Beard: A Memoir of a Marriage (William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 2025) recounts how Kelly Foster Lundquist met Devin at church camp when she was nineteen in the late ’90s. Immediately inseparable, the two bonded over bootleg Tori Amos recordings and a sense of disconnection from the spiritual fervor of their fellow camp counselors. Devin was classically handsome and Kelly on the plain side of pretty, but they matched. Their twinned search for God, acceptance, and love would profoundly shape the rest of their lives.
In this striking debut memoir, Lundquist revisits her relationship with Devin twenty years after their divorce, as she investigates the “beard” trope in literature, culture, and her own romantic life. The straight woman who unwittingly marries a gay man is either a laughingstock or a fool——or both——in the popular imagination. And yet reality——much like desire——is more wild. Reality is midnight pad Thai, tenderness in Ralph Lauren sheets, ritual visits to Blockbuster, and beginning a PhD in queer theory while your husband secretly struggles to reconcile his double life.
A tour de force of empathy and vivid prose, Beard reckons honestly with the harm done to both husband and wife by churches that required rigid performances of gender and sexuality. In contrast, Lundquist learns to let go of brittle certainties as she embraces what her first marriage taught her about risk and redemption.
This interview took place by email over several days in September 2025.
Charles Jensen (CJ): Beard charts the path of a marriage from teen Kelly's life just before she meets her future husband, through the early days of wedded companionship, until finally everything falls apart in front of her (and the reader's) eyes. Can you start off by talking about how you felt called to write this book?
Kelly Foster Lundquist (KFL): Common wisdom (as I’ve often encountered it in writing advice) is that you’re never supposed to write about sudden epiphanies. But there’s a moment that really did happen to me (which to me has always more or less been the point—or a point—of the book) feet away from a literal lamppost that has genuinely and dramatically altered the rest of my life. Maybe it’s that the pump was primed in my religious upbringing to fixate on a Damascene revelation, but it was one of very few times in my life I’ve been struck with an absolute conviction in an unexpected moment. I’m drawn to stories that surprise me. That moment has always surpassed me.
So, the part of me that lived this experience as well as the part of me that only understands her experience by writing about it kept circling back to that epiphany and turning it over and over to understand it. And almost from the moment it happened, I knew it would take a lot of context and history to unpack it. As a result, I pretty much only ever saw this as a book I’d try to write someday.
Briefly, another answer is that this relationship, especially the factual ironies that served as backdrop for the last year of it, was the main story I’d be asked to tell any time I met a new person. The reaction was nearly always big——sometimes pity or judgment, but more often than not (especially in the right company), sympathetic and raucous laughter. The theater kid in me couldn’t resist hashing out the story that makes acquaintances who get the ironies go, “No! Shut up! You’re making that up!”
I’m not, which is one of the many reasons why I’ve never felt compelled to write fiction. But mainly I knew this was a story I could tell with some tenderness and love, and those are the stories I have always needed most to hear. I’m sure in that sense, I wrote it for myself.
CJ: I love that you've touched on tenderness and love right off the bat in this interview. As I read the book, those emotions felt like the two rails the story traveled from beginning to end. What's interesting to me about Beard is that in a lesser writer's hands, it would have been about the shock of discovery that the man you married experienced--and began to act on——same sex desire. But your title makes this ending obvious from the jump: in the gay community, a "beard" is a woman who helps conceal (knowingly or unknowingly) a male partner's homosexual behavior or identity, rooted in a time when such disguises were often a matter of literal survival for gay and queer men. To me, this book was not about the revelation. It was about the love between Kelly and Devin, the world they lived in, and what they learned about themselves over these years. The book felt to me very detailed and vivid, and I wondered what the experience of reinhabiting those years was like for you. How did you care for yourself as you wrote this book? What did you learn or what surprised you about writing it?
KFL: One of my longstanding jokes about myself is that I’m a writer with Maggie Nelson aspirations and a Hallmark Channel skill set (please understand I am a big Hallmark girlie, so all respect for them). I share that because as soon as I read The Argonauts in 2016, I knew in my bones that what I wanted to attempt was a similar kind of autotheory (using literary or philosophical/cultural theory as the lens through which I told my personal story). But what I kept coming back to with this particular story was that it just needed to mostly be a linear narrative.
