Citizens of They Read Book nation – this book! It was truly love at first deal report for HOT GIRLS WITH BALLS, an absolutely sizzling, scathing debut. I read this book in one sitting. Come for the title of the year, stay for the equal parts hilarious and thoughtful romance between star volleyball players of the men’s league, lesbian power couple Six and Green.
Nguyễn’s voice is truly singular – she intersperses social media comments, voicey dialogue, and careful prose to create a world that is truly immersive and exciting. At the same time, Benedict never loses sight of her thoughtful commentary on fame and redemptive love. In this interview, we talk about San José State women’s volleyball, internetty-ness, and polarization.
Buy Hot Girls With Balls from Loyalty Bookstore (Benedict’s rec!) here.
CF: In your bio, you describe yourself as a “dancer and gym buff.” Why volleyball?
BN: Basketball is too susceptible to human error in ref calls, which also slows down the game. Pacing! Speaking of, sorry football (aka soccer)! And even in doubles, tennis feels more like an individual drama. But indoor volleyball is the most gloriously speedy, collectivist ball sport of them all.
CF: I’d love it if you could talk a little about the structure of the book, which is divided into three parts: DIG, SET, and KILL. How did this structure come to be?
BN: The three sections riff on the popular phrase, ‘bump, set, spike,’ (i.e. the classical sequence of three touches a team uses to send a ball over the net) with volleyball gestures whose non-sporty meanings resonated.
CF: I thought it was so interesting the way this book subverts the typical narratives around trans women in sports, in part because Six and Green play for a men’s team. What made you choose to write the story this way, rather than having them in a women’s league?
BN: What happens when trans women try to play with cis women is played out in real life to depressingly predictable results—notably, the horrible saga of last season’s San José State women’s volleyball team. But having Six and Green play with their gender-assigned-at-birth league inspired more curiosity and satirical potential. Especially when I had Six and Green exist in the same timeline, choose the same sport, and make that pivotal decision before they even meet. Mythical!
CF: So much of this book is about audience. It churns around the question: who is it all for? How did you think about your own audience while writing this book? Who were you imagining as your reader, and how did that influence the book?
BN: I filtered a lot of my revision questions through axes of mood and disposition, such as: how much someone might care about sports, how online/offline someone is; and how novelistic distance and humor and/or dark humor might register. No perfect trendlines, so imbuing each graf with intention was crucial.
CF: Something that I loved throughout the book was the near-reality of your world. Characters don’t use Twitter, they use ‘Flitter.’ They convene on ‘Instagraph’ Live. They nurse anxieties about the ‘COVIS’ pandemic. Can you talk a little bit about the choice to suspend Six and Green in this near-reality?
BN: The off-axis skew to our timeline retains some logics of our own world but doesn’t allow the narrative to slide into comfortable realism. Six and Green becoming famous largely unscathed before the start of the novel—a twisted kind of fairy tale, really.
CF: This book is also so delightfully internetty (though the internet is not always delightful). Can you talk about your influences there? How would you describe your own relationship with the internet and social media?
BN: I love how internetty diction has a hyperbolic intensity of feeling. Different idioms trend and fade, so I wanted to avoid dated memetic language and find syntaxes that captured the affective extremities that amuse me in my timelines.
Besides keeping up with people and keeping up certain professional appearances, I’m less inspired by the scroll’s current pollution levels. When the weather’s bearable, we’d rather a dreamy stroll outside.
CF: The language you use in this book is harsh, and often startling, especially when you excerpt Six and Green’s comment sections on social media. Why did you choose to include such vivid examples of transphobic language in the text of the book? What effect do you hope this has on readers?
BN: My own reaction to certain sentences shifted season to season over this book’s development. The text invites a reader to sift through the relentlessness of blatant hate speech, legitimate critique, and some completely nonsensical language around Six and Green. Maybe the book defangs certain discursive violence. Maybe some readers won’t care for it, and maybe some will have a true gut-busting laugh at some of the enjambments.
CF: In the book, Six and Green are forced to reckon with the murder of three trans women. They face pressure from the league, their agents, and their avid following to comment on the incident. As they respond, there is a clear anxiety about getting it ‘right.’ Do you experience this same anxiety? What did you draw upon when considering the various ways that they acted in response to the tragedy?
BN: I think with every horrible tragedy happening in our world, I hear different ebbs and flows among people feeling and applying pressure to post about something, or conversely, to do something more meaningful offline. This tension is compounded by the meta-anxieties about public perception of their publicized (or insufficiently publicized) labor and grief. Which, real! But the algorithmically censored, not-fact-checked, and structurally polarized tech platforms are not the online town square people thought they could be in 2011.
CF: One aspect of this book that really glitters is not only the competition on the court, but also the competition between Six and Green within their relationship. Can you talk about the forces at work in their relationship? Why are they so competitive with one another?
BN: It’s funny because Six isn’t competing with Green at all. The crabs-in-a-barrel mentality of being tokenized clouds Green with scarcity mindset, which makes no sense to someone in my tax bracket but also, capitalism makes everyone feel like they’ll never have enough. Green is at times in denial that she’s competing with Six’s popularity. Six is competing for a spot on her team’s starting lineup—very local! So from her (6’ 7”) vantage point, Green (6’ 1”) isn’t a blip on her oppo research radar. Oops!
CF: I started They Read Book to demonstrate a queer and trans reading practice, and to show that queer and trans literature isn’t ‘marginal’ or ‘niche.’ Tell me about some queer and trans literature that has been meaningful, formative, magical, challenging, to you.
BN: I recently read Chase Joynt’s Vantage Points—what a beautifully designed book that upends trauma plot expectations placed on so many memoirs by braiding media criticism to evoke some truly striking intimations between the lines.
The new Rabih Alameddine novel, The True Story of Raja the Gullible (and His Mother) (out Sept 2), is an absolutely spellbinding epic of wit and wisdom that accumulates with brilliant cadence over decades of life and history.
At my DC book event, part of the team working on Lilac Peril gave me a zine preview of their upcoming issue, “Taboo.” I’m also so stoked for Grace Byron’s Herculine (out Oct 7), a horror novel following a writer who flees to her ex’s trans girl commune.
CF: Inspired by 2000s blogs, I offer each author the chance to ask a question to the next They Read Book interviewee. What would you like to ask the next author?
BN: What’s a (not necessarily ‘the’) favorite sentence from your own work?