Jessika Bouvier: Can you walk readers through the life of this story: how the idea emerged and how it's changed since the first iteration, particularly once it became a co-authored project? Did y’all find the process of infusing styles organic, or were there unique challenges to writing hand in hand?

Jaime Goh: One of our friends shared this anecdote about a bully in her class who would call her classmates Flat Face, so they called him Pointy Nose. She never did learn his actual name. This eventually got us on the topic of what it would be like to have sex with Pinocchio, sit on his face while he fibs, make him ejaculate sawdust and whatnot. So if you guessed the first draft started out as Pinocchio smut, you were right. Henry and I began imagining the implications of having sex without being able to feel, which demanded that we also imagine the implications of living without being able to feel. Then, having committed to the retelling, we brainstormed what Jiminy Cricket’s role would be, and what Pete Nokio’s relationship with the Blue Fairy and Geppetto would be like. The draft grew from there and developed themes along the way. 

Here’s a secret! My style changed significantly after I first encountered Henry’s works (before we actually met) and became a superfan. I was always enviously, furiously combing through his stories, trying to emulate his prose, mailing him anthrax etc. I’ve been scheming to become him for years; this was the compromise. If he admires my writing at all, it is only due to pure narcissism. So. It wasn’t hard to combine our voices. He’d work on a scene, I’d work on a scene, we’d read each other’s scenes, jump around the page picking at each other’s sentences, smooth over the stylistic bumps. If there were challenges, they weren’t results of the collaboration. They were resolved by it.

Henry Sussman: I had never really co-written anything before, and yet it felt so natural. I had admired Jaime’s writing even before meeting her, and the chance to write something together, I felt, allowed us to accentuate each other’s styles. It was also incredibly fun to witness firsthand the creation of the kinds of passages at which, before, I’d only gawked post hoc.

JB: I feel like most writers who undertake retellings employ a fix-it attitude (for example, The Iliad is obviously more interesting when it’s gay). While the D*sney version is heavily sanitized, the original The Adventures of Pinocchio is—if I had to settle on a single word—wild. What made y’all want to tackle a retelling of this story? Was it a priority to keep the surrealism of the original intact in your version?

HS: To be honest, the choice of Pinocchio in particular wasn’t an especially conscious one. We just thought the symbolism was humorous—nose = phallus, kind of thing—and he’s this universal figure, deep down in everyone’s storytelling subconscious. 

JG: My memory of the original story of Pinocchio was fuzzy at best, but I did refresh myself on the plot while undertaking this. When I came across a particularly juicy forgotten detail, I’d share it with Henry and we’d discuss whether or how we might incorporate it into the story. We definitely tried to retain the otherworldliness. I believe Henry took inspiration from a chaotic Blood Meridian scene for our interpretation of the Pleasure Society. A “bougie furcon,” he called it.

JB: I’d argue that “Pegged” is a sort of anti-Hero’s Journey, wherein Pete interacts with and/or participates in the darkest aspects of humanity. Rather than ending on a reward, Pete’s achievement of “boyhood” (or manhood, technically, in this version) can read more like a curse. Could y’all talk a little bit about what you believe the story articulates about the intersections of embodiment, identity, and pain?

HS: At first, I was mostly concerned with this question of embodiment. Does identity come from the body? Is there such a thing as a soul divorced from flesh? When I began the process of rereading and editing the story, though, I was more drawn, as you say, to boy- or manhood. His gender and sexuality, or lack thereof, stood out to me. Does Pete have a gender identity? Does he have—dysphoria? Lately that’s how I’ve been interpreting the story.

JG: On the surface, “Pegged” is about a wooden puppet who wants, at every stage, to be a “real boy” (simultaneously a metaphor for moral maturity and a kind of ontological authenticity), but he has no fixed blueprint for how to achieve this other than—potentially—through sexual intimacy. But the story becomes a feverish meditation on the relationship between desire and the body. It’s about desire in the most fundamental, physically uncomfortable sense: the desire to become something you are not yet, to inhabit a self that you can barely even imagine, let alone reliably act as. And that’s tangled immediately with the theme of lying—lying as in the tiny, incremental, almost imperceptible ways humans deceive themselves all the time (we lie to avoid discomfort, to avoid facing responsibility, to please other people, to pretend we are someone who “has it together”). Then there’s the theme of transformation, which is everywhere but never abstract. Pete’s body literally changes. His nose grows. He gets a hole. He is reborn as flesh. These transformations reflect the messy inner work of learning who you are, what you value, and what you’re willing to endure for the sake of those values. And lurking underneath all of that is the story’s moral gravity: that freedom—the freedom to lie, to run, to follow whim—is inseparable from consequence, and that the adult world, with all its dangers and dull, crushing realities, is not optional.

