Vollmann began seriously cross-dressing in 2008 and developed a female alter ego named Dolores.

“'Dolores is a relatively young woman trapped in this fat, aging male body,' Mr. Vollmann said.

He describes the transformation as a vision quest to get into the mind of a female character he was writing, but also has mentioned liking the feel of women's clothes.

His experimentation in cross-dressing started in the late 1980s, while living in San Francisco and writing Seven Dreams, about the settlement of North America.

Maybe he did, however his prose does not reflect it: instead, he comes off, by the end, as an anxious mansplainer, uneasy about the feminine subject he has chosen.