I’ve shoehorned so many little theoretical and cultural studies Easter eggs throughout (they are part of the story, after all), and one of many reasons it was slow going was that I kept trying to fracture the narrative or limit the frame. At one point, I was only going to write about the last six weeks of that marriage.
I love the book Meander, Spiral, Explode by Jane Alison and pored over it regularly. But I could just never get my fractured/auto theoretical timelines to cohere into anything readable. Beyond that, the parts of the text that felt most alive to me and to beta readers were always scenes. Just straightforward, linear narrative scenes. It wasn’t until I was lucky enough to have my friend, the brilliant poet Jen Grace Stewart, do a developmental edit, that her encouragement and advice helped me permit myself to tell a straightforward linear narrative (with my little salt and pepper shakers full of lit theory to sprinkle as needed).
I knew that the danger of the linear narrative was exactly what you identify here——that the tension would be all about discovery and not about the rest of the story. I did my best to shift things (and to focus on the entirety of my experience and what I was learning at the time, not just the marriage) so that I could avoid that. My actual genius editor, Lisa Ann Cockrel, immediately understood the memo on all this too, and her help with cutting extraneous bits also kept the tension of the text shifted away from a reveal as well.
My friend Harrison Scott Key often uses the analogy that in Jurassic Park, you don’t see the whole dinosaur in the first scene. You see the dinosaur’s eye. So you never wonder “Is that a dinosaur?” You know it is. Then the questions become, “Well, what does the dinosaur look like? How did it get there? What happens to it?”
I wanted people to know from the outset, “This is a story about a divorce that occurred twenty years ago. He’s okay. I’m okay. We’re good. But here’s what happened.” Without that safety, I worried the story would fall victim to any number of things I wanted to avoid.
The primary way I emotionally handled re-entry into that time was through staying focused on the technical and craft issues that felt almost like chess problems or puzzles. I love a puzzle. And that puzzle kept the part of me that lived this experience at enough of a remove to maintain detachment and equilibrium.
Having said that, when I recorded the audiobook this summer, I pretty much sobbed from Chapter 27 through the Acknowledgments. And honestly, I’m grateful for that because having my own emotional reaction to it makes it feel true to me. And what I wanted more than anything else was to tell a story that felt emotionally and viscerally true.
As far as self-care, it helped that I have a job and a spouse and a kid and family and friends and a dog and a house that requires attention. All of that is a constant reminder that my life is bigger and deeper than my ability to complete or fail to complete a writing project. It didn’t always save me from catastrophic thinking, but it helped. I also watch, like, an embarrassing/shocking amount of television. Like. So much TV. Also therapy. Comedy podcasts. My group text. My Marco Polo writing friends. My students. All of that helped.
CJ: I think the work you did to decenter Devin’s sexuality is one of the essential ways the book focuses on Kelly. I was surprised when the book opened with teen Kelly embracing disordered eating as a way to affirm self-worth, and we stay with that thread for a while. It overlaps with Kelly’s initial meeting with Devin. Can you talk about how you determined that was the entry point for readers for the story/ies you wanted to tell?
KFL: I love this question so much. Honestly, there were some choices I made in the book that immediately felt right and definite, like, it could only be done this one way. This one (the choice to include/zoom in on my own history of disordered eating and at-the-time undiagnosed anorexia) felt more like one of many possible choices that eventually became the only right choice (as I saw it). Having said that, this has also proved the primary thing folks in my writing workshops have not universally vibed with. And I think that's due to a few things, one obviously being that no book is for everyone and my book is probably not for them if this part doesn't land. For the folks who've "gotten it" this has often been one of their favorite parts of the book. I say "gotten it" not because it's some obscure or particularly deep thing I'm doing or like I'm a teenager in 1993 driving around talking about how not everyone at their high school is deep enough to "get" how profound the Indigo Girls are (which is maybe a very real thing that 16 year old me did). But more just that this section to me is a bit more inside baseball than it might seem at first glance, and some readers are like, "Oh, shit! I see what you are doing!" And other readers are like, "Oh, honey! But you're so pretty!" Or "You're focusing on looks and bodies and that's boring/socially irresponsible." All of which I'm sure are valid reads and, of course, I appreciate the good intentions of the people who want to reassure me that I'm a valuable person by telling me I'm pretty (as if the 19-year-old me in these sections is the same as the 40-something me who wrote them), but at a certain point, I just had to decide I was going to write for the "Oh, shit! I see what you are doing!" audience and let the chips fall. This was the result.
