It’s okay to end on a happy note

In Conversation with Krys Malcolm Belc

Pt II

Billy Lezra

photo by K Ho

Krys Malcolm Belc is the author of the memoirs The Natural Mother of the Child (Counterpoint, 2021) and What I Made for Dinner (Catapult, forthcoming 2026). His essays about queer and trans family life have been in Harper’s Bazaar, Granta, The Rumpus, Electric Literature, and elsewhere. Krys is a certified preK-12 special education teacher and has worked with children, teens, and young adults in public school and pediatric hospital settings. He received his BA from Swarthmore College, his MEd in Special Education from Arcadia University, and his MFA in Creative Writing from Northern Michigan University. Since 2020, Krys has been the memoir editor of Split Lip Magazine. Krys has taught creative writing classes on memoir, lyric essay, and flash essay in the community and at the undergraduate and graduate levels. He is currently the Edelstein-Keller Writer in Residence at the University of Minnesota and lives in Saint Paul with his partner and their four children.

I wanted to go back to the first interview we did 5 years ago, where you said: “It’s important for me to remind myself that I just started writing nonfiction recently. So I think I can get better at it. That makes me feel hopeful because I would like to write more books that are even better.” I’m curious about the most meaningful difference you noticed about writing your first book versus this one.

I was doing a reading at Rutgers Camden and Paul Lisicky was the faculty member who was hosting that reading, and he had read my first book. This was the first time I ever read anything from the food writing I was doing; I read a scene where I stuck with a thought for quite some time, and Paul made an interesting comment about maintaining focus on something for longer. In my first book, I had this impulse to really jump around, to look at something for a moment and then move to something else and allow the association to cycle quickly. And in the second book, I noticed that I was allowing myself to sit with thoughts for pages upon pages, for longer and longer essays. I went from being someone who felt most comfortable in the 500 to 1,500 word range, to writing essays that are 13,000 words. That was the thing that I found myself experimenting with the most with this new book–how long I allowed myself to remain with one thing. And to not be absolutely obsessed with the idea of not repeating ideas. When I started writing, I was like, “well, it’s really boring to reveal that I’m really stuck on the same thoughts and ideas.” But as I kept writing, I was like: “I’m allowed to  state something multiple times if I’m still feeling it throughout the course of the events of a book. I don’t need to constantly be evolving what I’m thinking.”

To what do you attribute that sustained focus?

Part of it is recognizing that lack of focus was a big problem that was pervasive throughout all aspects of my life (laughs.) I was interested in this book capturing more of the trueness of my personality. I think my first book was more about capturing nuanced and specific kinds of experiences of marginalization or exclusion. I was really focused on the affective experience of microaggressions or even bigger kinds of exclusions or aggressions. And I think, because of that, I captured a pretty limited range of looking because I was just looking at those kinds of experiences. In the second book, I’m writing about cooking. Part of the nature of the project is like, you have to cook no matter what’s happening. You can’t be limited to only doing it on days when you’re really happy or days when you’re really struggling. You have to feed yourself throughout whatever else is going on. So because of that, I was by nature going to capture joy, exhaustion,  all the different things that happen, and allow for more access to what I’m actually like. People who spend time with me don’t really see the kind of person who is the speaker of my first book because I’m not ruminating on a time when I felt excluded from a social group because of my gender or whatever. That’s not really something I talk about that much in daily life. Versus being like, “I’m really annoyed because my kids are yelling a lot and it’s overstimulating me and I feel really overwhelmed.” That is something that people who actually know me will have heard— that will be very familiar to them.

In an interview with Emily Robbins you said: “With the second book, I want to be recognizable to people I love.” In this statement, there seems to be an awareness of the you who is crafting the narrator who’s propelling the book forward. And then there’s the desire for this narrator to be recognizable to the people you love. To me this idea implies that there can be an accurate awareness of the parts of you that are legible to the people that you love. How do you execute that recognition on a craft level?

