I Wanted to Tell a Different Story

Lydi Conklin discusses cancel culture, queer identity, and trauma responses with Anna Marie Cain.

By Anna Marie CainDecember 18, 2025

• Fiction

• Gender & Sexuality

IT’S A SURREAL PLEASURE to hear a song for the first time and feel like its words speak directly to you: like you’re hearing them through the studio window, or the artist themselves has invited you through the side door and backstage. Maybe you even think you know that artist—the “real” them—because you’ve spent so much time dissecting their lyrics and social media posts. Their art, and often their persona, becomes congruent with your body and mind; your loyalty cannot be questioned. This zealous devotion is how one advances from loving the art to laying the foundation for willful ignorance embedded within stan culture. Certain artists can, to certain fans, do seemingly whatever they want. After all, they don’t feel like a stranger to us; their work is part of who we are.

Songs of No Provenance (2025), Lydi Conklin’s first novel, doesn’t guide readers gently into the realm of these tenuous—and, taken to extremes as they are in the book, abusive—power dynamics; instead, it shoves them directly into the protagonist’s messy and destructive ways. Joan has teetered on the edge of “making it” for 20 years. Her sapphic love songs have cultivated a small but rabid fan base of mainly queer women; the fact that Joan herself is actually straight is a sidebar. When, in the book’s opening, she receives bad news right before a gig, something snaps: she pulls one of her most loyal fans, a woman named Carlotta, onstage, where she sexually assaults and pisses all over her. Fleeing the city, Joan ends up at a small arts camp in rural Virginia, looking to make money before disappearing for good. Yet there she finds herself drawn to the much younger, nonbinary teacher and comic artist Sparrow. As the two grow closer, Joan begins to confront the true, largely toxic nature of her relationships to art and other people.

It may go without saying that Joan is not likable—but she is interesting. That’s an important distinction: Conklin certainly never lets their protagonist off the hook yet is careful to create a character who isn’t purely a villain. Real villains often don’t think they’re the bad guy. Violence can be subjective, the experience differing drastically between the perpetrator and the individual it is inflicted upon—a reality that makes a lot of people uncomfortable. Conklin knows this well and is not afraid to make their readers uncomfortable, because, as we discussed over Zoom earlier this year, they know the subsequent conversation is crucial. Accordingly, Songs of No Provenance never forgets that open stage and studio doors go both ways. Conklin’s remarkable debut asks what happens when an artist we think we know and love comes into our life and hurts us in potentially irreparable ways, just because they can—sometimes, even, because we allow them to.

¤

ANNA MARIE CAIN: Most of the conversations you’ve had so far for Songs haven’t mentioned Joan’s peeing fetish. That surprised me considering it’s a massive part of the story. Do you think the interviewers just didn’t know how to talk about it?

LYDI CONKLIN: I feel like people are afraid of it or something.

Truthfully, I didn’t know how to approach it at first, but it can’t be ignored. It also feels purposeful that Joan doesn’t seek out other urophiles. She seems to surprise hookups with this blast of urine—no discussion beforehand of any water sports. Then I look at what she did to Carlotta onstage and her experience with Sparrow; in neither case is there discussion of consent. Has that always been the dynamic in her sexual relationships?

I think so. I don’t know if she asks for active consent in the way that she should because she is a bit feral, but I do think if she was engaging with someone else who was into the kink, it probably wouldn’t do it for her. It must be this aspect of shame and shock that she’s getting off on.

I wonder if Joan realizes it’s a pattern. She seems to have a bit of a blind spot for herself (as all of us can).

She has a lot of blind spots.

It’s a testament to your writing that the book begins with this horrible act—and the revelations about her behavior and compulsions keep coming—but I find myself still, at moments, rooting for Joan. I even caught myself feeling upset with people who held her to account … which did not make me feel great! It’s the age-old question: Do we separate the artist and the art? Where is the boundary past which we can no longer love art because of its creator? The Diddy case finished this year, and the amount of support he has gotten—despite graphic videos and numerous testimonies about his actions—is terrifying.

