Reading a book about an era of great cultural change is usually an exercise in nostalgia. You start wishing you had been around to see it happen. So it feels rather startling to walk through the sunshine of Paramount Studios in Hollywood to meet Jill Soloway – the director and screenwriter of Transparent and author of a new book, She Wants It, about overthrowing the patriarchy by making radical, funny, explosive TV – and to realise that the revolution the book depicts is happening right here, right now.
“It is exciting,” agrees Soloway, who adds that, one year into the #MeToo and #TimesUp movements, “I can feel the rage metabolising into something.” A vegetarian lunch is on the table; Soloway has just finished talking to a small team in the writers’ room next door for season five of Transparent, a fictional series based on her family’s experiences of questioning their gendered lives.
It began one morning in 2011, when Soloway got a phone call from her father. “He said: ‘Jilly, are you sitting down?’ That means something fucked up is coming. ‘Jilly,’ he said, ‘I’m coming out to you. I’m trans.’” She listened, spinning. “Now I realise he was introducing me to a woman who had been living in our house my entire childhood. I had the wrong pronouns back then and have only some of the right pronouns now – but will use the wrong ones so you can see how wrong I had it.”
Soloway knew straight away that she would be making all of this into something. The result was Transparent (the title is a pun). It is a comedy drama about the Pfeffermans, a Jewish family of two parents and three adult children in Los Angeles. The father, heading towards retirement age, announces that she has, in fact, long known herself to be a woman and is now trans.
This is the trigger for some relationships to end, while simultaneously setting all sorts of new ones in motion, with every family member liberated into a chaotic quest to find out who they really are, too. The Pfeffermans are free-range and brainy, loving and lost. They constantly rediscover that while sex and gender can be anything you want, you’ll still be looking for something else after that. By the end of season three, the storyline has become as much about their Jewishness as gender.
Today, storyboards on the wall flash with green and pink neon signposts saying: “GENDER IS A SAUSAGE CASING” and “EVERYTHING HAPPENS FOR A REASON STARRING ME” and “I WAS THE LESBIAN FIRST.” And if these slogans sound faintly ridiculous, then that is partly the point, because Soloway’s sexual revolution is a political one, and an angry and painful one – but it’s also very funny.
It’s hard to pick the funniest bit in her book, She Wants It – Soloway’s polemical memoir about “female desire and smashing the patriarchy”. Is it the part where she has split up with the fathers of each of her two sons, started dating women and finally finds that she feels most at home in the company of butch lesbians, because they are pretty much like men, “except for the part where they’re interested in what I have to say”?
Or when she creates a character in Transparent based on the poet Eileen Myles, to fall in love with the character whom she based on herself – only to then get tangled up in a relationship with said poet in real life, too? (“I had written a fictional character,” writes Soloway, “who fell in love with a character who was based on a person that the new, somewhat fictional version of me was falling in love with.”) Except that Myles later comes to visit her on set and accidentally witnesses their on-screen characters going through the break-up which Soloway has written into the script before getting round to doing it in real life.
Or is it the bit where the show prides itself on being made by a team of progressive gender radicals who fight to dismantle male dominance, only to find out that their lead actor, Jeffrey Tambor, who plays a trans woman, now stands accused of sexually harassing two real trans women who worked on it?
Obviously, that last bit isn’t funny at all – it is grim and shocking (though Tambor has denied sexual harassment and apologised if his actions were perceived as aggressive). It’s just that Soloway’s confession of her own hypocrisy towards dealing with it is fascinating. The allegations came from Van Barnes, who was a PA to Tambor, then from Trace Lysette, who acted on the show. They were made just days after Soloway was invited by Reese Witherspoon to attend a meeting of powerful Hollywood women. There the actor called for an end to the gagging agreements that kept female victims of abuse silent. “And now I was wondering if there was an amount of money that could put an end to all of this before it got out of hand,” she writes. “On the inside, I hated myself for questioning the legitimacy of Van’s claims. Yes, believe all victims but – damn it – how could this happen on my show, too?”
Now I will switch to calling Soloway “they” rather than “she”, because the book also takes us through their journey to no longer identifying as a woman at all, but instead as non-binary. The book is Soloway’s road trip through gender, and it comes across as an adventure, a grand tour, fuelled as much by intellectual, feminist enquiry as the urge to uncover one’s true self (Soloway also admits in the book that being non-binary keeps them cool and relevant to the younger Instagram generation, which is not unpleasant).
When we meet, Soloway assures me they are currently “having my cake and eating it” by identifying as “she, they and Mom” to different people at different times. Soloway is still Mom to their two sons, because of not wanting “to take away their having a mother. It’s a lot to ask from a kid, ‘Hey can you see me as neither?’”
