Inside Henry Cato follows a Kansas boy who escapes an abusive, religious upbringing to pursue freedom through storytelling, San Francisco idealism, and New York’s art scene, while his older self reflects on the costs of becoming who he truly is. What was the inspiration for the setup of your story?

When I was a child, my stepfather was part of a tightly closeted gay community in smalltown Kansas. Of course I didn’t understand that at the time; I just thought he and his friends were wildly creative. They were way more fun than my parents’ other friends. My stepfather made up holidays and was forever “costuming.” He had a pair of gold lamé slippers that he wore with brightly colored robes. Henry’s fascination with shoes almost certainly tracks to those slippers. I have always been fascinated by masking and theatrics, and the repressive nature of that time period – not to mention the provincial nature of the place – meant that my stepfather’s expressive impulses were a challenge to entrenched cultural norms. I think that has just stayed with me, and it manifested fully through Henry.

Eventually, the closet became too small for my stepfather. He had to break out of it – and his marriage to my mother, which was a closet for both of them, really. Like Henry, he went to California.

I was too young to make the trek that Henry did, to San Francisco, in 1967. But I dreamed about my own escape from what I saw as an increasingly suffocating world in my little town, and eventually I made my way to New York. It took a while, but I got there, and my first job was with an art magazine. So there are lots of autobiographical breadcrumbs in this story. I think I’m still trying to figure out who I truly am, but Henry has helped me a lot on this journey.

How did the idea of telling Henry’s story through the lens of his older self develop?

It was important to me that a level of understanding and self-awareness be present, to provide context for a complicated and ambiguous life story. The younger Henry wouldn’t have been able to do that. I could have written it as a close third-person narrative, and I did play with that a little bit in some of the early drafts. But telling the story from Henry’s perspective seemed important. The third-person POV lacked an emotional depth I was looking for. Much of Henry’s journey is intensely interior, and when I reflected on my own life journey, I understood instinctively that my younger self could not have imagined the paths I was about to take, or why. That girl – that young woman – was still forming, as was Henry. So in the end, the more grounded, reflective older man was the best choice.

Henry’s early thefts, modeling career, and eventual work as a shoemaker each involve shoes differently. What did you want those stages to reveal about power and ownership?

The shoes are forever opening doors for Henry.

The thefts were merely a catalyst. As Henry says himself in the book, they started as a revenge strategy. But it isn’t long before he sees them as a way out – even if initially, that “way out” is only in his mind. That’s one kind of doorway. But it didn’t fully satisfy Henry because he didn’t have enough life experience to see beyond the impulse; at this point, the experience of thievery, and then secretly harboring his love of shoes, owns him. He doesn’t direct it. That starts to change once he leaves home.

I never thought of the work that Henry did in posing for Cherub and Del as “modeling.” He was a subject, and it was always about making art. He was never a conventional fashion model. That felt too obvious, and also, an unlikely path in a place like San Francisco in 1967-68. And Henry would have lacked the confidence to be a commercial model. He needed these older men to guide him and instill that confidence in himself. It gave him an outlet to bring his own shoes out of the closet – literally and figuratively. Art was the vehicle for that, and it helped Henry bring his passion for shoes into better focus. As I was writing these scenes, I was often thinking, “What would Joel Peter Witkin do?” The work – as exploitative as it turned out to be – elevated Henry’s fascination above a pervy sort of obsession into something beautiful. Into art. That was another kind of doorway for Henry – one that gave him permission to openly love and wear the shoes, and the seeds of confidence to believe there was more to this shoe thing than playing dress-up – costuming, like my stepfather did.

But Henry didn’t own that experience – Del and Cherub did. He had to escape (again) to uncover the place where he could be the architect of these experiences, and what the shoes represented for him. And that ultimately, organically, leads to the shoemaking business.

What do you hope readers who have never experienced Henry’s particular struggles will take away from the novel? 

As a society, we continue to struggle with what it means to be our “authentic selves.” I believe this is especially true in our current political climate, where we seem so polarized over social norms and customs. We’re trying to seamlessly and comfortably fit others into categories and assign labels that make sense to us. Because let’s face it – for most people, acceptance comes through adherence to stereotypes and behaviors that are accepted by other members of the tribe we belong to. That’s just how human beings are wired. But what happens when individuals don’t fit that easily? When someone’s authenticity can’t be neatly categorized? This is the case for Henry. He doesn’t align to a label; he’s not fixed in place. He’s mutable, unconventional, and because of that, he will seem unknowable to many. Is that a reason to dislike him? Mistrust him or feel threatened by him? As we see in the book, for some, the answer is yes. But as readers, we have the luxury of seeing inside Henry, and we know that he is a bruised and damaged human who has survived and found strength in that survival. I believe that sort of struggle is a universal one; especially when the one struggling feels like an outsider, without any support system.

The other takeaway I hope for readers, is the notion that family doesn’t have to equate with a bloodline. So many of us have had challenges and conflict within our immediate families. It’s okay to build another one. Family is what you make it.

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