How Author V.E. Schwab Finally Found the Words to Come Out of the Closet
In OprahMag.com's series Coming Out, LGBTQ change-makers reflect on their journey toward self-acceptance. While it's beautiful to bravely share your identity with the world, choosing to do so is entirely up to you—period.
By the time V.E. Schwab was in her 20s, she was already the #1 New York Times bestselling author of beloved, and staggeringly epic, works of fantasy. Her next book, and her first-ever standalone novel, The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue, is already racking up rave reviews. The book's central characters, Addie LaRue and Henry Strauss, are introduced as bisexual without fanfare.
But while her characters freely lived out their romantic (and supernatural) adventures, Schwab felt constrained to pursue her own. She didn't come out as gay until she was in her late 20s—partially, she writes, because she didn't have the vocabulary.
In this essay for OprahMag.com's Coming Out series, Schwab deploys her characteristic figurative language to describe her own coming-out story—this time around, essentially, she's the character. Schwab likens her decades-long realization to moving through a house, and realizing, again and again, that certain identities are not quite "home." It's a feat of storytelling that only Schwab can pull off.
Coming out, as this essay from Schwab shows, doesn't have to happen in high school. Nor does it have to be overnight, with a lightning bolt of recognition. This is her journey.
You are in a room and it is dark. There are no windows and no doors, the bed is too soft—or too firm—and the books aren’t your taste, and the clothes in the closet have never really fit, and it’s a little hard to breathe in here, but it’s your room. It has always been your room. So you stay put.
You are 16 when you fall in love with your best friend—only you don’t understand the “in” part yet, so you just call it love. Teenage girls are always loving their friends, becoming entangled, like trees grown together, so you think that’s what it is. You call it friendship when you lean your head on her shoulder between classes. You call it friendship when she draws tiny notes in the plaid margins of your uniform skirt. You call it friendship when she throws her arms around your shoulders and everything in you settles like silt.
You take a boy to prom, and his hand feels like a wet fish in yours, his breath on your cheek like stale steam. You don’t have a brother but if you did, kissing him would feel like this. A skin-squirming discomfort.
One day, you realize your room has a door. You don’t know why you’ve never noticed it before. Perhaps it wasn’t there, but now it is. You don’t know where it leads, except that it leads out, which is a scary word, so you sit on the bed, and stare at the handle. You don’t open it.
You are 17, and the girls around you are all boy crazy and you wonder if something inside you is broken, or missing, or if your body is simply ignorant, unpracticed. You struggle with an eating disorder, and maybe your discomfort in your skin has spilled over, made your body an enemy. Maybe it is fighting back. You decide it is just your nerves, your neuroses, your mind getting in your way. It shouts “wrong wrong wrong,: and you put your thoughts on mute.
You can’t stand the room anymore. You open the door, and step out into the space beyond.
And instantly, you feel better. There is room out here, to stretch, to move. There is even a lamp, casting a dim glow, and your eyes begin to adjust...but as they do, you realize, this isn’t a room, it’s just a hall, a space between here and there. You have decided where you don’t belong, but you still have to find where you do.
You are 19, home for winter break and the girl you love is there, too. You fling yourself into each other’s arms, and it feels like coming home. For one incredible moment, the world makes sense. She tells you about the fraternities and sororities, and about the boy she’s dating, and you try to smile, because she seems happy.
Over break you go out with a boy—no, not a boy, a man, even though you still feel like a girl (the word woman scrapes like stubble against your skin). He is handsome, and clever, and when he starts to climb on top of you, your stomach turns. And you know if someone took a picture, you would look right, tangled together like this, your hand on his skin and his hand under your shirt...but it doesn’t feel right. You feel like the person behind the camera instead of the one in the bed. How can a man’s body be so beautiful, up until the moment it touches you?
You cannot stay in the hall, so you keep walking, into another room. And this one, this one is nice. It’s open and well-lit and you think, ah, there we are. This feels better, so you settle in. You put up the curtains you saw in someone else’s house, tell yourself they fit yours, too. You hang pictures that other people like, you do everything you can to make the space look right. You remind yourself it’s so much better than the room where you started. You try to make yourself comfortable, and for a little while you’re convinced you don’t have to keep going. This is far enough.
The break ends and the girl goes back to school, and so do you, but you don’t know what to do. You aren’t gay—as far as you know at this point, gay is only one of two things, butch or lipstick, and neither of those fit, and you like boys...or at least the idea of them. But you have never been in love with anyone other than your high school friend, so finally, you decide to call and tell her how you feel, to find the words and hope it will not ruin what you have. It takes months, but you are finally ready to pick up the phone, but she calls first, and you hold your breath and hope—but she’s calling to say that she’s engaged, which feels like the bad plot of a soap opera, except when it’s happening to you.
She asks how you are, and you say fine, the truth crawling back inside your throat as you tell yourself she was an exception, not the rule. You will keep trying to find someone who makes you feel how other people look when they’re together.