When I mention a character who died a slightly shocking death in season three of the show, Soloway scrunches up their face with a guilty expression for having killed them off. I have seen many women and no men do that face, that apology for one’s own power. So to see it come from someone in a man’s suit with a man’s haircut is interesting. Yet this current genderless state, according to Soloway, “feels impermanent” and the exciting thing is “not having to define, not having to pick a side and stay there forever. I’m maybe this now, maybe something else next week, next year.” For now, though, this identity “is perfect, it feels like a perfect suit to put on” and it makes Soloway, now 53, feel “like being reborn, being 15 again,” but I want to know if, beyond all this positive language, it has only felt like a rebirth, or also like a crisis? “I think both,” they reply. “Probably a crisis to the people around me. My husband. I’m sure my kids, to some extent. For me it felt, ‘Oh my God, I’ve been searching for this my whole life, this is the thing.’”
I ask how long it took to write the book after Soloway jokes about how it could perhaps have been entitled They Want It, only it’s “not as catchy”. They reply that it took four years of writing, but then the last year became “very specific, you know, let me find the beat changes and really put it in order. I was never really sure if I was ever going to publish it. It was personal and I think part of me thought, I have hired very attractive actors and great writers and they have lived all this stuff on screen, why do I need to say, ‘Hold on there’s more!’” The book is part memoir, part polemic, part explanation of how a TV show gets made in this new, online age – and how it ended up on Amazon because nobody else would take it. If you feel guilty for not reading enough feminist theory, but suspect you lack the concentration span, then this is the plot-driven thriller for you.
Soloway based Transparent on their own father coming out as trans, and Jill’s sister Faith Soloway, who was dating women long before Jill, is also involved as a writer, so the whole family’s journey through queerness has fed its way into the plot. When we take a break from the interview for a minute, Soloway receives an email from their own Moppa, as their trans parent is now called, which says: “You’re so right, my beautiful daughter!” to which Jill replies, “I’m not your daughter!” to which Moppa replies, “Well what are you?” and Jill says, “Just your adult child.” It’s fascinating to see that even in this most progressive of families, the conversation is ongoing. “It is ongoing,” nods Jill.
Soloway writes that Tambor’s moods had always affected the whole set, because he was “a package of raw nerves threatening to unravel in pain and anger. This is what made him such a beautiful actor to watch.” But when the cameras weren’t rolling, “It was real life.” Soloway would get called to the set to calm him down, and it felt like “being a daughter whose life depended on stopping Dad from raging.” Jill and sibling Faith spent their childhood similarly tiptoeing around their own father’s frightening anger. With Tambor this was, it seems, a price worth paying, until the true extent of the allegations were revealed – Soloway describes finding out about it from a Facebook post like everyone else did. So Tambor has been fired, but the show has not: they are working on a fifth, final season.
But then there is the other troubling Jeff behind all of this: Jeff Bezos, who owns Amazon. I mention the mixed feelings people have towards him – if Soloway is so truly intersectional, how do they square working for that guy? Having been so brilliantly free and enquiring with their thoughts in other areas, Soloway delivers some cringeworthily American platitudes in response, such as Bezos is “that person who has really big ideas about making the world a better place to live”. I point out that he could start by properly paying the exhausted workers in Amazon warehouses who are peeing into cups because they’re not allowed toilet breaks, all while claiming welfare payments from various governments, because their salaries are so pitiful, and pay some proper tax instead of building spaceships perhaps.
“No, I know there are issues with labour. I just think a little bit more about Amazon as a whole. And also because I know him and see the scope of his human ambition…” says Soloway, adding, “I also don’t see Jeff Bezos as someone who set out to become a billionaire, it was an accident,” which surprises me, because you’d think that after the first billion, he’d have spotted the next 149 of them coming.
Soloway has been asked why it’s not possible to dress however you want, behave however you want, and still identify as a woman. “To still use the word ‘woman’, to still be a feminist on the women’s team – why do you have to create this third category where you’re neither? Why can’t I just expand the definition of woman?”
And did that give you pause, that question?
“Yes! And it still does. But I feel like, wait a minute, if there is this third designation that is neither, I would like to try that one. I don’t know how long it’s going to last in the culture, and I know it’s a little bit annoying for people. But I just think, if I could walk around with a driver’s licence in my pocket that says my gender is X – it feels really exciting. It does feel really – what’s the word? – it feels light.”
Soloway discusses the extent to which the male gaze controls every single thing women do, and how little we realise this until we step outside of it. Soloway is too busy to be viewed in that way, and wants to experience the power with which an authoritative man can walk through the world. As a wife, Soloway found herself waiting around every Valentine’s Day for her husband to book a restaurant, which he didn’t do. Once liberated into being a non-binary person who dates women, Soloway writes of the joy in being free to call the restaurant to make the booking themself, and to give up this pretence of passive femininity.
“And it feels amazing! It feels so good. It’s a complete anxiety and anger reducer. So this might just be about being queer, because I started to notice when I dated women, I didn’t have this feeling that it was going to cost me if I gave them something.”
So does this mean that being a woman is a failed project, something that, for all Soloway’s feminism, they have now abandoned without hope? Apparently not. “I’m just saying, I’m stepping out, because I need a second to try to figure out why it is that being a woman also means being an object. I’m just saying that I need a second.”
She Wants It: Desire, Power and Toppling the Patriarchy by Jill Soloway is published by Ebury on 18 October at £16.99. Order a copy for £14.61 at guardianbookshop.com
