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The shoes are forever opening doors for Henry.
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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“In her gripping debut novel, Katharine English takes us on a staggering journey over several decades of America through the poignant eyes and (often shattered) heart of Henry Cato. Inviting the reader to literally walk in Henry’s shoes, English cinematically captures the five senses in which looking, touching, feeling, smelling, and tasting might never be the same.” -Susan Kouguell, Senior Contributing Editor Script Magazine, SUNY Purchase Lecturer
All Henry Cato wants is to belong. But he was born to a woman who saw the world as a series of stains to be scrubbed clean – and Henry as the deepest stain of all. In a root cellar deep below the Kansas topsoil, he does penance for being different, nurturing a secret obsession with shoes he was never meant to wear.
In 1967, with nothing but a sharp eye for detail, a talent for thievery, and a desperate need for belonging, Henry flees to San Francisco. There, Del, a charismatic Texas oil heir, exploits Henry’s taboo fascination and catapults him to cult stardom. For the first time, Henry feels seen – but the persona that promises liberation becomes a gilded cage.
When he escapes to the gritty, industrial playground of New York City’s Meatpacking District, Henry must navigate predators, fame, and reinvention – and reconcile the boy who still feels like a forgery with the person he is becoming. Or risk losing himself entirely.
Reminiscent of Douglas Stuart, Frank McCourt, and Hanya Yanagihara, Inside Henry Cato is a bold, compassionate exploration of identity, sexuality, and the tactile language of shoes – the story of a survivor learning to stand in the light of an ambiguous world.
Inside Henry Cato
Katharine English’s Inside Henry Cato is a sweeping queer coming-of-age novel about a Kansas boy searching for a life that feels genuinely his. Growing up with an abusive, fiercely religious mother, Henry finds refuge in storytelling and an intense fascination with women’s shoes. He runs away in 1967, first joining young idealists bound for San Francisco and later entering the art scene of New York. The older Henry narrates these events with the knowledge of what they cost him, giving the novel the intimacy of a confession and the shape of a survivor’s memoir.
English uses shoes as the book’s central language. For Henry, they represent beauty, escape, erotic feeling, performance, and eventually creative purpose. That symbolism could have become heavy-handed, but it keeps evolving alongside him. His early thefts are acts of resistance, his modeling career turns his appearance into someone else’s property, and his later work as a shoemaker finally lets him create beauty on his own terms. Letters exchanged with his childhood friend Perry interrupt the first-person narrative at key moments, grounding Henry’s reinventions in a relationship that remains candid, funny, and remarkably tender.
Perry is the novel’s strongest supporting character and its emotional anchor. His slangy, irreverent letters bring warmth to a story filled with abuse, exploitation, sexual violence, and the Vietnam War. Trixie and Xander also give Henry a convincing chosen family in New York, while his relationships with Del, Cherub, and Lady Vesta explore the complicated border between care and control. English is especially perceptive about bodily responses that don’t neatly correspond to consent, and she treats Henry’s fluid sense of gender and sexuality as something lived and evolving. He doesn’t need to arrive at a tidy label for his identity to be real.
The novel is ambitious, vivid, and emotionally generous, though its 376 pages occasionally feel crowded. Henry sometimes explains the meaning of an experience after the scene has already communicated it, and the historical commentary can slow the narrative’s momentum. A few coincidences and dream sequences also announce their significance more insistently than necessary. Still, English’s sensory writing is consistently memorable, from the damp rot of the childhood cellar to the leather, glitter, smoke, and music of Henry’s later worlds. The recurring images of masks, thresholds, and footsteps give the sprawling story a satisfying unity.
I’d recommend Inside Henry Cato most strongly to readers who enjoy character-driven historical fiction, queer coming-of-age stories, and novels about chosen family, artistic identity, and survival. It will especially appeal to readers interested in the counterculture of the late 1960s, the early queer communities of San Francisco and New York, and protagonists whose identities resist simple categories. The book contains explicit depictions of childhood abuse, sexual assault, and violence, so it asks for some emotional readiness. For the right reader, Henry’s voice and his lifelong friendship with Perry will linger long after the final page.
Pages: 376 | ASIN : B0HCHF37MC