You know how when you're in high school, and you've got a teacher who's telling you as if it's a definitive thing that Jim Conklin in The Red Badge of Courage is a Christ figure because his initials are J.C. and you're like, "That's dumb. No writer sits around thinking that much about symbolism and hitting you over the head with it." But as it turns out, that's kind of exactly what I did, for better or for worse here. And I think there were three primary motivations, especially with the "Judy Garland" and the "Scampi" chapters, both of which have become emblematic of these themes for me.
As I mentioned in the previous question, I wanted this book to be autotheory and not just a story. As queer theory has been my primary academic area of focus pretty much since Y2K, and as there was this very real (and very frequently remarked upon) coincidental physical resemblance I had/have to Judy Garland (and of my ex to Montgomery Clift), the queer theory/cultural studies bits of my brain all lit up like the Vegas Strip when I started to think about all the possibilities that could happen if I teased that out (however subtly or not) in the book. Karina Longworth is my favorite podcaster, and she's got a phenomenal episode, one I think might have actually been the first of hers I ever listened to, on You Must Remember This——it was her fifth episode, called the "Lives, Deaths, and Afterlives of Judy Garland," which does a beautiful job of pondering all the different ways that Judy Garland and the idea of her have persisted both in Hollywood culture generally and in queer culture particularly. That episode originally came out in 2014, and I would have heard it not too long after that. It planted a seed in my head that kept spreading its vines around the story. There were sources linked in her show notes that I gobbled up: Richard Dyer's "Judy Garland and Gay Men" as well as Gerald Clarke's biography Get Happy and Anne Helen Petersen's Scandals of Classic Hollywood. Add all of that to the fact that I always knew that the climax of the book would be the night I was dressed as Liza Minnelli, Judy's daughter, for Halloween on Halsted in Boystown (which is a real thing that happened, and I have pictures), and I felt like that could potentially make for this perfect little autotheoretical loop that could shape the whole book, especially once I shifted it (which happened around 2021) to being more about the concept of the "beard" as a cultural trope and less just about the accidental (if darkly hilarious) ironies of the lived experience.
I realized, also around 2021, that this was actually a book about reading——the ways we read or impose narratives onto people's bodies as well as the ways we attempt to make our bodies and lives "readable" or "translatable" to others. Along with that, I was really obsessed with this idea of "conversion" in all its varied implications--conversion as a religious transition ("I once was lost but now I'm found"), conversion in a chemical sense ("convert a liquid to a gas"), as well as conversion in reference to the kind of therapy my ex-husband was once subjected to. While there's absolutely no direct parallel between the two experiences (my experience of disordered eating and his in conversion therapy), there was that conceptual, connected throughline of the desire to be made new that I found really interesting. Because ultimately, I think there's something so tragically hopeful and perhaps so particularly evangelical or American (or both) about that desire to be re-made. The perennial tabula rasa of it all. I recount my addiction to makeover shows in a couple places in the book. There's also a scene where I zip up my first pair of size 0 pants, and I remember thinking, as I admired myself in the mirror, "You can make yourself into anything at all!" I think I wanted the shared quality of that doomed and damaging desire for conversion to be a thing readers could perceive as connecting me and my ex, but also just to help them see, "Look at these poor sweet earnest hopeful kids. Bless their hearts. They were trying so fucking hard."
Connected with both paragraphs above, I wanted to write about performativity, and to explicitly link the world of theater I grew up in with the white American evangelical South, both of which had some BIG ideas about bodies and what they should be and do.
