In a crowded Lower East Side park with people playing volleyball behind her, Benedict Nguyễn began the performance. While I was there to talk to Benedict about her debut novel Hot Girls with Balls, I relished the opportunity to watch a run-through of her piece Defense. A true multi-hyphenate, Benedict would be performing this work with collaborator Sugar Vendil at her book launch blurring the lines between literature, dance, and sports.
Throughout the run-through, some kids kept hitting their ball onto our stage and each time Benedict hit it back as if they were part of the company. This is the kind of precision, creativity, and freedom Benedict brings to the page. Hot Girls with Balls is a novel that feels deliberate in its form while still vibrating with an energy of unpredictability.
Existing in a world parallel to our own, the novel follows Six and Green, two Asian American trans women competing at the highest level of men’s indoor volleyball. Influencers as well as athletes, the two women struggle to balance their sport with the pressures of their public and private lives.
I spoke to Benedict about why volleyball is the most aesthetic sport, writing Six and Green’s romance, and why the names of real tech companies are not in the book. While you’re reading, imagine the background sounds of people playing volleyball in a New York City park.
Drew: Tell me about the performance I just watched. What was the idea behind it and was it always planned to be in tandem with book events?
Benedict: Defense is a dance work. You could also call it a dance theatre work. It’s a duet between me and my friend and collaborator Sugar Vendil. It’s set on a sports court where we’re both players on a team getting ready for a game and we’re catching up and also having intense discussions about the nature of violence and also having some close call not-quite-arguments while doing functional exercises, pushups, and warming up with the ball. I’ve had the idea for a couple of years and we started rehearsing it in April. I was working on it as a solo and when I got back to New York last summer, I was hanging out with Sugar and I had the idea of turning it into a duet. Then I let that idea marinate for a few months before I accepted we can let the idea crisscross with the book launch.
Drew: When you say you accepted that they can crisscross… (laughs) What do you mean by that? That you wanted it as a solo piece but it felt like a valuable way to promote the book?
Benedict: Yeah I think the hesitancy is I had this idea and I wanted to just do the idea.
Drew: You didn’t want it to be marketing.
Benedict: Yeah but also the logistics of when and how this work would be shared. And this is a moment in which an audience we hope will appear.
Drew: So in a sense the book is marketing for the performance piece as well.
Benedict: (laughs)
Drew: But really neither is marketing. They’re just two creations of yours that are in conversation. Do you think they’re in conversation?
Benedict: Absolutely. Defense is not an adaptation of Hot Girls with Balls but in this period of public output I have a narrow enough set of ideas that I’m digesting.
Drew: More broadly, how do you feel like your work as a dancer and a performer affects your writing?
Benedict: I think a lot of my adult professional career has been trying to understand the relationship between them. Earlier when I was just starting to work with choreographers, I had a challenge of all of a sudden having to learn a lot of new material very quickly which hadn’t been my strong suit before then. Writing became a tool that helped me become a better dancer. I’ve written dance and cultural criticism in the past and there I was thinking of how to translate an hour-long performance into so many words and the impossibility of that task. Then I decided to write a sports novel. (laughs)
Drew: There’s a clear link there to me though, because you write physicality very well and athleticism very well. How do you approach that?
Benedict: It’s a delicate task where I want to be specific in certain ways without being too rote or itemized or atomized about a person’s body. I want to create a clear sensation and image but I also want to infuse that with a degree of mood. And then with the satirical element of the book I’m also trying to make fun of it at times. I think there are moments where the seriousness of a life devoted to one’s physical performance — and I felt this in my dance life as well — that commitment can feel bizarre.
Drew: That makes me think about how it connects to the presenting of oneself on social media as a sort of influencer. What about that world were you hoping to capture and satirize?
Benedict: The way the algorithm prioritizes beauty and prioritizes face to the screen over other compositional choices in photographic or film medium. It’s a codification of sex sells. But unlike the 1990s, no one is exactly discussing it that way. Or, at least, not as much. The “hot” in Hot Girls with Balls is that it’s a given our protagonists are extremely beautiful. And they know it and they’re aware of how that affects the growth of their fan bases. It affects their careers offline and their relationships to their sports team employers. Athlete as celebrity blurs public self and personal brand.
Drew: Even though Six and Green are active participants in their careers as influencers, it does feel like the book is getting into something around the way race and gender identity often force people into that kind of space. Only some athletes get to just be athletes. When you have these points of identity you’re more likely to have to fall into this influencer space in order to turn these things into commodified plusses in the eyes of your employers and the culture rather than hindrances.
Benedict: Yeah people have been talking about the flattening of social critique and identity politics that occurred in the 2010s social media era. The logic of celebrity affects people who are genuinely activists and then get incentivized to build their platforms and then that slippery slope into hawking products on a platform that might be well-intentioned but are not that different from a traditional influencer hawking a beauty product in terms of the distribution flows from product to influencer to consumer.