When I started writing about food and cooking, I was–as the narrator in the book–I was working 9 to 5 at a hospital. Writing was not at the center of my life in terms of how my time was spent. The writing I was doing was in my free time. When I was early-to-mid in the drafting process, I started teaching writing for a living, which was not really on my bingo card, it just kind of happened. And I do think that teaching writing led to an interesting almost-crisis for me. I found myself repeating things that had been really important to me when I wrote my first book, like: “You are not the narrator entirely. You have control over the person you’re creating. You don’t owe your readers all this information. You need to protect whatever parts of yourself are not really a part of what you’re writing. You never have to go where you don’t want to go.” But then for me part of the challenge of writing a second memoir was like, nothing really remarkable has ever happened to me. So to write a first memoir is kind of a wild thing to do. And then to do a second one, I was like, “Wow, now I’m really testing what memoir even is because there’s no experience I have had that is really worthy of the genre in the commercial definition of literature.” So I was like, “I have to give something else.” And part of the exercise I would do with the undergrads who were learning how to write personal writing, would be: “Write a draft of your essay about going home after your first semester of college for break or whatever.” But then I would ask: “What do you want a stranger to learn about you in the essay?” And it’s not just a theoretical exercise. I asked my students to take a piece of paper and write down, like, “I want them to know that I’m from Wisconsin and that my family really values our religious tradition.” And then as you’re re-reading your draft, pick out: where are they actually learning these things about me? Don’t just assume that your reader is going to pick up on things. How do you know if you’re communicating what you’re communicating? And as I was teaching this, I realized I needed to actually practice what I was preaching and identify what the readers wouldn’t have learned reading the first book, and then reveal those things. So for me, a lot of that revolved around being mentally ill, which I think was implied but not explicitly stated in my first book. And also being someone who struggles with the idea of wanting to have a positive outlook on the possibility of my life in the context of these depressive episodes that I’ve had. I was asking: “is it possible to convey to a reader that this narrator actually is pretty upbeat and into the world and into life and making more and more children and making more and more of an investment in futurity, and also show a reader that someone who’s depressed can still have that?” So yeah, I do think that, to bring it back to your question, teaching writing and talking explicitly about needing to take a hard look at whether readers are going to truly get what you’re trying to communicate was really important to me. My first book was more about communicating my ideas versus truly communicating what it means to inhabit my interior.

Yes. I think what stood out to me when you spoke about recognition is that you’re not talking about any reader; you were specifically talking about a reader who actually knows you. Like, would a reader who actually knows you read your book and get a sense of, “There he is. I recognize that voice on the page.”

Yeah, and I think longer sentences were a part of this. I am someone who I would not say has a disorganized mode of thinking, but perhaps has some doom spiraling. So then having doom spiraling on the sentence level with lots of commas and elements added into it, and we don’t know where it’s going to go–that is a more accurate capturing of the way that I think versus the more biting tone to some of the writing in my first book, which was more clipped because that was the artistic turn I was taking. And in this one, I was like, “let’s riff for a bit. Let’s just let this go the way it goes when you’re talking to a friend and they’re like, “where did you even begin? What are we even talking about here?”” (laughs)

Something I noticed in this book is this remarkable use of weaving–weaving of the food videos, research, theory, personal narrative. How did you go about this weaving?

I have a really idiosyncratic drafting method. I write in Adobe InDesign pretty exclusively. It started because I’m interested in image-text work and things that look kind of strange on the page. And that allowed me to just not fight with Microsoft Word every minute of the day when I was writing. In InDesign you have to intentionally create new pages. You can’t just keep writing off a page: the page as a unit is more of a visual thing. So when I reach the end of a page, I will ask: “Is the thought that I’m having worthy of continuing on to the next physical page? Or is that enough for now?” If I’m talking about myself, should I go back to talking about the other things that I’m talking about in this essay, the research that I’m doing, or should I move onto a different timeline? The permission to continue is not only a sensibility thing: it exists in a physical format as well. So that helps me with weaving. Every 400 to 500 words is an inflection point. Do I need to bring something back, or into it?  This is why I’m able to write with multiple strands. I have tried all the things other writers do: cutting out strips or using index cards. None of that really does anything for me. I just get confused.  But in InDesign I’ll be like: “I’ve been talking about a memory I have of cooking for Anna in college for 4 pages, and the idea of creating a 5th page feels morbidly self-centered. And I don’t think that this essay can sustain 5 pages of this. So do I have 5 pages worth of research to counterbalance that?” Not that I’m looking for a 50/50 balance, but there is a sense of physical proportionality that I am creating.

So the medium you’re using to write is quite literally influencing how you’re structuring the thoughts.

