In February 2011, the Believer published an essay by T Cooper called “So There’s This Man,” in which Cooper wrote about his experience telling his parents he wasn’t their daughter anymore. And that was the good news. The essay discussed his female-to-male transition, and all the assumptions (by others) and fears (of Cooper’s own) that accompanied that transition. The essay was honest and widely admired, and inspired T Cooper’s book, Real Man Adventures, which is at once groundbreaking, candid, very funny, occasionally sad, beautifully written, and profoundly illuminating. McSweeney’s is proud to be publishing it this month.

– Vendela Vida

VENDELA VIDA: What was the process like, growing “So There’s This Man” into a book?

T COOPER: It varied depending on the day. Some days I felt like, What am I doing, I should just be writing fiction all the time, and others it seemed like I was doing exactly what I needed to be doing. I suppose in publishing the shorter essay I was experimenting with how it would feel to see some of this intensely personal stuff actually appear in print. After it was published, I realized that although “how it felt” wasn’t nothing, it definitely wasn’t as important to me as, say, whether or not I felt like I’d done everything I could with the subject matter. And the answer to that question was a definitive No. And I knew I could trust McSweeney’s with the material, so now we have this weird little hybrid book going out into the world.

VV: How did the mosaic-like structure of Real Man Adventures come about? Did you start conducting the interviews with other people (your wife, ReDICKulous, parents of other transgender children, and others) before you started writing the book, or while you were writing it?

TC: The structure reflects pretty much how my brain originally envisioned the book. I never thought of it as a “start at point A, end at point B” type of narrative, and I don’t think I could ever have written it as such. Okay, maybe if writing it that way would eradicate wars and violence and starvation I could do that—but it wouldn’t be a very good book.

As for the interviews, I’d conducted a handful with various people over the last couple years (my brother, his FTM [female-to-male transsexual] colleague on the Los Angeles Police Department, the FTM who was assaulted on a college campus in California), thinking, I’ll use this for a magazine piece or something, but then that didn’t happen for a variety of reasons, and I realized that those voices...