Totally. And I think that’s part of why I was so interested in writing about this subject in this moment, because it used to be that you didn’t really see the horrible things that the artists you loved did. Like, William Faulkner was racist, but he wasn’t making racist tweets, so you didn’t have to think about it [the same way]. Even with Michael Jackson—that all happened before artists’ lives were so easily accessible. But nowadays you can hear from people who would have had zero voice in the past. They can go on Twitter (like Carlotta does) and share their experience. It’s harder now to separate the art from the artist, to still love an artist who’s done something unforgivable.

Because it’s almost impossible not to know what they’ve done. Plus, there’s this voice in your head going, “What does it say about me if I like this?”

And the world is such a trash fire that if you’re going to come out of the woodwork, it’s going to be now.

Right. Louis C. K. only took a year off, Bill Cosby started touring when he got out of prison, Kevin Spacey was just honored at Cannes—it’s like the Year of the Terrible Man Comeback. Honestly, it makes you wonder: with all the lip service we give to the concept of “canceling,” can you think of anyone who actually has been canceled?

People will disappear for a time and then reappear with stories in The New Yorker or specials on TV or whatnot. A “canceled” man I know of is writing a novel about a canceled man.

Of course he is. Speaking of shame—kinks play a vital role in the narrative. The inciting incident is a very literal, public outing of Joan’s kink, plus a sexual assault and public humiliation of one of her hardcore fans.

Yeah … it’s hard to come back from that.

But then there’s Sparrow, and they’re such a compassionate and warm person. After they discover what Joan has done, they still hold such a deep level of consideration for her actions—Sparrow even uses their own art to explore it. Do you think that they would’ve made that effort if they hadn’t been a big fan of Joan’s music?

That’s such a good question. I was really interested in how this moment of harm and assault can be refracted through multiple perspectives. The internet has one idea, and Joan has her idea about what happened—then that changes, then the internet’s idea about it changes. Sparrow’s [perspective on] the incident changes over time too; Carlotta’s reaction is different from what anyone expects. Even if it’s undeniably a terrible act of assault, the harm caused could be interpreted in many ways, through many lenses. I think Sparrow’s willingness to attempt to understand is definitely colored by their admiration of Joan the musician, even though they’ve grown out of the fandom a bit.

Carlotta’s reaction was certainly unexpected. She even thanks Joan for the assault, crediting it with helping her find sobriety. Admittedly, it was difficult to discern whether she was serious or if it was a ruse, but it made her return later in the narrative feel dangerous.

If something traumatic happens to you, it may mean different things at different times of your life. Of course, trauma could have devastating effects, but it also could turn your life around; there could be points where you think of it differently, or you don’t really accept what happened as “an assault.” And when you revisit something later in life, you may be like: Wait a minute. That was really fucked up. So many systems are in place to keep us from understanding the harm that’s been caused to us—the patriarchy, white supremacy, transphobia, other powerful systems of thought—and push us into accepting all kinds of harm as “normal” or benign.

In other words, we’re told we should be grateful for what we get—and shut up! Carlotta’s response adds a critical layer to the lie of the “perfect victim.”

Exactly: I wanted Carlotta to be in this ambiguous place when she appears, where perhaps she’s fooling herself into believing what happened was a good thing. Obviously, Carlotta getting sober was a positive change, but that doesn’t mean what happened to bring it about was good or right in any way.

It was sexual assault.

Yes, and dealing with that kind of trauma can move in waves. It’s not a one-size-fits-all response.

There definitely need to be more mainstream conversations about the nuances of trauma responses. Add in the complex relationships between some victims and their abusers, like the power dynamic in your book, and it might take years to fully understand what you’ve been through.

Or it’s too scary to accept that that’s what happened to you. Too sad and hard. Nuanced trauma takes a while to process; some people never get there.

This brings me to the protectiveness I felt over Sparrow as they were becoming intimate with someone who has done so much bad.

I don’t think Sparrow and Joan are going to have a relationship. I mean, the end is ambiguous, but I do feel like that engagement was important for Joan. I think she’s going to have to go off and figure the rest of her shit out alone.

Do you think Joan’s affinity for songs of no provenance is reflective of her own feelings of irrelevance and jealousy?

Yeah, I do. I think her toxic orientation toward art has pushed her to do this horrible thing and harm people that she loves. She knows she can’t go, but she is such an art monster—music is her life; she’s pushed everything else out. So it’s too upsetting not to have it around at all. I think the songs of no provenance are a sort of bridge; she can still love music if the ego is stripped from it.

