love Pamela: A Memoir of Prose, Poetry, and Truth”. I recommend it too.
And, finally, I have to ask… I’m sorry. What’s next? But wait! Only use three words.
I just want to lay on a beach in summer with a handsome man who I love’s hands wrapped around me to be honest. That’s more than three words though.