This is where Long Covid meets trans being: “Muscles made of plastic” tells what no book has ever told about
In Selma Kay Matter’s painfully beautiful prose debut “Muscles made of Plastic,” a nonbinary main character from Zurich suffers from chronic fatigue syndrome. An encounter in Munich.
The jacket fits. Selma Kay Matter currently lives between Berlin and Leipzig, seen here passing through Munich.
Image: Thomas Studer
September morning in Munich, a bench in the middle of the pretty Gärtnerplatz. “It’s extremely unusual for me to talk about my writing in Swiss German,” says Selma Kay Matter in broad Züridütsch. And then talks about his own writing as if it were a big habit.
The pitch of this Züridütsch is that of a tenor, but used to be higher. Matter was born as a girl in Zurich in 1998 and today describes herself as a nonbinary trans person. On this September morning, Matter has a short haircut and a black and red motorcycle jacket.
Matter grew up as “Selma Matter” and the first texts appeared under that name. For around a year now, the name “Kay” has stood between the first and last names: Selma Kay Matter. Matter’s prose debut “Muskeln aus Plastik” has now been published under this name. A book that tells what no book has ever told.
In bed 23 hours a day
The main character in “Muscles Made of Plastic” is a 24-year-old named Kay. Kay grew up in Zurich as a girl named Selma, but now lives as a nonbinary person in Berlin and is flirting with the idea of testosterone therapy in order to transition to male gender.
Actually the moment to properly reshape your own identity. But after a Covid infection, Kay is suffering from the most brutal form of Long Covid: a chronic and as yet incurable disease with the clunky name Myalgic Encephalomyelitis/Chronic Fatigue Syndrome (ME/CFS).
Selma Kay Matter: Muscles made of plastic. Hanser Berlin. 240 pages.
Hanser
The disease massively weakens those affected and replaces their lack of energy with pain. Kay has to spend “an average of 23 hours a day” in bed. Greater excitement means a “wave of limb, lung and joint pain combined with abysmal exhaustion,” which causes Kay’s thinking to become “foggy” “and every breath hurts.” Greater efforts trigger collapses that last for days.
Because of shortness of breath, Kay cannot wear a binder – the garment that flattens a woman’s breast so that it appears to be a man’s. And a gate-free expression of sexuality, as is crucial for the queer main character in Kim de l’Horizon’s “Blood Book”, is also forbidden. “Babe, this is way too strenuous for you,” a lover says to Kay when they are both sweatily entwined in each other. So the two lie down next to each other and read on their e-readers.
Therapy works in parts, letters provide comfort. Kay reads through meters of literature written by those affected by other chronic illnesses. And write about your own disability, because that means ME/CFS. Writing is a means of mental orientation and structure of painful hours – as well as a means of proof: to make the ME/CFS disease, which is invisible to the eye, communicable, “to force the events to leave lasting traces”.
Write to get through the days
Anyone who smells autofiction here can boast of a capable nose. Like her own main character of the same name, Selma Kay Matter grew up in Zurich and Italy and now lives in Germany. After graduating from high school, Matter first studied dramatic writing at the Hildesheim Literary Institute, then in Berlin. The plays created in Berlin deal with climate and queerness, several of which can be seen on major German-speaking stages.
In the fall of 2022, when Matter’s theater career was just beginning to take off, ME/CFS intervened. “Six months after I had Covid, I was really, really sick and just in bed for a few months,” says Matter in Munich. “To get through my days, to endure them, I started collecting notes.”
Matter writes diary-like snippets about his own illness. And reads literary reports of illness by authors like Anne Boyer, who talks about her cancer in “Die Unsterblichen” (2019), or Pochorista Khakpor, who writes about her own Lyme disease in “Sick” (2018). “I was just looking for something that talked about the things that concern me.”
However, Matter did not find any literary texts about his own ME/CFS illness at the time. Just like those who think about the simultaneity of becoming ill and being trans.
“A less interesting reading”
Because there are no texts that depict Matter’s reality or at least expressly relate to it, Matter fills the gap itself. Expands your own notes and turns them into “muscles made of plastic”. In an attempt to be able to offer other people in similar situations literary medicine or at least relief in the future. “This book is for everyone who needs it,” is the dedication.
It is foreseeable that many people will mentally merge the character Kay and the real person Matter into one. Although some magical-realist parts of the book (which calls itself an “essay”) are recognizably fictional. “People always think that everything is autobiographical and say: Oh, that’s your story, exactly how it happened, blah, blah,” laughs Matter and adds: “I don’t find that an interesting reading.”
It’s true – reading “Muscles Made of Plastic” is not worth it because it would satisfy some voyeuristic greed. The book names suffering without whining.
In tender flashbacks, Kay remembers her own childhood in Zurich as Selma. Selma is queer without consciously knowing it, would like to express herself but can’t. The speechlessness about one’s own condition shows through in anorexia and scratched upper arms. As an unconscious strategy to communicate, to find a visible expression for something invisible.
It’s the same question that later plagues Kay as a result of her ME/CFS illness – and to which “muscles made of plastic” itself is the painfully beautiful answer. Matter skilfully ties all of this together in a form that avoids the danger of slippery navel-gazing: the book regularly interrupts the thoughts and experiences of its main character by interspersing bits of quotes from the texts that Kay reads for comfort.
So that the quotes theoretically classify and open up what was told before and what is told afterwards further illustrates or twists the theoretical idea. Accessible with footnotes and an explanatory glossary if terms are too academic or stagey (which happens often, you can be forgiven). “Muscles made of plastic” is a sparkling non-fiction book and a theoretically based story at the same time. And an invitation to understanding.
Rejection of smooth ending
“Muscles made of plastic” rejects the longing for a standard end in the form of complete healing or death. Kay doesn’t recover, but comes to terms with things. Find support in literature, loving relationships and the hope for a society that is openly supportive of disability and queerness.
To which the book itself of course makes a contribution. Maybe even to the extent that the huge media interest in non-binarity here is no longer limited to just a few people who make it into the mainstream, as Matter notes in the interview? Well, beyond such arguments, “Muscles made of Plastic” deserves attention simply because the book is touching, opens up new connections and trains the empathy of its audience – i.e. does what good literature does.
Selma Kay Matter: Muscles made of plastic. Hanser Berlin. 240 pages.
On October 26th, Selma Kay Matter will read in Zurich, on October 27th in Winterthur, and on November 17th in Basel.