Over Zoom, Jeanne Thornton asks me if I know the story of The Shaggs, a late 60s band from Texas. The musicians were three sisters, the manager was their father, Austin Wiggin. While being given a palm reading by his mother, Austin was told that he would marry a strawberry blonde woman, have two daughters after she passed away, and that those daughters would go on to be a success. After the first two predictions came true, Austin went out of his way to make the final one a reality.

This tension, between art and family, parents and children, is at the heart of Summer Fun, Jeanne’s award-winning epistolary novel. But while The Shaggs, and even the Jacksons, served as inspirations, the heart of the novel is The Beach Boys. Jeanne says that ‘the fantasy version of the Brian Wilson story is sparkling magic and potential,’ something that’s held back by an evil family. And it was through this framework—described by the author as a ‘fairytale’—that the central question of Summer Fun was asked: what if this was a trans story?

In Summer Fun, super-fan Gala is writing letters to the lead songwriter of rock band The Get Happies. At first, these letters are simply addressed to B-, but after a narrative coup, backed up by a refrain in the prose that feels like magic— ‘Keep breathing like a girl in the dark’—the truth comes out, alongside a new name that Gala uses at the start of all of her letters: Diane. This moment, which turns the novel on its head, is imbued with what the author calls ‘coming out energy’, something that informed the epistolary nature of the novel.

Jeanne tells me she was ‘out to more people by email than in regular life’, and that ‘the voice of the book ended up being in letters ‘cause I was coming out to friends when I was conceiving the book.’ Summer Fun was first being conceived back in 2009. The sheer length of time between the genesis of the book and its publication—especially in the UK—has changed the relationship that Thornton has with her book, describing the process of its long road from inception to publication as being like laying out an outfit for a party at 26, only to wear it out at 38. This means that a lot of the politics in the novel—particularly the combative relationship between trans Gala and cis Caroline—are something that Thornton has changed her relationship to. She says that she doesn’t necessarily feel like the author of Summer Fun anymore, but instead that’s ‘editing a book by my unruly teenage daughter’. Gala and Caroline often butt heads around the politics of gender; from an early interaction where Gala refuses to answer Caroline’s question about her preferred pronouns, to the ways in which Caroline projects certain ideas onto trans identity, saying ‘for a, like, MTF transgender person, you’re pretty conservative, can I just say that?’

Most of this editing exists in the core relationships, with particular attention being paid to the idea that ‘Diane would be so irritating to know’, and that for Gala, there’s something of Milton in her precarious living situation, that she is ‘ruling in Hell’. But these two women are still at the heart of Summer Fun, reaching across a seemingly endless number of divides: from time itself, to the vast differences of class between these two generations of trans women. In Diane’s case, this is an example of what Thornton calls ‘money being able to sustain your unreality’. Diane’s life exists at a fascinating intersection, between what her family will begrudgingly allow because of the success her music brings them, and the—often viscerally violent—consequences of being trans in America in the middle of the twentieth century. This dynamic is complicated by the ways in which that pain seems to inform Diane’s art. As Thornton herself says, admitting to the slight bluntness of the metaphor: ‘diamonds are produced by pressure’, and that it might be that pressure that means ‘we as trans people are so good at making art.’

It’s the moment of time that Diane and her bandmates represent that brings The Beach Boys to the fore in Summer Fun. As well as offering a narrative framework—with Jeanne saying the novel is a way of asking ‘can I tell this legend by other means?’—and world-building details (each of the women are named for those in Beach Boys songs), it offers a way of capturing a nation at a moment in time. For Jeanne, The Beach Boys are associated with a kind of ‘classic dream culture Americana’, and the Get Happies mirror this; their early songs about cars and girls and the ephemera of American culture shifting towards something inward looking, political, and explicitly trans. The album that The Get Happies are making—the eponymous Summer Fun—and the book itself both feel like records of trans alternatives; ways of infiltrating and changing the culture as a way of showing that transness has always been there, and always will be. Out in the desert, recording the ill-fated Summer Fun, Diane says to her bandmates ‘we’ve got to haunt the tapes,’ a statement of presence that’s both fleeting and eternal all at once.

At the climax of the novel, Gala imagines a utopian reunion concert for Diane and The Get Happies, even if Gala herself is too punk to attend it. But the thing that allows Diane to return to public life, at least in the mind of the woman who’s been writing her all of these letters, is that ‘polite society has finally advanced to meet you, Diane’. But whether or not this is true for trans culture in the real world, as opposed to the happy ending Gala wants to give her hero, is more complicated. Jeanne herself says that the line about polite society was ‘definitely me being punk’, but that the truth in that statement is still an unanswered question.

Echoing those lines, Thornton says she’s ‘grateful that the time has come to make money from our secrets at last,’ but that we’re ‘years and years away’ from this actually having any chance of co-opting what quote-unquote trans literature looks like. Whether or not trans literature is Hitting The Big Time, the reality is that ‘the whole literary system is deeply unjust.’ It’s this moment that seems to call back to the form of Summer Fun itself: Gala writing letters that she might not even send, that the best way for her to tell her own story is to retell Diane’s alongside it. In exploring the vast differences between a historic image of transness, and one that’s strikingly contemporary, Summer Fun captures not only the possibility born from so many things that have changed, but some of the tragedies that come from the world staying the same.