An Interview with Jill Dearman: Author of The Uncanny Case of Gilles/Jeannette

Jill Dearman is one of the most innovative noir authors writing on sexuality and gender today. I have covered her excellent novels The Great Bravura and Jazzed on this site before, so I was thrilled to receive an advance copy of her latest novella The Uncanny Case of Gilles/Jeannette. In this tale, Jill reimagines Robert Louis Stevenson’s classic Gothic novella Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde into a queer gender-swapped tale of transitioning.

Ella’s partner Simon (formerly Simone) is transitioning. While Ella is supportive, she misses the woman that she fell in love with. Around the same time, Ella inherits an old inn from her grandmother in Hudson, New York. At the inn she discovers a diary from 1933, telling the story of Jeannette, daughter of the original innkeeper. Jeannette has romantic feelings for Dahlia, who has rebuffed her on the grounds that she is only interested in men. Jeannette takes a novel approach to overcome the dilemma, she decides to become a man, but this unleashes an increasingly dark side of her character and… well, I won’t say anymore to avoid spoilers.

The Uncanny Case of Gilles/Jeannette is a gripping, twisted tale, brilliantly rendered by Dearman, that should appeal to anyone interested in sexuality and gothic fantasy. I was delighted when Jill agreed to talk to me about writing the novella.

Interviewer: Where did you first get the idea of framing a gender transition narrative around the Jekyll and Hyde premise?

Much like the way Robert Louis Stevenson spoke of Jekyll and Hyde coming to him in a fevered dream, Gilles/Jeannette came to me in a sort of waking dream. It happened on March 3^rd and 4^th, 2020, a week or so before New York City was about to go into COVID lockdown. I wrote it out in bed in a mad rush, as a detailed treatment, much like one would do for a screenplay. I had lived (as had my parents and their parents) in New York City my whole life, but was transitioning to moving upstate to the Hudson Valley with my child. We were going upstate on weekends and planning to move up permanently in six months for the school year. But on these early days of March there was no official crisis yet, just incredible tension in the air.

I thought about where to set the story – having previously set all my fiction in New York City – and the idea of placing it in the Hudson Valley really set me on fire. I’ve always loved the gothic trope in which a character from the so-called “civilized” city moves up to the country and finds themselves not just “in the wild,” but face to face with the wild animal within.

Since Jekyll and Hyde is about transformation, it seemed so exciting to explore the transformation from female to male, so I came up with the framing story first. A young Brooklynite lesbian inherits an old Inn and in the basement she finds a diary filled with a horror tale from the past. As she reads about the dual characters from the past, she herself is dealing with the complexities of a changing relationship, as her lesbian lover is transitioning to male.

And to add to the “uncanny” throughline, we left New York City for the Hudson Valley just twelve days after I wrote the bones of the story down, never to return! That had not been the plan, but that’s what occurred.  And then at the end of the following year, my child came out as genderfluid and took the name “Phoenix.” Phoenix ended up doing the cover art for the novella when it was complete! Phoenix’s journey was not one I expected, but this is not the first time for me that life has imitated art – a story comes to me and something in real life mirrors it.

Interviewer: Has the story of the Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde always been an important one to you emotionally, and how do you rate the work of Robert Louis Stevenson?

Oh absolutely. Both of Stevenson’s characters are so vivid and real; they are separate and yet the same. We all have our inner demons and our public persona. When I was in college, my thesis project was on “the double.” I often teach the prose poem “Borges and I” on my first day of writing class at New York University. I do like the short works that are included in the Penguin edition of the novella too. But Stevenson as a character himself is who I find truly fascinating. I include a brief author’s note in Uncanny which quotes the homophobic Labouchere Amendment passed in the U.K. the year before Jekyll and Hyde’s publication. There has long been curiosity about Stevenson’s sexuality, and that certainly stoked the fires for me as I wrote my novella.

Interviewer: The Uncanny Case of Gilles/Jeannette jumps between two timeframes as it alternates between the story of Ella and Simon and Jeannette and Dahlia. Why did you pick the present day and the 1933 setting to tell this transition love story?

The idea of a present-day character discovering a diary from the past was always in my mind. And I really wanted to explore the moment we are living in – in which trans lives that were once hidden are being revealed – and how polarized the reactions are. Of course, I support all trans people, especially kids, but like Robert Louis Stevenson, I am also a Scorpio – ha! – and am the most interested in the complexities of sexuality. I wanted to explore the subject in a physical as well as an emotional way.