Yeah, because as a teacher and as a reader I’m really interested in small press chapbooks and hybrid works and book-length essays–things where a page means something even though it’s prose. It’s just what happens when you submit a Word document to your editor and then somewhere along the production line it gets turned into an InDesign document. I’m sort of intervening a little earlier with myself. For me, in drafting, there is a physical component of like, “these are 2 facing pages that are talking about different things. Am I building up to and away from this page spread appropriately?” For poets, the decision for a poem to be 1, 2, or 3 pages or more is a big decision. As someone who’s writing memoir about everyday life, I’m like: “what is going to happen to my reader when they turn the page? Are they going to be like, not this again?” And that’s not me being like, “I don’t have anything interesting to say.” It’s just that people could be reading anything. And right now they’re reading this book about an ordinary sad guy who’s cooking spaghetti and having lots of feelings. And I want them to have an experience that’s interesting. And if they turn the page and I’m talking yet again about what I was talking about on the previous page, is that going to be satisfying? Or do I want there to be some element of surprise where they’re like, “wow, I didn’t know that this idea could connect to this other idea”? 

Earlier you said that the first book was more about making art out of life experiences, and that the second one is more about trying to get to the center of an emotional truth. How did you identify when you had arrived at that center?

There’s a scene in the book that’s brief, but it’s about a time when I was depressed after having my daughter–I was feeling suicidal. And that’s not something I felt very often in my life, but it was a really intense feeling. And I wrote this scene about it. It had to do with cooking Polish food for the anniversary of my wife’s immigration to the US. And it was these very dense couple of pages. I had showed my agent a draft of the book at some point, and that scene was pretty early on. And I think her comment was something like, “this needs to be later, you need to move this back in the manuscript.” And I think at that point I was like, “oh, this is something you need to arrive to, not just in terms of mood, but because there’s information in there that is a core of something.” And that was a very clarifying moment for me. And another moment was figuring out that I had reached a point where I didn’t want to look at food videos on the internet anymore. So then I was allowed to write about doing other things. Because COVID restrictions in my life had really loosened up, I was doing everything in person. And I was gearing up to leave Philadelphia and move to Minnesota, which was exciting for my family. All these things were happening where I was like, “I can finally stop writing about the internet.” So that was another clarifying moment–I knew I was headed for more emotional truth. It helps me a lot when I know where I’m going. Because if the book is about becoming obsessed with YouTube videos of people cooking, I don’t know whether that is something that could have been sustained forever. I don’t know that I should still be watching videos on the last page of the manuscript. I don’t know what the purpose of that would have been because it would no longer be about a specific period of time. I was like, “I gotta go touch grass.” And that helped me figure out that the book was about cooking, and it was about being into YouTube, but it was also about a period of time where I was spending an unhealthy amount of time looking at media and thinking about it. And that time ending helped me realize how deep the hole had been.

This is reminding me of something I saw you write about, the idea that one of the most important decisions a memoirist can make is deciding what the organizing principle of the book is going to be. And it sounds like in this book, more so than the first one, chronology was the principle. 

Yes, as a plot. But it’s hard because I realized I wanted to write a food memoir before any of the plot had actually happened. And then I was battling a very typical memoirist problem of like, “how much time/distance do you need? How can you gain the distance perspective to write about something? And: to what extent do I need to wait to have real thoughts and insights?” I think that’s why there were a number of times where I took a break and worked on other things because I was like, “I don’t have any intelligent thoughts about any of this stuff that’s happening.” I had all these things that were motivating me to write a food memoir, but it didn’t have a plot. That didn’t present itself as a problem because my first book didn’t have a plot at all, and that’s just fine. Clearly I was able to do it. But it was interesting to me that once I started writing in earnest I realized: there really is a plot. There is a moment when the action begins and then there’s a time when it ends. And I can identify what year and month these things happen. And it does unfold chronologically. I have told students many times that I don’t believe in binaries, except that I do think there’s a memoir binary: is it organized by time or not? And I was like: “this book is organized by time” which honestly is helpful and nice. I do feel like that is a more novelistic way of writing. It allowed me to do things I wasn’t able to do the first time.

This is obvious, but what you’re saying is making me think of how the whole abstract question of “what is time?” doesn’t really apply when it comes to cooking or parenting. So it makes sense that chronology would organize a memoir that is looking at cooking and food and raising children, where time is very real.

