In her book Dinner on Monster Island, Tania De Rozario looks at her experiences growing up in Singapore and how she often felt monstrous and othered as a queer, brown, fat girl.

The essays recount traumatic life events such as getting gay-exorcized at age twelve and connects them with elements of history, pop culture and horror films.

De Rozario is a Vancouver-based writer and artist whose other books include Lambda Literary Award finalist And The Walls Come Crumbling Down and Tender Delirium.

She spoke with The Next Chapter's Ryan B. Patrick about Dinner on Monster Island and the stories it shares.

I was coming back from school and my mother met me at the bus stop, which already my spidey senses told me that something was happening. What had happened was two of her friends from our church had shown up at our apartment and said that God had sent them there and they had successfully convinced my grandmother to convert from Catholicism to the brand of evangelical Christianity that my mom was and it was kind of a shock to me because my grandmother had been Catholic her whole life. She was a really loyal Catholic.

We went upstairs and I was told to, you know, just go do my usual after school things. When I emerged, my mother's two friends took great umbrage, for lack of a better word, at the fact that I was so-called "dressed like a boy."

Everyone read lesbian tendencies into that and that's how the exorcism started. It was a seven-hour process of what they said was not yelling at me, but yelling at what was inside of me to try and get them out and a lot of prayer and casting and laying of hands, etc.

That's a really interesting question. I don't think she did. I think it was circumstance, the circumstance of them coming over, being so-called "led by God" to our apartment

That intersected with concerns she already had about me and my sexuality. I think those two just happened to meet at an unlucky junction. To my knowledge, I don't think it's something that she planned, but it's definitely something that she let happen.

I absolutely loved it. I think the first time I watched it, when I was a younger teenager, I didn't connect with it the way I do now. I thought of it more in terms of like, "Oh, these effects are really outdated. And how much is this scaring me? How much is this not scaring me?"

I think it took me a while to get into horror and to rewatch it to connect with it in terms of what it means to turn someone you know into a monster or perceive someone as a monster.

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I think people discover their difference when they realize they can't pass through society in the same way other people do. And this can be any kind of difference. We can be talking about race, we can be talking about sexuality, we can be talking about gender. The ease with which one passes through the world without question, without punishment, without difficulty. When you move through the world differently, the deeper your knowledge of that difference gets as you get older.

I had just come to Canada and my mother had died earlier that year. I got my first assignment in the writing program I was in, and it was to write a letter to someone.

The instinct to write that letter to her was immediate. By the time I got to the end of that essay, I realized I wanted not just to be angry, but to feel all the feelings that come with grief.

That is very complicated, because when you lose someone you love, you grieve the loss of that person and the loss of that relationship. But when you grieve the death of someone who had a big role in your life because they harmed you when they were supposed to be taking care of you, you don't necessarily grieve the loss of that person or the relationship. You grieve the relationship that never was. And that comes with a lot of anger and deep disappointment and maybe even some catharsis. You might possibly have no love for this person who died and yet, you're wrestling with these big emotions.