11 Books That Inspired Benny Peterson’s ‘The Maidenheads’
“The Maidenheads” is out now from Penguin Random House.
There’s no real substitute for living through the indie-grunge scene of the early 2000s, but reading Benny Peterson’s beautifully illustrated and delightfully queer new novel, The Maidenheads—out now from Penguin Random House—is perhaps as close as you can get to actually running wild and free through the very specific world of D.C. punk.
For the latest installment of Vogue’s Required Reading series, Peterson opened up about the fellow writers whose work most makes them want to write, from Carrie Brownstein to Andrea Lawlor to Raven Leilani. Below, Peterson walks through their various inspirations for The Maidenheads below.
Girl, first published in 1994, tells the story of Andrea Marr, a lonely suburban teenager in the Pacific Northwest who drifts into the burgeoning punk scene in Portland, where she finds community and a complicated first romance with a charismatic singer. I must’ve read it a dozen times in high school, when I was also a lonely suburban teenager hungry for community, baffled by my own sexuality, dreaming of being swept off my feet by a sultry, tortured musician. This book is imprinted on my psyche forever (as will be clear to anyone who reads The Maidenheads having read and loved Girl thirty years ago), and I dream of achieving its raw, visceral immediacy.
Another novel I read in high school that changed me forever—also, just as a note, another brilliant ’90s (technically, 1989) novel about girlhood written by a man! The eponymous heroine of Celine is an artist and queer-coded weirdo; the novel is plotless and fairly low-stakes, just Celine wandering through life and observing things. What stuck with me most (beyond one nightmare-fuel scene where Celine’s friend vomits into her own sweatshirt at a party) was how seriously Celine takes her art. At no point does she doubt herself; her identity as an artist is the most fixed thing about her. I found this somewhat shocking as a young person who was full of doubt, and I thought about it (both artistic self-doubt and the lack of it, as experienced by teenage girls) as I conceptualized the two main characters in The Maidenheads.
Sleater-Kinney is a major touchpoint in The Maidenheads, both as a musical inspiration and as a relational one—two of the members, Carrie Brownstein and Corin Tucker, were romantically involved when the band formed, then wrote one of their most beloved songs, “One More Hour,” about their breakup. Brownstein’s memoir is a thoughtful and beautifully written account of becoming a rock star; I also read it looking for gossip about what it’s like to play music with your ex, as my characters in The Maidenheads attempt, rather chaotically, to do.
Partway through writing The Maidenheads, I both transitioned myself and realized that my main character, Jamie, was gender nonconforming. I revised to make Jamie’s gender more central, but I also felt strongly that Jamie wouldn’t be ready to come out in the space of the novel—in part because it’s set mostly in 2012, a very different moment for public understanding of complex genders. In working through how to convey experiences like dysphoria and nonbinary gender identity from the perspective of someone who isn’t conversant with that language, I was very inspired by Idlewild, a novel set in 2001-02 at a progressive high school in Manhattan. One of Idlewild’s two main characters is, quite obviously, a gay trans man—and yet the character has no framework for that identity, and suffers without it. It’s a beautiful and quite poignant story of what it means to exist before your own time.
While neither of the two central bands in The Maidenheads are really punk bands, they exist in the context of the D.C. punk scene of the 1980s and 1990s, which produced groups like Fugazi, Bad Brains, and Minor Threat and helped birth the Riot Grrrl movement. As someone who moved to D.C. as an adult in the early ’00s, I knew I needed to do my research on the characters’ musical inspirations, and Dance of Days was invaluable. A history of D.C. punk, hardcore, and emo from the early 1980s into the late 1990s, it was written by two insiders: Mark Andersen, a prominent figure in the hardcore scene, and Mark Jenkins, a local music journalist. It helped me understand not just the history of the music, but what it felt like to live through those explosive years in D.C. as a fan and a musician.
These two short story collections—connected structurally and through shared characters—are the best books ever written about D.C., hands down. The D.C. I live in and write about is very different from Jones’s pre-gentrification Chocolate City, but I deeply admire Jones’s gentleness towards his characters and his geographical precision. His stories take place not just in D.C., but at specific addresses and intersections; you can pinpoint on a map exactly where his characters live and work and go to school. That specificity makes his work vividly evocative to me, and I worked to emulate it in The Maidenheads, which, for the most part, also takes place in real locations in DC and Maryland.
It’s really hard for me to talk about this novel without getting excitable and incoherent—I don’t even know where my copy is at this point, because I have pressed it on so many people over the years since I first read it. Paul Takes the Form of a Modern Girl is a journey through time, space, and bodies—its central character, Paul (or sometimes Polly), is a DTF shapeshifter who drifts through various scenes and genders, from midwestern leather bars to the Michigan Womyn’s Music Festival to Provincetown to San Francisco. This book woke me up to the generative slipperiness of language around gender; it also has some of my favorite sex scenes in all of literature.
So many of the novelists I come back to again and again are mid-century British women: Virginia Woolf, Muriel Spark, Jean Rhys, Barbara Pym, and not least among them, Elizabeth Taylor. The Maidenheads includes far more queer sex and punk rock than any of these writers, but I hope still embodies some of that wryness around very dark topics. Taylor’s wonderful 1951 novel A Game of Hide and Seek, similarly to The Maidenheads, is about two people attempting to revive a teenage romance that, perhaps, should’ve been left in the past.
Jamie, the first-person narrator of The Maidenheads, is a frustrating character—she makes bad choices, acts selfishly, hurts the people she loves. I personally love reading (and writing) about complicated people, and was very inspired by other novels with tricky, maddening first-person narrators. Leilani’s narrator in Luster, Edie, is one of the ones I admire most: brutally and brilliantly aware of herself and others, unable to avoid running into walls of her own making, never, ever boring. I would follow her anywhere!
I had known from the beginning of writing The Maidenheads that I wanted the ending to feel open and capacious. But it wasn’t until I read this brilliant novel about gender and parenthood that I began thinking seriously about how. Peters’s entire novel centers on a major decision for its three main characters that, spoiler alert, the ending does not fully resolve. And yet, somehow, it still feels satisfying. When I was working on the ending of The Maidenheads, I read the ending of Detransition, Baby over and over until I’d nearly memorized it. At one point, I typed out the last two pages to see if I could somehow discover how Peters pulls the rabbit out of the hat. I never figured it out, though; it’s just magic.