It’s extremely real. And the thing with cooking also is the fact that you do get better at it with time. Like, my wife fucking hates cooking. That’s how I ended up in the position that I’m in. But I teach late 2 days a week, so she has to feed people something, and she’s not gonna enjoy it, but you do get better at the things that you do over time, even if you don’t like doing them. It’s interesting because in a way this is a book where there’s a plot and things are happening and I have desires and we get to find out whether the narrator’s desires are going to be fulfilled. And there are all these roadblocks. But there is a sense of like, “things have to resolve in some way if they’re going forward,” versus my first book was more like, “well, you can’t resolve something that’s not really a defined problem, or something that’s not occurring along a timeline.” I can’t solve the problem of “people don’t understand who I am in the world” or “I’m not recognizable.” But the problem of: “am I going to be able to have a 4th baby or not?” You’re going to find out in the book whether that’s going to happen. This felt really interesting to me as someone who had developed a sensibility of liking nonfiction where things are really  unresolved. And a lot of the books that I return to again and again are not about solving discrete problems. I think of Emerson Whitney’s first memoir Heaven or Terese Marie Mailhot’s Heart Berries, where the problem is existing in society. That’s not something that we’re going to resolve in the course of 200 pages. But like: “this guy doesn’t like working remotely at a job that he used to work in person. Will he figure that out or not?” That is something that is likely to be resolved in the course of the book. So it was really interesting and nice to work on something that was different in that way.

Even resolution is a binary idea.

Yeah. And I struggled a lot with how to end a book without being like, “and now everything’s great.” But I recognized that part of the book unexpectedly became about this episode of depression that was not over by the end of the book, but clearly was getting better. I think most people’s experiences of postpartum depression is that there’s not a day where it’s over, but most people find that their symptoms abate at some point. And some people are lucky and it only lasts a little while, and some people go through the first year and it’s a slog and it’s slow. But the reality of the plot of the book was that it ends when my daughter was around the age where my symptoms were abating. So I was able to be like, “I’m feeling better.” But I don’t want to write a book about depression where you’re like, “and now I’m not depressed,” because that was not true.  Andrew Solomon has written about this in The Noonday Demon, where you have this recognition that once you have your second depressive episode, it’s likely that you are going to have more, and you don’t know when they’re going to happen, or what they’re going to be about. The episode of postpartum depression I had was my second serious depressive episode of my life. So it’s interesting because you are resolving this episode of depression which feels great, but you can’t resolve depression as an element of a speaker’s life. So that helped me a little bit because I hate when memoirs are like, “and now everything’s great.” And a lot of trans memoirs especially end in a resolution because the person has finally transitioned or whatever. And I was like, “I don’t want to participate in that, but I also don’t want to lie.” My depression is getting better because my kid is almost a toddler and I’m moving out of this postpartum depression era. So there was a little bit of wrestling with that. And ultimately I was like, “it’s okay to say that you feel a little better at the end of the book.”

That makes me think of something Hannah Matthews said when she was interviewing you: how you say that one trains their reader toward an ending, or that you’re training them along the way to understand the ending. Would you talk about the training you were doing? Because the final image of the book didn’t sound like resolution to me. It sounded like possibility.

Yes. I am a person who’s a huge starter-overer as a writer, and I end up abandoning lots of images and ideas. But one image that I wrote and stuck with early on was this moment where it’s deep early pandemic, I’m like barely going anywhere, but I go to a local grocer with my kids and buy strawberries. It clearly doesn’t solve your life to eat good strawberries, but you can have these times where everything’s really dark, but there’s a breakthrough moment. And throughout the book, I threaded these moments of possibility. Lots of things are happening but you go to a restaurant and eat a special meal and something really nice happens. Or, later in the book, I am taking all these fertility medications that have horrible side effects and there’s this montage of scenes where I’m eating and cooking all these different things. In those moments I want the food images to be extremely colorful and vibrant, to train the reader to be like, “if you’re looking through this haze, at the end of it, there’s a cheeseburger on a plate.” And I think my kids recognize that I’m someone who, if they have a bad day, it’s like a TV show from the fifties where I’ll be like “I have frozen cookie dough, let me make you a warm cookie while we talk about your bad day.” That is just something that helps me. So I was training the reader throughout the book to look for these food images as something that would be beautiful. 

Is this a conscious choice, or does it start as you notice a pattern you build around?