This room isn’t right. You thought you could make it work, but you can’t stand the pictures and the color isn’t right, and you’re not sure when the room began to feel so small and stuffy, but it does, and you can hear voices, coming from somewhere else. You didn’t realize there were other people in the house, but the sound of them talking, laughing, fills you with hope. You go to look for them.
You are 21, watching your best college friends—both girls—fall in love. For two years, the three of you have been inseparable, but for the last few months, they have been pulling away from you and toward each other, and when they finally confess that they’ve been dating, it’s in the same breath they say “There is no room for you in this anymore.” They have carved you out of their story, translated friendship into romance in a way you could not. And they are so sure of themselves, so at home in their skin, and you are so confused, you convince yourself that what you felt for them was not love, though it clearly was. You feel lost. You feel alone.
You find room after room that isn’t yours (you had no idea the house was so big). Everywhere you look, you find open doors, and people ready to welcome you. Some rooms are vast and brightly lit, and others cozy, and everyone you pass seems so happy in their home, and you want to feel the way they do, but you know that none of these rooms are made for you. You have gotten very good at knowing what and who you aren’t, an image made up of negative space.
You are 24 and you know you aren’t straight. When your parents ask when you’ll bring home a guy, you softly amend that it might be a girl. They ask if you are bisexual, and you say yes, and their takeaway is that there is still hope. To them, it is 50/50, a roll of the dice. They love you so much that they want your life to be easy, and easy means normal, and so they hold their breath and hope you fall for a guy—and you hold your breath and hope you do, too.
You don’t.
You slump onto the stairs, tired of searching this house for somewhere that feels like home. A stranger passes and offers to help you up. They can’t show you the right room, but the gesture makes you feel a little less alone.
You are 27 when you learn the difference between aesthetic and romantic and/or sexual attraction, when someone explains that you can love the way a person looks, you can be drawn to their mind and admire their body and still not want to sleep with them. It is shocking, to have the words. So far you have only been able to point out what feels wrong. But this, this one detail feels right. The relief you feel is like a window thrown open. But the breeze carries with it a current of dread. You realize you will never bring home a man.
You begin to date girls, and it feels like you are starting over, like you are 16 again, your best friend’s head lolling on your shoulder, the scent of her shampoo tickling your nerves. You feel the flutter, the panic—but this time, when you kiss them goodnight, there is no wall, no recoil. This time, when their hand slides along your skin, you don’t feel sick. This time, it is right, it is spoons, it is edges fitting, it is mornings beneath warm blankets, and for the first time you understand what people mean when they talk of longing.
You have found the right room, you think. It took so much searching, and you’re pretty sure you passed this door a dozen times, but it hangs open now, ready to welcome you, and you step through, ready to be home. It is a beautiful room, full of kindness and warmth, and you finally sink into a chair beside the window—and smile.
You are 29, a bestselling author with a major platform, when you announce that you are gay. You did not want to, really, but you have begun to write queer characters, and people have begun to wonder if it’s your place, and so you claim it. You announce yourself. It feels…uneventful.
The backlash is minimal. The support is loud. Every few months, it seems, you have to mention it again. You wonder if you are not gay enough, because people always seem surprised, even though, looking back at your work, it has always been there, the versions of you that did not fit, that were not home inside their skin. Every single story with an outsider at its center, a person at odds with their world, who decides to escape, to change, sometimes themselves, sometimes everything else. You no longer need to hide your heroes.
Your characters begin to live the way you do, unrepentant. Never reduced to their queerness, only expanded by it. It infuses them in many ways, sometimes subtle, others loud. They take up space in the world, space they deserve. And you? You feel better than you have felt in years. You are not hiding anymore. You feel right. And proud. And yet.
The window. You are sitting in the room beside the window when you look out, and see the garden. You never realized that there was a place beyond the house. You tell yourself to stay put, that it’s not worth it, that where you are is good enough, but that old discomfort rises up, a restless whisper in the back of your mind. You have spent so many years watching others be happy, at home, and the truth is, you have never felt as sure. Now, the sight of that window, that garden, makes your heart race. You rise, and slide open the window, and climb out.
Your feet hit the grass, and the breeze rushes through, and it is the best feeling in the world, and you realize, this is what they all felt, the people in the house, this is what they all found.
You look back at the house, with all its rooms, and you are so grateful for the people in them, and so glad you listened to your heart when it told your tired legs to keep going.
You are 33, and you are standing in the garden of the house. It wasn’t the rooms that were wrong. It was the house itself. You didn’t need walls—you needed space. Out here, there are no rooms, no roof. There are no walls, no doors, just open ground, a sprawling night filled with radiant riotous blooms.
There are people out here in the garden, and they welcome you without asking where you’ve been, and you say you’re sorry you’re late, you got lost, and they fold you into their arms and says it is okay, you are here now.
You are home.
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