Joan’s sexual orientation is a moving target. From presenting as a fake lesbian for her fans, passively letting her friend-mentee Paige have sex with her because it “seems easier,” to exploring a queer identity when she meets the right person at her lowest moment, the book does an excellent job of reminding us how bendable the rules of attraction, not to mention a person’s private and public personas, can be. Do you think we get things wrong, or perhaps misunderstand, when it comes to concepts like queerbaiting or appropriation?

I feel like “queerbaiting” is a subcategory under the larger umbrella of “appropriation.” When I started writing this novel, I was interested in my anger and resentment around queerbaiting. At the time, a lot of the books that were winning awards and were about queer people were written by people who at least appeared to be cishet authors. Their books felt like a “safer” version of queerness: “Don’t worry, a straight person wrote this—you don’t have to be too creeped out.” And eerie patterns began to emerge from these cishet-authored narratives of queerness. Everywhere I looked, I’d see queer narratives, books, and films that ended in suicide.

The “kill your gays” trope is a classic.

Not that suicide isn’t an issue that queer people deal with. But it becomes problematic when that’s the only narrative being told, over and over. And when cishet people are comforted by that narrative, it’s distressing. So, I decided to write about a cishet character who is creating queer narratives because I kind of hated her. I wanted to dig into her and have her be a troubled person.

As I continued to write Joan, though, what happened is what always happens when I write about someone who I’m angry at or who harmed me, even if it’s in an abstract way: they start to have humanity and become more complicated than I thought they were. With Joan, I realized she’s not cis or het—she’s just at the beginning of her journey with that stuff. I did not want that to be true. I wanted to tell a different story, but her complex gender and sexuality stuff was true. It made me have more empathy for people who are accused of queerbaiting: a lot of the time, they may be queer or trans in some way and they don’t even know it yet (maybe they’ll never know it), or maybe it’s a small part of themselves and this is the only way they can—or get to—face it. There are definitely people who queerbait in bad faith, or who have good intentions yet do harmful work. But writing this book also made me realize that there are people who are “queerbaiting” because it’s actually the first step to seeing something in themselves.

Oh, wow—Joan’s queerness was an organic discovery?

Yup.

You bring up an interesting point about queerbaiting: there’s totally a difference between somebody playing a queer character beautifully, maybe even as an act of unconscious discovery, and somebody using the illusion of queerness to gain an audience. Originally, queerbaiting was a marketing ploy, to draw us in and then never actually deliver a queer storyline. But there’s clearly been an evolution of its meaning.

It’s interesting—the conversation between Joan and Sparrow about trans identity … Obviously, everyone should feel open to do what they want—it creates a more open atmosphere for people to experiment and spar—but that can also become disrespectful. Gender isn’t a joke or a lighthearted game. I don’t think it’s great to enforce gender norms, obviously, but it can be really frustrating when cis people say that gender doesn’t matter. If you’re trans, gender may be the most important thing in your life. I see both perspectives, so I wanted to put the two characters together and make them fight about it.

You’re really adept at exploring shifting senses of identity. You’ve personally worked through it, and you gave Joan similar space to investigate.

I’m so interested in the process of uncovering identity … I knew I was attracted to women when I was nine, and I have dealt with gender dysphoria since I was a little child, but it took so much longer to uncover my gender because of the culture around it. Other people’s coming-out stories and journeys are very different.

I have to talk about the ending: Joan has developed as a teacher, her sexual identity has unraveled, the assault has gone public, and she’s even begun to address her culpability … and in the final moments of her last class, you see the joy she has over her student’s progress—and then Georgina, the school administrator, touches Joan’s wrist. It was such a gentle way of telling her, and the reader, that it’s over.

Oh—thank you. I kept going back and forth: is this too subtle? But I felt like people could understand what was happening in that moment by just the littlest touch.

The book begins with such aggressive physicality, so there was something really special about ending it with a soft, simple touch; it felt like an acknowledgment of a journey taken by somebody who, hopefully, grew.

You know, I think she did.

¤

Lydi Conklin is a writer, cartoonist, and assistant professor of fiction at Vanderbilt University.

¤

Featured image: Photo of Lydi Conklin by Emily April Allen.