And as for the 1933 story, my previous novel Jazzed, was set in the 1920s, and the novel before that, The Great Bravura, in the 1940s. The first half of the American century has a lot of juice for me, probably because of my parents and their strong association with those times. I also had a feeling that writing about the Great Depression would be fascinating, thus I was pulled to the 1930s. And then lo and behold when I started to research Hudson in that era, it turned out it was known for vice and gambling – much more debaucherous than it is now. And of course I loved that! Add to this, the fact that the town itself had something of a split personality then – the gamblers and prostitutes on one side and the Quakers on the other. Doing historical research to truly capture an era is one of my favorite activities, so I was really lit too while writing. Add to that that there is a specific bit of racist and criminal history from Hudson circa 1933, that I felt even more compelled to explore the labyrinth of connections through fiction.

Interviewer: When I see the name Dahlia, I can’t help but think of James Ellroy. Was he an influence, however allusive? If not, can you name some other authors that were your main influences?

I love how we always come back to Mr. Ellroy, Steven! I do love the name! And interestingly, my late wife Anne and I were considering it as a middle name when our child was born. Where I think I most connect with James Ellroy is through his memoir My Dark Places, in which he talks a lot about the similarity between his mother’s murder and that of “the Black Dahlia” true crime case. So that name is very loaded and very thrilling for me. There are aspects of his personal obsession with one of his dead parents that resonate for me. I also really like playing with names in a mischievous way. The main character in the 1933 tale is Jeannette. She’s the “Jekyll.” And the object of her desire is Dahlia. J&D, my initials. And the “Hyde” character she transforms herself into is the male “Gilles,” French for “John.” Gilles is pronounced “Jeel,” and is easy to free-associate with my first name. I liked the idea of Gilles charming Dahlia in ways that Jeannette couldn’t, and the phrase “Sunday Botanist” came to me. He calls himself one and plants dahlias for her. When I scampered down the rabbit hole of studying the onomatology of “Gilles” I discovered the renaissance musician Gilles Binchois, and so I wrote a scene in which Gilles serenades Dahlia with a Binchois song, “Triste Plaisir” or “Sad Pleasure,” which I think is a theme I always enjoy exploring in fiction. The more I explored, the more the idea that identity is fluid kept coming up. And I believe it is. As much as I enjoy my own character – “Jill Dearman!” and my fictional characters – I am also of the belief that there is no actual “I.” We are all part of the same whole.

Interviewer: Why the novella form?

Well, Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde is a novella, though longer than mine. And so many great gothic and horror tales are short and chilling. But once again, my unconscious served as Boss. Even though I had come up with the whole story in detail in a day and a half, the actually writing of Uncanny did not come as easily as I’d hoped. During the pandemic I met monthly on Zoom with the Exiles, a fabulous writers group based in Brooklyn (where I was no longer based, so virtual meetings were a gift). After making headway on Uncanny, I reached a brick wall of sorts. I experienced a compulsion to work on another project – nonfiction and based in metaphysics – and felt a little torn about how to move forward. When I came upstate I went underground for a couple of years so to speak (like so many during Covid), and my lifelong study of metaphysics took a much deeper turn. I wove in the ancient hermetic text The Kybalion, and that definitely helped me move forward with Uncanny, but at some point I just didn’t know how to complete it. Then I literally woke up at 3am with a “download from the universe.” I got up to write it down because it was so striking. I felt like I received my marching orders and what I was told was: finish Uncanny as a novella not a novel, and then get to work on a nonfiction book sharing your comprehensive knowledge of esoterica, which is exactly what I’m doing. Thanks, universe!

Interviewer: This is your second gender-swapped take on a traditionally male narrative after the excellent Jazzed. How would you describe the appeal of gender-swapped narratives in reimaging classic tales for contemporary readers?

It’s funny, because we live in an era where white men, particularly straight white men, are being judged pretty harshly. Historically it’s a time of reckoning, and I stand on the side of #MeToo, and feminism. I even wrote a book on the history of feminism for teenagers. But I have always had a great soul connection with men. I get a great deal of nurturing from the guys in my life. My own father was a very nurturing man. At the same time, the close men in my life all seem very comfortable showing their vulnerability to me; they know they will never be judged, and it’s very easy to share unconditional love. I think they get to see the feminine side of me much more than most do, as well.  So, perhaps there is something about having a natural compassion for how tough it can be to be male in this world, mixed with my innate fascination with the mystery of sexuality and gender that compels me to conjure up these re-imagined takes on these classic male narratives. And on a global level, I feel passionate about sharing more non-mainstream stories like these because I want to open the Pandora’s Box to those conversations. More than anything, I feel there is no shame in anyone’s sexuality or gender, just as there is no shame for these things in the animal world. So I hope that someone reading my fiction is gifted with a sense of permission to live a more natural, more uninhibited life.

For more on Jill Dearman: http://www.jilldearman.com.