It’s more noticing the pattern. One of the things that happened when I was editing my first book was whenever my editor would be like, “you should add something more here,” and it was a sort of vague directive, I would just always default to some sort of food experience or image. I got a lot of satisfaction out of those things. They felt almost like in children’s books, when the authors will put secret images or breadcrumbs for the adults to find, right? In the Arthur series, the author Marc Brown would put his kids’ names in tiny print in the books, kind of a “if you know you know” thing. So I was thinking about some of the moments in my first book that gave me the most delight where I’m writing about how pregnancy is so weird when you’re a guy, but then there’s a very vivid memory of holding my son at this party where I’m bringing key lime pie and we’re all eating watermelon. From a craft perspective, it would be one of those things where I’m like, “it’s been a long time since the reader got a nice moment where you’re just kind of happy about something you’re eating.” And if I’m thinking about people who I think would gravitate towards being into this book, it’s people who have a fraught relationship with food. I think especially people who are the primary caregiver of anyone of any age and therefore have to think about someone else’s nutrition. It’s this thing where I love cooking and baking quite a lot, but that doesn’t mean I like it every day or all the time. So I was looking for times where it’s like, “yeah, it sucks that I constantly have to think about what’s in my fridge and how much we are spending on groceries and when’s the last time we ate this or that,” that cascade of thoughts, but then also those times where it’s just like, “it’s really nice to eat this thing that we made.” And I wanted the reader to be reminded of that. I think a lot of food memoirs are toxically positive about food. And a lot of writing about domesticity is like, “and it’s all a trap, and my husband does nothing, and I’m the mom who’s always doing the mental load, and I hate everything about life.”  It can be very, very dire in tone, and I just wanted to find something that’s more true to life for most people I know, which is like: “a lot of it I hate and a lot of it I love.”

You said that the most trans thing about this book is how competing experiences and desires can exist at once, which I think is what you’re speaking to now. 

Yeah. I have this moment where we’re trying to decide whether we want to have another baby. And we go away on a trip to a national park and we’re staying in this cabin and go hiking. And I just have this thought while I’m watching my 3 kids that I already have where I’m like, “I don’t know, maybe I would want this kid to call me dad.” My older kids all call me by my first name exclusively. And I was like, “I don’t know, maybe my gender is changing or my perception of how I want to be perceived or what would be easy or difficult, maybe those things are changing.” I think what kids call their queer parent becomes a stand-in for how the queer parent wants to be experienced in the world and in the context of their family. So that is a moment that I was thinking about, like, “what does this have to do with other things that are happening around food?” And I do think that a lot of the book, because it’s about celebrity chefs or people who are creating these food empires, is asking: to what extent is your domestic performance a performance? And, and how much of it is about curating perception? And how much of it is about conveying the real you? How real is the Sara Moulton that we get on the television show? If she’s cooking in this fake home that her producers rented for this version of her show, how true to life is that? And what does she look like when she’s actually in her real kitchen? And are we supposed to think we’re getting access to it? And I think there’s a wide variation in how these internet celebrities or food TV personas perform. I think some of them are trying to really convey something about their true personality, and others are just trying to do a business, or trying to show professional skill. And I was thinking, well, what does that have to do with me? When I invite friends over for brunch for the first time and I’m deciding what to make, to what extent am I showing them, like, this is how I always eat, or this is a special occasion, and this is the kind of person I can be when it’s a special occasion? If I’m choosing something that’s a little fussier, am I bragging about the fact that my kids will eat anything? I do think that every decision you make when you’re giving food to anyone who’s not in your family is about performance and perception. So I think I experience that as being fairly similar to certain social obligations that I might have, where I don’t know the degree to which I’m going to be read as a queer person, as a trans person.

For a while we lived in a remote area of Michigan and my wife worked as an emergency room nurse, and they had their Christmas party at a restaurant. So in that context when I wonder: “what am I going to wear and how am I going to do my hair?”, I am making a decision that will imprint on these people. What kind of a family is my coworker in? What kind of a person are they with? And what does that say about a lot of other things? So I was thinking about food as a performance and communication of one’s values. And to me there’s a connection between that and how the later parts of the book are about having kids who are neurodivergent or need special-ed support. To what extent are we disclosing that, and what does that say about our family? And how is it being a neurodivergent person parenting neurodivergent kids? I think a lot of experiences I’ve had of transness are similar to experiences where I can choose to not tell people I’m neurodivergent. Similarly, I can just not mention that I’m trans. Random nurses at a hospital are not going to Google their coworker’s partner. So I think there’s an extent to which I’m like, “how much am I going to reveal? What is it going to say? Am I comfortable hamming it up a little or performing or enhancing the degree to which I perform straightness or queerness?” I do think that there are a lot of parallels.