CJ: I absolutely want to return to the representation of North and South in the book, but first, let’s stay with entertainment culture. I appreciate that you referenced how much the book connects to old Hollywood and how that in and of itself is a kind of queer(ed) signifier. In the introduction, you give us a litany of “beard” representations in culture, from SNL to 30 Rock to Parks and Rec, each time noting how the storyline seems to suggest these women married to gay men deserve their comeuppance. I remember when I heard you read from this intro at AWP, you described the night Elizabeth Taylor saved Montgomery Clift’s life by plucking each of his shattered teeth from his throat. This moment serves as the diving board into the story. You suggest perhaps you were the Liz and Devin the Monty. That you saved each other’s lives. But the last line here is “But sometimes I also wonder: what if I was the teeth?” It’s a moment that steals my breath. I’d love to hear a little bit about why you offer such a specific and developed intro to the book.
KFL: Well, for this we're right back at Karina (Longworth). Another early episode (also from 2014) of You Must Remember This called "Liz and Monty" highlighted that relationship and made me remember the story of the car wreck (and again, planted a seed that kind of hung out and germinated for a while until I began drafting this version of the intro in 2021).
In the book, I talk about my relationship with the reference librarian in my small Mississippi Delta hometown, the first out gay man I ever knew. He used to tease me because I checked out Montgomery Clift (and Marlon Brando and Laurence Olivier and Rock Hudson) biographies so frequently. He passed away several years ago, and I've always wondered if one of the reasons I love Karina's podcast so much is that it reminds me of that time when I was a lonely theater kid in 7th grade and that library (and librarian) and those books brought me solace.
Although I definitely clocked the similarity in appearance between my ex husband and Monty Clift literally from the first time I ever met my ex, the Liz Taylor-to-me pipeline was less direct. (Ha!) But then as I started to frame the whole book and remembered that I had written my first-ever research essay in college on "mendacity" (or lying) in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (which, again, if you know the plot of that play and of my life is another...striking...irony), and I knew I wanted to dial up that Maggie the Cat to Brick analogy even more. I also read several biographies of Elizabeth Taylor over the last ten or so years, and was really struck by her activism and advocacy on behalf of her friends who were gay men, and the ways she translated that love for her friends into concrete support for AIDS research and policy change. It struck me that actions like those were one of the beautiful things about being a "beard"——to provide cover or shelter, to protect and defend.
Having said all that, besides de-centering Devin's sexuality, I also didn't want to center myself as "straight savior" (analogous I suppose to "white savior") mainly just because that wasn't what happened at all. I would have hit so many false notes I can hardly count them. But we did have a beautiful ending of our relationship (which has only gotten better in the last few years) that really did save us both, and I am the one who left. So I wanted to say honestly yes, I did leave, and also, yes, sometimes I indulge this fantasy that I saved him not just by leaving but by leaving with love.
And yet, what interested me way more even than finding ways to include my Tennessee Williams and Old Hollywood bits and bobs, was riddling out my own complicity not just in the relationship but in the pervasive and destructive heteronormative systems that served as the context for our relationship. And any honest retelling of that story has to acknowledge that I served as the ultimate culmination of years of programming and conditioning that told him that the only way to be happy and to be whole and to be loved by God and to experience belonging and care and to be worthy of community were to be married to a woman. By leaving him, the main thing I ultimately saved him from was the constant, paralyzing guilt and obligation and daily pressure that came along with being married to me. Thus, I was in a very real sense the thing that was choking him.
Like so many of my favorite lines in the book, the "what if I was the teeth?" line came to me in the middle of the night. I don't know if I had a dream about it or if I went to sleep thinking about that story of the car wreck or what prompted it, but my husband (current/second) can attest that I sat up so fast the night it came to me that I yanked the covers off him——it was winter in Minnesota, so this is no small thing——and then was so frantic to get the phrase down before I forgot it, I grabbed my phone, opened my Notes app, typed it in, and only then did I fix the covers.
But that was a huge moment for me and a huge shift in momentum towards the version of the book that's coming out now. I knew almost as soon as I had that vision of it that it would more or less be one of the central questions of the book. And having people respond to it so positively really reinforced that.