Drew: The book is so grounded in our current moment, but it exists in this explicitly parallel world due things like Flitter instead of Twitter. At what point in the process, did you find that angle and what was the intention behind that distancing?
Benedict: It’s the most surface-level satire of the book. It immediately reminds the reader that even if things feel extremely familiar, the book’s orientation toward our timeline is slanted. Even on a drafting level, I didn’t want to be typing out the names of corporations that I don’t care for.
Drew: (laughs)
Benedict: I didn’t want these names printed ad infinitum. But this allows a reader to recognize an applications interface without me having to spell out how a certain 3×3 grid is shaped.
Drew: You float from these various limited third perspectives. Did the decisions to favor which character at which point in the story come naturally? Was that something that shifted through revisions?
Benedict: I wanted it to be somewhat volleyball rally-esque. It bounces between Six and Green and it sometimes bounces between Six and Green and somebody else.
Drew: Sometimes it goes out of bounds.
Benedict: Way up into the stands. And having that structure helped shape the delivery of information. There are moments when it’s not exactly even.
Drew: As in sports.
Benedict: Yes.
Drew: Why volleyball? How did your interest in the sport develop?
Benedict: We’re sitting outside watching a bunch of people play and I just think it’s such a stunningly gorgeous use of round sports ball. Basketball does not look this good. Soccer does not look this good. Throwing up the ball, looking back, and then swinging your arm around your shoulder socket and hitting the ball real hard — that’s beauty, baby. (laughs)
Drew: It’s very aesthetic. When did you start playing?
Benedict: I had some high school gym class, but I didn’t touch a volleyball again until I started writing this novel and thought I should remember what it feels like. And I was like, wait is my hand-eye coordination better than it used to be?
Drew: That’s a great thing to learn.
Benedict: It’s been great playing a lot more again rehearsing for Defense.
Drew: One of the aspects of the book that I find most interesting and that I think people will potentially fixate on because it’s of the moment is that this is a trans women in sports book. How did you decide to make it about trans women playing in men’s sports specifically?
Benedict: That was a day one conceit, because unfortunately the narrative pathways — at least in my imagination — for where a trans woman could go in a women’s league feels so predictable and in a novel less compelling to write about. At least to me.
Drew: Totally.
Benedict: Whereas our protagonists complying with the conservative thought that they should just play with their gender assigned at birth draws attention to the paradox of gender and opens up space for humor. I had fun showing the girls on a boys team dynamics.
Drew: And in terms of hormones and how medical transition is discussed in the book, was everything just character driven and narrative driven or were you thinking about the wider conversation? I guess the question is are you able to remove yourself from this fraught world that we’re in right now where trans people in sports has become a moral panic or did that weigh on you as you wrote?
Benedict: Within the novel, the narrative deliberately doesn’t give that much insight into Six and Green’s personal choices around the question. But that debate does happen around them and about them. And I think the tension between Six and Green making empowered choices around their medical transitions based on their experience of their genders within or outside of the context of the sports regulations and market incentives is an ambiguity that I invite a reader to interpret.
Drew: It’s a sports story, but it’s also a love story. I appreciated how the book is romantic and I was rooting for this couple, but you don’t brush past the challenges of the relationship and even certain incompatibilities between them. Can you talk about creating Six and Green as a couple?
Benedict: When I knew that I wasn’t just going to have one but two Asian American trans women as my protagonists, I knew that they had to be lovers and I knew that they had to be opposites.
Drew: You said well they obviously have to kiss.
Benedict: (laughs) Well, yeah. And there’s definitely black cat/golden retriever energy and that allowed me to differentiate them on the page and their orientations toward social media and their sense of stability within the sport. I wanted the density of all of the similarities in the structures of their lives with their different personalities to create tension and have that be an internal motor of the plot alongside all the other outside events that happen.
Drew: Do you think there could be a Six and Green in professional sports? I know mens sports are very conservative and very toxic toward queer people but I am always waiting for a baseball player to transition. Or even come out as gay would be huge I guess. (laughs)
Benedict: That’s part of the satire/fantasy/alternate reality of the book is that I have a hard time imagining someone truly being able to be out in this way and progress in a sports field without real obstruction. But it has been great to see the proliferation of queer sexualities of athletes that I follow. There was a nonbinary track runner at the Olympics last year which was very cool to see. I recommend reading Michael Waters’ The Other Olympians that traces the history of trans athletes in the 1930s amidst the rise of fascism and Cecé Telfer’s memoir Make it Count which discusses her journey from becoming an NCAA champion to competing in the Olympics. Oh there was also a nonbinary figure skater at the 2022 Olympics. And gender was happening.
Hot Girls with Balls is now available.
