A man mistaken in David Ebershoff's 'Danish Girl'

February 24, 2000
Web posted at: 5:21 p.m. EST (2221 GMT)

By Jayne L. Bowman
Special to CNN Interactive

(CNN) -- While writing about the first sex-change patient in his novel, "The Danish Girl" (Viking), David Ebershoff shared one fear with his hero. He was afraid of being misinterpreted, misread.

"I was very, very concerned that people would not read the book how I intended," says Ebershoff from his home in New York. "I wanted people to get beyond the fact that it was a book about the first sex change. Taking a story that just screams tabloid headlines and writing about it in a thoughtful, careful, quiet way was challenging."

Initially, Ebershoff doubted he was up to that challenge. It was while skimming a friend's book that he first encountered Einar Wegener, the precedent-setting Danish transsexual.

"It was literally a parenthetical mention. I was surprised because I'd always thought Christine Jorgensen was the first sex change," he says.

Intrigued, he researched Wegener at the library and uncovered a story as moving as it was scandalous.

"I thought, 'Someone will write an amazing book about this,' but I didn't think I could," explains Ebershoff. "I'd never been to Denmark in my life. I thought the book was beyond me. But it stuck with me and six months later, I went back to it and thought, 'I have to try!'"

The raw facts of the true story sound like an offbeat fairy tale. It begins in 1920s Denmark, with a pair of married painters. Einar is a shy Dane, Gerda a bombastic, beautiful, rich, rebellious American expatriate.

Cliches aside, these opposites truly attracted. Years into the happy and loving marriage, Gerda (called Greta in the novel) senses Einar's struggle with his sexual identity even before he does. She asks Einar to pose for her in stockings so that she might finish a portrait of an absent female subject.

'Lili' comes to life

On that day, with Greta as a figurative midwife, Einar's alter-ego, "Lili," is born. Lili evolves, grows and gains confidence until Einar lives half his life as a man, half as a woman. As Lili flourishes, so does Greta's career as an artist; her paintings of Lili become wildly popular.

Eventually, Einar decides to become Lili permanently, enduring a series of untested medical operations. The first operation is successful. The second one is fatal.

What fascinated Ebershoff were not the groundbreaking medical details of the operations, nor was it the social implication of what it means to turn a man into a woman. What caught and held Ebershoff was Greta.

"What type of woman would stay with her husband through this?" wonders Ebershoff. "She was a woman who would do anything to help her marriage survive. She wanted to help her husband finally become happy, though ultimately that would destroy her marriage."

Ebershoff sees Greta's plight as simple, and the heart of the real story: What do you do when the person you love changes?

"It's a question that enters every relationship that ever was," he explains. So universal was this question that it inspired Ebershoff to choose this rather risky historical event as the basis for his first novel.

"People sometimes ask me why I wrote this as a novel instead of as a nonfiction book," Ebershoff says. "It's because the terrain that I'm exploring, the emotions, aren't documented, as is the case in most marriages. The private thoughts aren't known and that's what I wanted to pursue here. I took it to my imagination and to the skills of fiction writing in order to write about this marriage."

So Ebershoff explores the nature of change and a model of true love via this incredible story. With the artists' tale, Ebershoff challenges readers to realize that "people change."

"One of the most difficult things of managing any romantic relationship is whether the people involved are willing to change together," he says. "Everything around you is shifting, including yourselves, but you still have this base upon which the relationship was first founded."

He also considers the idea of being "born into the wrong shell" a universal feeling.

"Everyone at some time or another has looked into the mirror and thought, 'That's not who I am. The world sees me differently than I see myself,'" Ebershoff explains.

From computing to publishing

That's heavy stuff for a first-time novelist, but in his role as publishing director of the modern library for Random House, Ebershoff is used to weighty literature. Ebershoff, 31, deals with the classics daily.

You'd think that to achieve such success at such a young age, one would have to have been working in publishing when other kids were working on paper routes -- not so, apparently. Ebershoff took a different route. He studied English and East Asian Studies in college, then lived in Tokyo for a year, only to return to work at a Boston computer firm.

The computer job "wasn't where I wanted to be," says Ebershoff, so he went to business school in Chicago. There, he began writing short stories and became familiar with the publishing world. Now, he's an author and an accomplished publisher.

"It was a lot of being at the right place at the right time," he explains. "And, a lot of people took a chance on me."

So he has evolved, much like Einar. Ebershoff feels everyone can take a cue from Einar, whom he considers a man brave enough to be who he really was, despite his past, despite his environment. Ebershoff grew to admire the man who would be a woman.

"When I traveled to Copenhagen alone to conduct research, I didn't tell anyone why I was going," he recalls. "People would ask me why I was vacationing alone in Denmark. I'd tell them 'I have a friend there.'"

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