Meredith Talusan’s memoir, Fairest (Viking, May 26), is a complex story of identity as it is expressed—and perceived—through race, class, gender, and sexuality. Born albino in the Philippines, Talusan was told from a young age that, with her pale skin and hair, she belonged in America. Talusan did, in fact, move to the U.S. at age 15 and went on to attend Harvard University, where she came out as a gay man. When she began wearing women’s clothing and makeup—she told friends she was exploring gender as a project for a photography class—she recognized, as she writes, a “physical manifestation of that woman’s spirit who lived inside of me.” Eventually she would fully transition. In a recent video chat with Kirkus, Talusan explored her complicated life story with the same honesty and openness that characterize the book. Our conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

You open the memoir at your Harvard reunion in 2017. Why start there?

You know how reunions are, right? They’re these moments when you reconcile your present with your past. One of the things that happened when I went to that reunion was realizing the degree to which I’ve simultaneously changed but also seem the same. For somebody who was supposed to have gone through this radical transformation, I realized the degree to which that transformation is a transformation in the eyes of other people. I wanted to portray the subtlety and the nuance of that.

As an albino child in the Philippines, you were immediately recognized as different, and your family encouraged the belief that you would one day move to America.

It’s not generally true that albino kids in the Philippines are seen as in some way related to Americans in America. There are albino kids who are very much treated like outcasts or not considered desirable. One of the major ways in which I formed my identity was to grasp on to this idea that I’m not freakish, I’m like those Americans who have white skin and blond hair.

Your sexual and gender identities were more obscured during childhood.

I wasn’t outwardly feminine, in the sense that I didn’t wear girls’ clothes, but at the same time I played mostly with girls, I didn’t play outside, I didn’t like roughhousing. I think because I’m albino, people were less likely to say, “Meredith is like that because she’s gender nonconforming.” It was always, “Meredith plays by a completely different set of rules because she’s completely different from all of us.” What’s really interesting is that as soon as I came to the States, I was identified as feminine. The standards for what is considered masculine and feminine in the two countries are really different. I didn’t explicitly come out, because I was living in a relatively conservative part of California, but I played gay roles in the theater, I did a lot of dance, and I was mostly friends with girls. All of these things were markers to people that I was a gay man.

One of the most powerful parts in the book is when you begin going out into the world as a woman and the incredible sense of power that you describe feeling.

I came into the experience very much as a gay man who was dressing in women’s clothes. And there was that liminal period of several months where it was really hard for me to define my identity in relationship to manhood or womanhood and whether my sexuality was a woman’s or a gay man’s. Knowing that all of this is socially constructed, right?

I was in this mode of just being like, I am superdesirable to these men—many of whom were in these gay-male-fetishized professions, men who had been in the military, or plumbers, or construction workers. For me, it was just like, wow, I only need to put on a dress and makeup, and the straight guys would suddenly be attracted.

You were in a long relationship with a gay man, Ralph. And as you began to transition and realized that you wanted to live your life as a woman, that relationship couldn’t come with you into the future.

We have managed to stay in touch with each other. But what does it mean to see your ex who is your gay ex from when you were a gay man? It’s fraught—whenever we interact we actually have no idea what we’re doing, what this means. We’re still trying to figure that out. I’ve written it down so that maybe someday somebody else who’s going through a similar situation can have at least some measure of understanding of what they might need to anticipate.

We’re starting to see more trans memoirs like yours. Is the reading public ready to embrace trans stories?

There has definitely been a steady interest in trans issues, in part because there are many more out trans people, many more people who have trans family members in their lives, trans people in their communities. But I have my former academic long view that in the broader landscape of books and literature, we’re still at the very, very early stages. If we think about gay and lesbian literature, it’s read by a superbroad public and is considered an integrated part of literature in general. It’s something that I hope for with trans literature as well. And that’s something that I strive to do with my work—to impart ideas and ways of seeing that transcend the individual experiences of the writer.

Tom Beer is the editor-in-chief.