“Queering” the past (as the MLA puts it) is hardly an issue for me: What else can I do? Margery prostrated herself “with inordinate lust” before the “members” of world religions—I can do no less. I am more attracted to dubious moments of explosion and disjunction than, say, to the life of Michelangelo, the world-historical genius who defines his period. Margery is a queer version of disintegration that includes (takes with it) a central myth of our culture. Perhaps I am as angry as Cousin Bette, and perhaps anger is a defining position. I don’t mind a reaction of shock—there’s plenty of aggression in the book. Shock, confusion, sexual arousal—all acceptable.

The actual forms we take are a kind of extremity we are driven to in a quest for love. We exist to desire and be desired. Or, more roundly, we make ourselves “different” and “same” in order to be loved (if only by the world). And behind this is the mystery of form, how weird and even unendurable it is to be one thing (race, sexuality, gender) rather than another.

When I become Margery, I can no more “control” the import of my literary drag than I could if I dressed as a woman, pursuing an inner necessity whose explanations and effects would be contradictory at best. But maybe that impurity, which is an expression of a problem rather than a way of containing or explaining it, is the way I handle the ever-crossing circuits of narration.

To make an object of the book, to suppress figure and ground, I developed a kind of minimalism amid the excess. I piled up declarative sentences. I used birds and bird calls every few pages. I researched where a certain bird would visit during a given season, say, “the whickering trill of a grebe” in Margery’s vision of the Holy Land during December, 0000, the year of Jesus’ birth. And I hung the novel on four words—exalt, exasperate, abandon, amaze—that appear again and again, a reduced version of the whole book.

Margery is a tale of middle-aged breakdown (those other middle ages) for Margery and Bob equally. By the end of the book, both accept the partial truth of life in the moment—including an acceptance of death, which in the logic of the book means the reduction of the fear of death, and so the end of obsession. Still, Bob and Margery persist in wanting to be lifted out of history and see their books as another stab at rewriting the end.

—ROBERT GLÜCK
2000