I could say a lot more about the whole intro, but I'll save that for later. I'll just say for now that I it's important to be that people know I think Saturday Night Live's "The Actress" is one of the top three funniest things ever (which is one of the reasons I know it so well), and my friend Chris Stedman and I text each other "Jared, what are you doing?! Not with my godson!" (or for short, "JARED! GODSON!") minimally once a month, and I giggle every time.
CJ: The North and the South—both as settings and as ideologically-laden ideas—are vivid presences throughout the book. Both Kelly and Devin grow up in communities of faith in Mississippi and Oklahoma respectively. They visit Chicago for their honeymoon, of which you write, "In Chicago—a place we both love—we feel fresh, hopeful." Over the course of the marriage Kelly and Devin leave the South for Chicago. What strikes me somewhat about that transition is that the chapters that take place in Chicago center on how both Kelly and Devin seemed to find themselves there–or, to use your earlier words, how they made themselves "new." Kelly in particular comes so alive in the Chicago chapters as she pursues her graduate studies of concepts of masculinity in Walt Whitman's work. This is a very open-ended question but I'd love your thoughts on how you felt location acted as an unspeaking character in the book, and how you Kelly and Devin end up in conversation with those places in the arc of their story.
KFL: For real, if you were to try to write a question as a love letter, this would be it! I’m so glad this came through. I think, to a large extent, this was one of those themes that organically just rose to the surface as the book came together.
There’s a line in the chapter right before we get married about how Chicago was a place that rose out of the plains, was built and burned and then built again (in so many words). And this summer, a little out of nowhere, when I was reading that for the audiobook, my throat clenched on that line. And it took several takes for me to read it without crying.
I had no idea it would hit me like that. And I think to some extent it was sympathy for the Devin and Kelly of the early book, who are hoping so desperately that this bustling, alive place can save them (and the knowledge that it did and didn’t save them, depending on how you view it).
But also Whitman is still so near and dear to my heart. Trying to read his work aloud, especially, “To die is different from what anyone supposed, and luckier” was like poking a bruise, not in the sense of it hitting a wounded place so much as a tender one. I just love Whitman so effing much. Me and Bram Stoker both! And there’s nothing more Walt Whitman than a city, especially a city with the conventionally masculine and visceral descriptors Chicago has often been given, the big shoulders, hog butcher, etc.
As far as place more generally functioning as character as much as backdrop, the part of me that grew up in Mississippi lit classes just being fire-hose doused with Faulkner and Welty an
Wright and McCullers and Williams and so many others is like, “Yeah, that tracks.” Flannery O’Connor (sidebar: I wrote my 10th grade research essay on the grotesque in “Good Country People”) says that the South is “Christ-haunted,” and I’m sure that’s true, but what feels truer to me as a perennial ex-pat is that I’m “South-haunted.” And that haunting feels somatic as much as anything. I was asked some questions recently by the brilliant Mississippi author Lauren Rhoades, and I compared returning to Mississippi (for me) to remembering you are a creature with gills who’s turned amphibious out of necessity, but Mississippi is my water.
All of which is to say I think the thinness of both places, the lingering bruise or the haunt of them, was necessary to convey if I was going to tell any kind of true embodied story of myself.
CJ: I sense an idea behind the ideas in your response here, so I want to see if we can tease them out a bit. Your response reminded me of a Donald Hall poetics essay called “Poetry and Ambition,” in which he writes, “For almost every poet it is necessary to live in exile before returning home.” He means this pretty literally, like poets should go live in Europe for a minute, but I’ve always looked at this through a lens of understanding how many ways people can be at home and experiencing exile at the same time–exile from desire, exile from feeling home in the body, exile from spirituality. A theme of Beard, if I’m stepping way back from Kelly and Devin’s story, is about resolving involuntary exiles and finding home in the self. I’m curious to know how you respond to that framing of this story.
