The Brooklyn Rail

Just before the UK release of Tyler Wetherall’s debut novel, Amphibian, we met at a mixer for folks who run reading series in the city. At the time, I was co-hosting After Hours in the Red Room at KGB and was there to represent the Urbane Arts Club, and it seemed like Tyler knew everybody. She is the creator of Reading the City, a weekly newsletter of book events based in NYC. I had just been given an advanced copy of Amphibian because Tyler was set to be one of the readers at the Urbane’s Brooklyn Book Festival Bookend event, and that was one of the first things I confessed to her in the backyard of Pete’s Candy Store.

After that night, I pushed the other books on my nightstand aside to start Amphibian. The narrator, Sissy, is a young girl with a sharp and curious voice. She describes the sensation of desire: “it feels like anger except the edges are softer.” From the perspective of a twelve-year-old, Wetherall bears witness to the magic and mystery of girlhood. With all of the tension of a story written on the brink of transformation, Amphibian finds agency in becoming.

When I finished, I felt compelled to tell Tyler how much her story resonated with me. I reached out over email. She was generous enough to talk with me on Zoom about pleasure and perspective in Amphibian ahead of its US release.

Hannah Burns (Rail): The inciting incident that sparks Sissy and Tegan’s friendship is marked by childhood sexual exploration and gendered violence—threads that unspool throughout the rest of the novel. At what point in the writing process did you decide this scene needed to take place?

Tyler Wetherall: It is really interesting that you raise that, because that is the first scene I wrote in full. I actually wrote it first as a short story. I had been playing with the themes. This began as an exploration of shame and desire. I had a one-night stand in my late twenties. I chose the guy, I hit on him, I took him home, it was all my choice. And he was a perfect gentleman, as much as you’d want for a one-night stand. It all happened the way it was supposed to—he even asked me out for a drink afterwards. I sat on the beach with my mum a few days later and came to the question: why do I feel like I’ve done something wrong? What would it take for me to have that experience and not feel as if there is something to be ashamed of? She talked about the sexual revolution in the sixties, and that is where this all began. I was curious when shame and desire became connected. I think it forms really early on, and circling back to my own life, the book began as a memoir—obviously it has gone very far. It was me writing my own experiences in reverse, trying to find the moment where I felt desire without shame, and I had to go back to early girlhood. In doing that, I was talking to people about what I was writing and they kept telling me their stories, almost unprompted. We would talk about formative sexuality and first memories of desire, and they’d launch into a story they’d preface by saying, “I’ve never actually told this to anyone before,” and then tell me something deeply personal. That was when I realized it was bigger than a memoir, with all these stories. One story that was shared inspired that scene, just the very kernel of it was a story my friend told me, the rest was fictionalized, and I just kept thinking about it. This girl, who she was, where she came from, what it was indicative of that she would choose to take that action. In trying to understand her, that’s how I found Tegan.

Rail: I wondered if you found Tegan or Sissy first. And how you landed on Sissy as the narrator. How did you access the mind of a twelve-year-old and make it believable?

Wetherall: I actually started the book as third-person past tense. It was multi-layered, multi-narrative. Every woman in that whole book had a backstory and they were interwoven. I know those characters inside and out because at some point their stories were on the page. But it wasn’t working. I had this one paragraph I had written in first-person present tense that I kept coming back to because I could hear Sissy’s voice. That’s it, that's the voice. I loved that paragraph so much. It felt different, urgent. I had finished the book and submitted it to my agent, so I was quite far along, but it still wasn’t fitting together. I took that paragraph and printed it out, stuck it on the wall behind my desk, and I rewrote the whole book in first-person present tense. Every time I couldn’t hear the voice, I’d read that paragraph and listen and hook myself back into her voice again. I could hear it, and I would keep writing. What I realized after the fact is that with third person, we were voyeuristically watching these girls perform early sexuality and that was uncomfortable. And what I wanted to do was give these girls agency and voice and dignify the experience of girlhood, and part of that required the reader to be embodied, sharing Sissy’s experiences with her in a very sensory way. I realized that was why it was so important to use first-person present tense.

Rail: There is a scene where Sissy looks up “masturbation” in the dictionary, and she is deflated because the definition is clinical and devoid of the magic she associates with these feelings. After reading your British Vogue article that talks about sexual education, I wonder if you believe there is a way to demystify female masturbation in public conversation while maintaining this magic?

Wetherall: It’s difficult because you simultaneously want to give young people the tools and the knowledge, but you don’t want to have those conversations too soon. You have to find this balance between supporting and not scaring young people with more information than they are ready for. It’s complicated, but it would help all of these dialogues if the first thing people talk about is pleasure. When you hear about sex as a young person, you talk about safe sex, using condoms, STIs, pregnancy—and it’s fear. Hopefully you talk about consent—there isn’t really enough education about consent, according to reports in the UK. Somehow, no one ever says, “Sex should feel good. It’s something two people can do together, it’s called sex, and it’s meant to feel good, when you’re ready for it.”

Rail: With puberty being such a time of transformation, there is a natural connection, but what does Sissy’s amphibian metamorphosis represent to you?

Wetherall: I think it was trying to manifest a version of womanhood that is empowered, to transform into something that has strength or agency. To be something more powerful than a girl is the wish. Girlhood can and should be powerful. I think she finds her way there, but it’s not not-woman, it’s something else. I think it’s also laying claim to the myths where transformation is a punishment or an escape. I liked this idea of transformation on her own terms. These things are happening without her choosing, but she embraces them, and they become part of her. I think it is a commentary on all the stories we have inherited throughout time in which our bodies become a canvas for a lesson or fable, rather than our own to do with as we please.

Rail: And these myths set up the binary that you play with, of the fear Sissy finds instilled in her, the tales of being loved too much and the tales of not being loved enough: Daphne, the Little Mermaid. They are extremes that Sissy almost seems to reject by choosing to become something beyond Woman.

Wetherall: Exactly. It is the classic virgin-whore dichotomy that is played out in all these different mythic forms. Finding the right proportion of loving and being loved in the world, we’re learning those lessons at that age. There’s just a cacophony of stories of women who fail in the social terms of the stories and become apocryphal. Foam on top of the sea. By the end, I wanted it to be a crescendo of these stories; every chapter you get another story about a girl, and the reader is just surrounded by this noise. We internalize that as young women and we carry that through all of our lives.