David Ebershoff



Danish guy: Author Ebershoff

interview by Scott Shrake

David Ebershoff is 31 years old, publishing director of the Modern Library imprint at Random House and has just had his first novel published in 10 countries. The Danish Girl (Viking, 288 p., $24.95) is based on the life of Einar Wegener, a Danish painter who underwent the first gender-reassignment operation in 1930. When his wife, also a painter and his former student, asks him to pose for the legs of a portrait she is painting of a female subject, Einar begins the transition to becoming Lili Elbe, both psychically and physically. The Danish Girl brims with historical detail, evoking the book’s decadent European and rugged Californian settings, and its dialogue embodies the clash between primness and audacity which marked 1920s bohemian circles. Ebershoff spoke from his home in New York.

What inspired you to write the novel?

A few years ago, a friend of mine sent me a book on gender theory. A very academic treatise, but buried in it was a parenthetical paragraph about the first person who ever changed his sex. I thought to myself: I’ve never heard of this person, [but] there must be some story here. So I went to the New York Public Library and started pulling books on gender identity, sexuality, medical books.

Which is what Einar does in the book.

Exactly! [laughs] I began to realize that [Einar’s] was a known story, but a kind of forgotten or overlooked one. Then [about six months later] in June of ’97, I sat down at the computer and very quickly began to imagine the life that [Einar] might have lived. I made this promise to myself that if I had written enough through the course of that first summer, I would get to go to Denmark. And then in September, with about the first 100 pages in terribly rough form, I went. I told no one what I was doing. I told my colleagues and friends that I was going to Denmark on vacation. Ultimately I made three trips to Europe. I also came across Lili Elbe’s diaries, which were published right after her death in 1933 and those were very, very important to writing this book. I went to the Royal Academy of Art in Copenhagen where Einar and his wife were students, and that’s when I first saw some of the images of the paintings of Lili by Einar’s wife, who in reality was [Danish and] named Gerda, but I [made her an American from Pasadena, and] named her Greta. And that’s why I do stress that this is a novel. There is a Danish writer, in fact, who’s writing a biography of Einar Wegener, and I’m really pleased to know this, because I think a biography is necessary, and my book is not to be read that way.

The novel leaves off before Einar/Lili becomes known as a cause célèbre.

I realized early on that what interested me was not the story of the first person who had a sex change but the love story [between Einar and Greta]. At first I couldn’t imagine how a marriage would confront such a fundamental change, [but] it’s really that question that everybody faces, taken to the nth degree: What do you do when the person you love changes? I wanted to take a very sensational story and write it very quietly.

Is The Danish Girl part of the academic and literary "reclaiming history" project that was so prevalent in the 1990s?

Not really, because ultimately, as a novelist, I work very traditionally, working with what I believe is a good story, and then using my best skill as a writer to tell it as evocatively, as beautifully as possible. I do know that Lili Elbe wanted people to know her story. That’s why she talked to the press in the last year of her life. That’s why she published her diary. She knew enough to know there were other people like herself.