Beck Rourke-Mooney wants everyone to fall down the wrestling rabbit hole with their YA debut We Are Mayhem. The novel follows Birdie, a former gymnast who has returned to their family’s hometown in search of a new sport to showcase their athletic prowess and help them fit in. But when a prank gone wrong lands Birdie with a job working for local wrestling star Mabel and her granddaughter Abigail Rose, they’re swept into the ensuing battle between Abigail Rose and her cousins for creative direction of Mayhem, an amateur wrestling show and the family business. When Birdie agrees to help Abigail gain control of the business from her close-minded cousins by signing on to become a wrestler, they contend with their inner turmoil around body image, femininity, and gender. In a conversation with PW, Rourke-Mooney shared how they got bit by the wrestling bug, their interest in challenging the binary, and the intersections of identity and performance.

How did you first become interested in wrestling and what made you want to center the sport in your debut?

​​I had never been a fan of wrestling. When I was younger, it kind of terrified me. Even when people told me it was fake, I would see it as very real. But my partner had a brain injury and was not able to follow very complicated plots any longer, and started to watch wrestling, which he had watched when he was younger. And while I was watching it, I was just like, “Oh, I’ve totally misunderstood this. This is actually silly and very fun.” There's a lot of catharsis in the act of violence.

I realized that there is this concept in wrestling called kayfabe, which is where the identity of the performer and the character that they're playing are conflated. They would go out in public and would pretend to be the person that they played on stage. It was that concept of kayfabe that initially gave me the idea that when you’re trying on an identity, it becomes who you are. I was thinking about how when we go through life, we try things on and sometimes we stick with them and sometimes we don’t. That’s part of the process and that’s fine. It occurred to me that the concept of identity for teenagers might be an interesting idea to start playing with in a coming-of-age novel.

A quote in the book that aptly describes Birdie and their initial relationship to femininity is, “I know there’s no one right way to be a girl. But sometimes it feels like the world thinks there is, and I’m not it.” Can you talk more about the pressures Birdie is referencing in the novel?

Birdie is told at a very pivotal moment [in their gymnastics career], “You can’t achieve in this because your body is not what we want to see.” Birdie’s power and their ability to become the strongest version of themselves was at odds with all of the messaging they’re receiving. Then they get into this [wrestling] world, where it’s the opposite, and they’re accessing those parts of themselves that they have tamped down in order to fit into this world. When I was younger, boys would say to me, “You’re too fast and too strong. You can’t be a girl.” Birdie has been dealing with all the flashbacks to things that people have said to them and the ways in which they’ve shrunk themselves into the point where they only want to be perfect. A very common experience for people who are socialized as females is to be so worried about growing in the “wrong” direction, that you’re like “I’m going to be this perfect student” and then realize you want to be messier than that. I want to access permission inside of myself to be all of these things that I have felt like I’m trying to preemptively censor out of myself.

How does the gender binary act as a boundary in Birdie’s quest to become a wrestler?

At the beginning with Abigail Rose, it’s just like, “Well, these are the rules, and they’re the rules because the boys say that they’re the rules.” And the rules are, you’re different, so you are relegated to a secondary category. And this isn’t a free discussion. Abigail and Bird realize that it doesn’t have to be that way. In fact, by having that separation, there are inherently aspects that are being excluded, and there are limitations that don’t need to be there, on both sides of the coin. The crux of why the binary is problematic is because it’s not true. Bird and Abigail are [dealing with] the men of Mayhem, who came out of a matrilineal lineage that they’re no longer honoring. And going forward, what does that mean for this new generation? How do we give honor to the divine feminine lineage of Mabel, and incorporate the history of the men of Mayhem, and then pull it into the future? [The answer is] by stepping outside of that binary, and into the diversity of actual nature.

How does wrestling play with expectations of femininity?

In the typical socialization of females, in the cultural lens that I’m presenting, so much gets sublimated in terms of aggression, of being comfortable looking like a crazed mess. Just being able to unleash that raw emotion and get aggressive and dominate and bring forth aspects that are typically socialized out of those who are raised as female. I love when at one point, Birdie asks, “When is it my turn to go apeshit in the ring?” That idea of letting yourself not think about what’s socially acceptable, not think about what parameters you’ve been conditioned to operate under, but to allow that shadow material that gets shoved down to rise up, and to not feel shame but feel emboldened and empowered by that instead.

We Are Mayhem by Beck Rourke-Mooney. Feiwel and Friends, $19.99 Mar. 19 ISBN 978-1-2508-3659-5