KFL: Several things come to mind, one of which is that it makes me realize that so many of the people I've bonded with the quickest and deepest have shared my sense of being exiled in some way——physical, spiritual, geographic, social, etc. And I wonder sometimes if there's something energetic in collective exile like that——almost like a pheromone pull or something. It also makes me think about how the therapeutic approaches that have worked best for me have involved some concept of narrativizing and welcoming back exiled or wounded pieces of ourselves.
I spent several years after my divorce in Internal Family Systems therapy, the central premise of which is that the goal of therapy is to bring the exiles home (in IFS, exiles refers to any piece of ourselves that was formed around a time when we were wounded or shamed--the exile is the piece of us still stuck in that time waiting to be heard in order to be healed). The goal of IFS is to come into a place where all the different parts of ourselves that have been formed in order to protect those exiled bits of our hearts (in IFS speak: managers and firefighters) and can instead be led by what IFS refers to as "self." Self, in IFS terminology, is identified by the 8 C's: calm, curiosity, clarity, compassion, confidence, courage, creativity, and connectedness.
Pardon what sounds like a pitch for IFS. It really was great for me, but other therapeutic approaches have also been great for me, and one of the things I appreciate most about my current therapist is that she's as allergic as I am to any "this one approach is the only true approach" thinking, which just smacks of fundamentalism and purity culture to me, and I have no space left for those ways of thinking.
When it comes to the old idea of taking what amounts to a Victorian gentleman's "Grand Tour" in order to arrive at insight, I think my best counter for that would be the absolutely perfect SNL skit from a few years back. Adam Sandler plays the owner of a travel agency called Romano Tours that specializes in taking people to Italy and the skit itself is an ad for that company. The concept of the ad is essentially that Sandler's character is trying to help lower people's "Under the Tuscan Sun" style expectations of how they'll be a different person when they get to Europe. This part makes me laugh so hard. He says, "You're still going to be you on vacation. If you are sad where you are, and then you get on a plane to Italy, the you in Italy will be the same sad you from before. Just in a new place. Does that make sense? There’s a lot a vacation can do. Help you unwind. See some different looking squirrels. But it cannot fix deeper issues like how you behave in group settings or your general baseline mood. That’s a job for incremental lifestyle changes sustained over time...I want to be very clear about what we can do for you. We can take you on a hike. We cannot turn you into someone who likes hiking. We can take you to the Italian Rivera. We cannot make you feel comfortable in a bathing suit. We can provide the zip line. We cannot give you the ability to say 'Whee!' and mean it. You’re not your sister."
My classic example of exactly this principle is that I was once lucky enough to do a teaching exchange in Scotland. For one of the weekend side trips, we went to the Isle of Iona and visited the Abbey there. Historically, it's been viewed as this sacred "thin" space where the veil between other dimensions and ours are pared back and you receive visions and dream dreams. Unfortunately, the weekend I was there, I had a horrible sinus infection——fever, motion sickness, constant nose-blowing, mouth-breathing. Intellectually, I kept telling myself, "Wow. This is magical. So cool. You're in Iona. WOW. This is magical. So cool." Emotionally, I had nothing. Nothing. I was just an emotionally numb, mouth-breathing little snot-bucket whose only desire was to climb into my bed back in Jackson, Mississippi, with a Ken Burns documentary on constant rotation.
I think there's something real about the things you can learn in physical exile or at least in a kind of defamiliarized/unfamiliar atmosphere——going to other places, seeing new things——different looking squirrels as the SNL skit suggests. I don't think I've ever gotten on a plane that five minutes into actual lift-off some part of my obsessive little brain hasn't unclenched a bit because all the things that felt like such massive overwhelming emergencies back on land suddenly don't. You're in the damn sky! Who cares about Strategic Planning or your kid's dance recital or credit card debt in the damn sky, for the love of Pete?! But I think there's something much more powerful in intentional and mindful approaches to healing our own exiled parts (thus finding a home in the self) no matter where our bodies are than in eating a hot dog in Times Square or a croissant in Paris, if that makes sense. Travel is no automatic guarantee of spiritual insight.
