“I'm not frothing at the mouth, desperately horny for The Telegraph to review the book” - Alison Rumfitt on Brainwyrms, Institutionalised Transphobia and Internet Communities

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The UK government just put a decree out banning transgenderism, gender identity clinics are bombed in terrorist attacks and fascist ideology is slithering off smartphone screens’ newsfeeds to incubate in even the most “progressive” of minds. This is the imagined future in Alison Rumfitt’s new novel, Brainwyrms, and in the wake of Rishi Sunak’s Conservative Party Conference speech, it feels more imminent than implausible. 

Brainwyrms follows Frankie and Vanya, a trans woman and nonbinary person, in the wake of a terrorist attack. Alongside the pair’s complex relationship, Brainwyrms explores obsession, kink, social media, childhood trauma and the insidiousness of online bigotry, in the style Rumfitt is quickly becoming known for: extreme horror made palatable with biting satire and compelling, experimental prose. The book is nauseating and grotesque, a visceral illustration of the UK’s current attitude towards transgender people.

It’s a story set in 2030 that feels current, especially with worms having such a cultural renaissance. Since Dasha Nekraskova’s commented on an Infowars reporter having “worms in her brain”, worms have become a mainstay of internet culture. Alison says she didn’t set out to do this, but was “lucky to write a book that was sort of attuned to a moment.” Originally, Rumfitt explains, the story had a different focus. “At first it was wyrms as in like, dragons, and that was a whole thing. It was connecting a modern day phenomenon to a sort of Old English, mythic tone”. This echoes Brainwyrms'‘ predecessor, Tell Me I’m Worthless, which allegorises contemporary British transphobia as an Olde English haunted house, Albion. 

Covid helped steer Alison’s sophomore offering to its final iteration. “I was like, there's a lot of parasites about; there's a lot of people thinking about infestation. I think people are more sort of attuned to and scared of their own body… thinking about the things that are inside of it” The story started to shift, “ I was just thinking about the internet phrase of brain worms, right. And like someone having worms in their brain. And then, yeah, that was a big brain connection.”

But what are brain worms? “It’s hard to define. It’s when you spend a bit too much time online and online is how you approach everything. It’s what Grimes has. Everyone has them. You’ve gotta pull them out.” 

Alison understands the internet on an intuitive level and much of Brainwyrms’s plot revolves around online communities - there’s entire chapters of online speak but, unlike a lot of internet fiction, it feels contemporary rather than cringe. Where Brainwyrms differs from a lot of internet fiction is its nuanced presentation of online culture. 

“I'm very aware that my experience with the internet is just one person's experience, yet I can't say the internet is wholly bad because it isn't.” Alison details, “There is a particular strain of internet equals bad in a lot of fiction writing about the internet that I am not necessarily interested in doing, while still sort of not shying away from the fact that it can have very bad effects.”

“Not everyone who works at The Guardian is transphobic or whatever, but I think there is a sort of institutional block. They're maybe not disinterested, there's just this institutional line there, where they don't really engage with trans writing.”

At a book launch event I saw Alison speak at, she discussed how as a child online she was exposed to extreme images she is still haunted by as an adult, but also how she discovered herself and met some of her most important friends online. “There’s no single easy narrative around a lot of internet community stuff, and that was a lot of my experience. Like, sure Tumblr helped me realise I was trans, but it also made me more depressed and it put me at risk in some ways.” 

Maybe Alison’s aptitude for internet writing explains her work’s popularity. Brainwyrms merch sold out in hours and the first print run sold out in just three weeks. Despite Alison’s success, the mainstream British media is largely ignoring her books. It’s unsurprising, when transphobic sentiment is rife, even in supposedly left wing news outlets. Support for a book by a queer and trans woman, published by a queer and trans publishing house would feel out of place in the UK’s hostile press. 

In the US, Brainwyrms is getting a lot more recognition, even being reviewed in print for the New York Times. Alison says she thinks the lack of British coverage is less about individual writers and more about an editorial status quo: “Not everyone who works at The Guardian is transphobic or whatever, but I think there is a sort of institutional block. They're maybe not disinterested, there's just this institutional line there, where they don't really engage with trans writing.”

She continues, “It's not like I'm frothing at the mouth, desperately horny for The Telegraph to review the book. It's just interesting to be ignored and a little bit disheartening. Even if in my mind I know that obviously it doesn't actually matter, what matters is that people are reading the book, it is disheartening. I'm having fun and doing weird, horrible stuff but I am also doing interesting things with prose and perspective and a lot of my work is informed by experimental British poetry. That’s interesting! I'm like, come on, come on, can someone notice that?” 

In the opening chapter of the book, Rumfitt writes as a fictionalised version of herself: “I just wanted to have a nice life and write my little extreme horror novels in peace. I guess I ended up writing in response to it, though, and I’ll never know what sort of writer I would have been if I didn’t live in this fucking world that forces me to write about transphobia.” 

Words: Alex Ogden Clark

Buy Brainwyrms and Tell Me I’m Worthless here.