So I believe the story articulates a lesson about the inextricable link between body, selfhood, and suffering: you cannot disentangle the experience of being a moral, conscious, living being from the fact of embodiment, and you cannot experience embodiment fully without risk and error. Pinocchio’s transformations—wood into flesh, lie into truth, chaos into understanding—are always mediated by some form of pain, which is the story’s insistence that the project of becoming is neither easy nor metaphorical. Embodiment gives the stakes, identity gives the direction, and pain gives the grammar with which the story teaches you how to navigate the space between the two.

JB: On a similar note, there is a lot of brutal subject matter in this story. How do y’all go about writing difficult things? I recognize there may be divergent perspectives on this.

HS: I’ve always been attracted to so-called “transgressive” literature. Authors like Dennis Cooper come to mind. I know it’s totally cliché, but I still believe in this idea of comforting the disturbed, etc. To use another cliché, reading this transgressive stuff has always made me feel “seen.” 

JG: It’s like handling a live grenade. The trick (if “trick” is the word; it isn’t really a trick, it’s more like a careful negotiation) is to keep a sort of mental buffer between the raw grotesquery of what you’re describing and the reader’s capacity to absorb it. You don’t dump everything in at once—wall-to-wall gore, existential despair and so on—because then it becomes basically a horror movie on fast-forward where the emotional impact evaporates. Instead, you layer. You juxtapose, show the banal alongside the brutal. And you play. You find glimmers of comedic irony amid tragedy. Crucially, I try not to write solely to shock (as I used to in my earlier works) but to understand something, to probe at the ugly bits of human experience. It takes both restraint and honesty. Which is why it’s so hard.

JB: Knowing you personally, Jaime, I’ve seen firsthand how your work—and “Pegged” in particular—can have a polarizing effect on readers. I’m curious if either of y’all keep a prospective audience in mind as you draft, or is your focus more geared toward rendering the hard thing accurately? Do you ever think about “risk” when you’re writing stories—when to take them, when to leave them, etc.

JG: Yes and no to having a prospective audience. I think a writer can’t really divorce themselves from a hypothetical Other, because any publically accessible piece of media is always going to be a form of communication. Some things I write will happen to laser-target specific friends, for better or for worse. But trying to write exclusively for an audience—actively thinking “what will they approve of, what will they nod at” and then giving it to them—is intellectual bribery on the level of marketing execs. It’s like trying to perform kindness for brownie points or calibrate my conscience to a social algorithm. It almost always results in something lesser than what the work could be if I just let it crawl by itself out of my head. So I write first and foremost for the internal audience of my own curiosity and unease, my own struggle to parse the world. Then I let the reader wander in, knowing they may or may not follow, but trusting that whatever is genuine and strange and necessary enough to survive my own scrutiny has a good chance of resonating beyond me. And that’s about as much audience-thinking as is tolerable without turning my work into literary cosplay. It’s not always going to land, of course; my writing is an acquired taste even for myself.

Regarding risk, I avoid treating it like a spreadsheet where I tick off “edgy content, yes/no; controversial theme, yes/no; emotional vulnerability, yes/no.” It’s more like walking on a narrow ridge with the wind constantly trying to push me off, except the ridge is made of my own insecurities and the gusts are all the things I know I could get wrong, or that people will hate, or that might reveal me to myself in ways that are humiliating or uncomfortable. When to take a risk is often determined less by reason and more by instinct. I just know that not taking it would be a betrayal of the story itself. But sometimes leaving the risk alone is the braver act: knowing that the story isn’t ready, that I’m not yet at the appropriate skill level or stage in life—and resisting that itch to leap just because the idea is flashy.

HS: With respect to concern for an audience, there’s always, I think, part of me—an impish, immature part—that wants to get a rise out of people. I want people to read this story and react to the nose-sodomy with revulsion, rather than seen-it-before jadedness. As for “risk,” I guess I try not to think about it, personally. I feel as though, if I ever abandoned an idea due to it being “risky,” it would be tantamount to self-censorship, which is of course the death of art.

JB: Hypothetically, if you were swallowed into the gaping asshole of your predatory nemesis, what ephemera do you think would be waiting inside? (My answer is black olives/Maryland drivers/books with the titling pattern The ___ Of ___ /any number of cishet men who DJ, regardless of music genre).

JG: I have several nemeses, most of them literary, but I’ll pick a commercial author who shall remain nameless. Inside: ivory tusks; some tropical mocktail with too much grenadine; a colony of stingless bees; the ugliest iteration of the pride flag; their own tongue, still attached.

HS: I have perhaps fewer literary nemeses than Jaime (it’s a high bar), but one such asshole comes to mind: a Fisher-Price-brand hammer and sickle; an ingot of camembert; a poster of the movie Election (1999 dir. Alexander Payne) signed by Reese Witherspoon, who of course plays Tracy Flick; and a copy of Ulysses.