CJ: Thanks for expanding on those ideas. I’m reminded that while the act of writing can have therapeutic outcomes, it’s not therapy–therapy is therapy–and so I’m thinking that Adam Sandler skit could be just as much about the impact of writing a memoir as it is taking a vacation. Telling the story doesn’t change you, but it does put the story outside of you in a way that reflects how we engage in talk therapy. And that, I think, points back to something you said at the top of this conversation, “He’s okay, I’m okay.” I worry that folks reading memoir don’t always see that division because they don’t see the therapeutic work that occurred alongside the storytelling; they just experience the story as it was lived. I want to transition from here into a discussion of villains and victims. In life those categories aren’t as vividly separate as they are in stories. One thing I love about Beard is that Kelly never seems like a victim, and I don’t get the sense she ever regards herself that way. Even using the word “victim” here feels so loaded–maybe because we’re attuned to call it “survivor” in most contexts. Kelly does more than survive. I know firsthand she thrives. Can you talk a bit about how Kelly’s perception of herself changes from beginning to the end of the book in this framing?
KFL: Love this, and I have to add another insight from my wonderful therapist. The first time I ever met with her several years ago, I talked a lot about all the possible reasons why I was feeling dysregulated at the time. I posited several possible theories. My dad was/still is a therapist, and I’ve always been drawn to people who liked to analyze behavior and its causes, so I love those sorts of conversations. Makes my life feel like a show about which I’ve got fan theories.
Anyway, towards the end of our session, my therapist put her arms on her desk and looked at me really compassionately and said, “You have so many genuinely wise ideas about yourself, but I don’t think your body believes any of them.”
I mean. You want to talk about a mic drop. That was one.
From my perspective, the head and the body are emblematic of that divide between telling a true story (i.e. breaking it down into its constituent parts, choosing the points of entry and departure, selecting some details, omitting others, performing the intellectual exercise of riddling out why things happened and where motifs arise) and doing the work as a human being to integrate the events of your lived experience into compassion and clarity.
One is primarily cerebral and often externally performed. The other is messier, more embodied, more internal.
But it’s undeniable that it feels so redemptive and good to tell a story that feels true. And if anything, the reason Kelly thrived then (which is pretty inescapable in the story) was English class. There were ideas and stories and poems that kept her tied to a world outside herself, where there was beauty and hope and something to be interested in for its own sake.
I think what English class did for me (the Kelly who wrote the book and the Kelly who lived it as well as the Kelly who’s a character of sorts within it) was to give me something that felt so alive and transcendent that the stuff that used to eat me up (like the way I looked or how I was perceived) was easier to shake off. I learned who I was, what was absolutely necessary for me, and what I could let go.
But more than anything else, in every case——Kelly in 2003 Boystown and Kelly in 2025 Minnesota——Kelly survives and thrives because she has kind people. Growing up I felt weird for being smart in the way I was, and growing up where I grew up, there were only a handful of people who liked me anyway. But as I’ve aged, much like a snowball or a bit of lint in a dryer, I’ve rolled around enough to pick up the same kind of sweet needs as me and that’s the main difference between me at 48 and me at 19.
CJ: We’ve barely discussed Devin in the course of this interview, and I think that’s another testament to this story’s navigation through Kelly’s journey. It would be easy to call Devin the villain of this story. That’s not how I felt at the end of reading the book, though. In Western storytelling traditions, we expect an antagonist. We expect conflict. While this book does have its share of conflict, it’s one in which the two main characters both exit the story having experienced a kind of personal redemption–an outcome that rests firmly in the writer’s hands. Can you talk about who or what you think the villains of this story are, and how you wanted readers to view the book’s conflict?
KFL: First of all, I want to highlight the fact that the beard trope and its frequent companion, the “hag” trope, can’t exist without bumping up against others. There were three I had in mind as I wrote (though I’m sure there are hundreds of others I’m not aware of having invoked): the tragic gay man, the gay best friend, and the gay villain.
I am (jokingly) explicit about naming one gay villain (the mean boy who gave me a Barbara Bush haircut as my life was crumbling) in the story. But if past is precedent and the circumstances were right, I’m sure he and I would eventually have bonded over drinks at some point and all would have been well.
I’ve always been resistant to the idea of protagonists and antagonists, and always avoided media I found to be too reliant on conflict as a plot device, especially when that conflict feels forced or unnecessary.
I think there’s a recent surge of shows: Somebody Somewhere, Ted Lasso, Shrinking, etc, that certainly contain conflict, but the resolution of it is always surprising and makes those shows feel especially fresh and alive. Somebody Somewhere, in particular, blew my mind.
If there is a villain in my story, I suppose it’s shame, and the systems that use shame to silence and isolate us and keep us afraid. If there’s a hero in the story, it’s that little resilient thing in all of us that refuses to be silenced or to give up hope that connection and love are possible. Devin and I have both learned to listen to that voice and let it blossom over the years. And I can’t imagine a world in which I’d cast him as villain.
CJ: What advice do you have for someone setting out to write a memoir? What lessons did you feel you learned the hard way?
KFL: Oh, man. So many potential answers here. I think the main one that comes to mind, to revert back to an earlier answer, is to write for the people who immediately get it, the ones who say, “Oh, shit! I get what you’re doing here!”
Sometime in 2018, I spent a two hour drive on a phone call with my friend Zach bemoaning how stuck I felt with the book and airing all the various concerns I had about different critiques or advice beta readers had for me, much of which would have required me to become a different person or writer to enact.
Finally, at the end of the conversation, Zach just said, “Write it for me. Fuck those people. Just write it for me.” And what he meant was some version of the classic writing advice to tell your story imagining that a kind person who is desperate to hear it and enthralled by what you say is sitting across the table from you.
Any bits of play or risk or cleverness that are in my book are largely due to that approach and if I had to sum up the single quality that all the folks in my Acknowledgements share, it’s that they were my “Oh, shit!” people.
So, I guess that’s my advice? Write it for them and don’t spend years (like I did) trying to write for people who will never like your book. It’s okay to let those people not like it. And that doesn’t mean don’t take good faith criticism or feedback seriously. But learn to suss out the bad faith critique as well as the well-meaning critique that just isn’t for you.
Cling to the “Oh, shit!!” people. Fuck the others.
Kelly’s Suggested Reading and Viewing List
Alison, Jane. Meander. Spiral. Explode. Catapult, 2019.
Bell, Matt. Refuse to Be Done. Penguin Random House, 2022.
Clarke, Gerald. Get Happy: The Life of Judy Garland. Penguin Random House, 2020.
Dyer, Richard. Heavenly Bodies: Film Stars and Society. Routledge, 1986.
Karr, Mary. The Art of Memoir. Harper Perennial, 2015.
Longworth, Karina. You Must Remember This podcast.
Nelson, Maggie. The Argonauts. Graywolf Press, 2016.
O’Connor, Flannery. “Good Country People.” A Good Man Is Hard to Find. Harcourt Brace, 1955.
Petersen, Anne Helen. Scandals of Classic Hollywood. Penguin Random House, 2014.
“Romano Tours.” Saturday Night Live. Season 44, Episode 19.
Salesses, Matthew. Craft in the Real World. Catapult, 2021.
Shrinking. Apple TV, 2023.
Somebody Somewhere. HBO Max, 2022.
Ted Lasso. Apple TV, 2020.
“The Actress.” Saturday Night Live. Season 44, Episode 18.
Williams, Allison K. Seven Drafts. Woodhall Press, 2021.
Williams, Tennessee. Cat on a Hot Tin Roof. 1955.
Kelly Foster Lundquist teaches writing at North Hennepin Community College in Brooklyn Park, MN. Originally from Mississippi, Lundquist has taught writing all over the United States (Boston, Chicago, Mississippi, Seattle, California, etc), as well as in Slovakia and Scotland. Her poetry and nonfiction can be seen in many places, including Villain Era, Last Syllable Lit, Whale Road Review, and Image Journal. Her work has been nominated for a 2024 Best of the Net Award as well as a Pushcart Prize. She is the recipient of grants from the Minnesota State Arts Board as well as the Central Minnesota Arts Board. Her book Beard: A Memoir of a Marriage (Eerdmans) debuted in October 2025. She lives in a little red house in Minnesota with her spouse and daughter.
