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Bad Fire: A Memoir of Disruption
This book will make you trans.
It is an atheist Torah interpretation with a new spin on the deaths of Nadav and Avihu.
It is a memoir of suicidal hallucination and psychiatric medications.
It is a poem. About butterflies.
Everyone who reads it becomes trans.
It is an atheist Torah interpretation with a new spin on the deaths of Nadav and Avihu.
It is a memoir of suicidal hallucination and psychiatric medications.
It is a poem. About butterflies.
Everyone who reads it becomes trans.
176 pages, Kindle Edition
First published December 1, 2018
2 people are currently reading
22 people want to read
About the author
Tucker Lieberman
29 books225 followersTucker Lieberman is the author of the novel Most Famous Short Film of All Time (tRaum Books, 2022).
He also wrote Ten Past Noon: Focus and Fate at Forty (2020), Painting Dragons: What Storytellers Need to Know About Writing Eunuch Villains (2018), and Bad Fire: A Memoir of Disruption (3rd ed., 2024). His bilingual poetry book, Enkidu is Dead and Not Dead / Enkidu está muerto y no lo está (2021), inspired by the Epic of Gilgamesh, was a finalist in the 2020 Grayson Books poetry contest and nominated for a 2022 SFPA Elgin Award.
His essays and stories are in anthologies including Instant Classic (That No One Will Read) (2023), It Came From the Closet (2022), the 2021 Lambda finalist Trans-Galactic Bike Ride, the 2012 Lambda finalist Letters for my Brothers: Transitional Wisdom in Retrospect, and the 2011 Lambda winner Balancing on the Mechitza: Transgender in Jewish Community.
He and his husband, the science fiction writer Arturo Serrano, live in Bogotá, Colombia.
He also wrote Ten Past Noon: Focus and Fate at Forty (2020), Painting Dragons: What Storytellers Need to Know About Writing Eunuch Villains (2018), and Bad Fire: A Memoir of Disruption (3rd ed., 2024). His bilingual poetry book, Enkidu is Dead and Not Dead / Enkidu está muerto y no lo está (2021), inspired by the Epic of Gilgamesh, was a finalist in the 2020 Grayson Books poetry contest and nominated for a 2022 SFPA Elgin Award.
His essays and stories are in anthologies including Instant Classic (That No One Will Read) (2023), It Came From the Closet (2022), the 2021 Lambda finalist Trans-Galactic Bike Ride, the 2012 Lambda finalist Letters for my Brothers: Transitional Wisdom in Retrospect, and the 2011 Lambda winner Balancing on the Mechitza: Transgender in Jewish Community.
He and his husband, the science fiction writer Arturo Serrano, live in Bogotá, Colombia.
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Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews
April 14, 2025
I cannot say if reading Bad Fire has made me trans. But I know I am changed. Perhaps I am the khilazon, not-caterpillar and not-butterfly, goo that is reshaping itself, unsure of what it will become. Perhaps I will always be the khilazon. Some stories have no simple ending.
Bad Fire is a conversation. The narrator with you. The book with its citations. Society with transness, illness, love, the things that pull us from its tidy structures and threaten its hegemony over facts. The things that remind us that even a fact, a grown man's height in feet, is fluid.
Some parts of Bad Fire felt like revelation. Some felt like me best friend offering my own thoughts back to me, before I'd articulated then in words instead of feelings. That's what a best friend is for. That's what a good book is for, reading you as you read it.
Bad Fire is a conversation. The narrator with you. The book with its citations. Society with transness, illness, love, the things that pull us from its tidy structures and threaten its hegemony over facts. The things that remind us that even a fact, a grown man's height in feet, is fluid.
Some parts of Bad Fire felt like revelation. Some felt like me best friend offering my own thoughts back to me, before I'd articulated then in words instead of feelings. That's what a best friend is for. That's what a good book is for, reading you as you read it.
March 25, 2025
This book promises to make you trans. I guess I am trans now. Or at least, this tumultuous storm of gender, disability, and mental illness, told in a highly literary memoir, may or may not have reordered my brain a little. It is a story of metamorphosis and change—not the pretty externalities of the caterpillar becoming a butterfly, but the messy bits in between, the bit where you're goo, where the things that you believe you are are crushed and liquified and reprocessed into something new.
It's important. It's gorgeous. It even cites me (a nice surprise!). You should read it and see if it will make you trans too.
It's important. It's gorgeous. It even cites me (a nice surprise!). You should read it and see if it will make you trans too.
January 1, 2025
I'm kicking off 2025 by reading a book by one of my favorite authors. If you don't know Tucker Lieberman, run don't walk to grab one of his books---how shall I describe his writing? Well, I just finished VALIS---imagine, a chiller, transer Philip K. Dick, but more Tucker Lieberman, questioning our grasp on ourselves and reality, making conversation about binaries, about good and bad fire, with the touch of a prophet's ecstasy.
Once in a while, one encounters a writer whose writing just really -works-, personally. Lieberman is such a writer for me. I love how consistently conversational and intelligent Bad Fire is; how often it is touching on things I've thought of before, and things I should've thought of, but now someone's pointed them out.
Why trans? My cousin asked me, irritably, when we were discussing another cousin of ours, who had come out as trans this last year (never mind that I am trans. >->) 'What is this magic making people trans?' Magic was the word she used--it's also a word Tucker uses in his book. I could feel she wasn't looking for a real discussion, just a rant about a world that is transing kids willy-nilly, so I didn't engage. [You get a feel for when someone wants to actually talk about something, and when they just want to sullenly bounce a ball against the wall of the world changing too fast for their taste.] If I had the energy though (or if it seemed she had it), I would have asked her: why cis? Why anything? If you have the guts to tell someone what they are (and consistently try to corral them into a mold of that, even as you virulently insist that they were born a certain way and nothing us humans do can or does change it...), then have the guts to accept that some portion of people will go, nope. Anyway.
You do not need to be trans to enjoy this book--if you're not, you'll have transformed anyway by the last page. :> Also love love how Tucker brings in the Torah, the Bible, philosophers, poets, and writers old and new, also personal images and photos, to make this a very personal but relatable text, both extremely up-to-date (last updated in 2024) and touching all the way back into antiquity.
Once in a while, one encounters a writer whose writing just really -works-, personally. Lieberman is such a writer for me. I love how consistently conversational and intelligent Bad Fire is; how often it is touching on things I've thought of before, and things I should've thought of, but now someone's pointed them out.
Why trans? My cousin asked me, irritably, when we were discussing another cousin of ours, who had come out as trans this last year (never mind that I am trans. >->) 'What is this magic making people trans?' Magic was the word she used--it's also a word Tucker uses in his book. I could feel she wasn't looking for a real discussion, just a rant about a world that is transing kids willy-nilly, so I didn't engage. [You get a feel for when someone wants to actually talk about something, and when they just want to sullenly bounce a ball against the wall of the world changing too fast for their taste.] If I had the energy though (or if it seemed she had it), I would have asked her: why cis? Why anything? If you have the guts to tell someone what they are (and consistently try to corral them into a mold of that, even as you virulently insist that they were born a certain way and nothing us humans do can or does change it...), then have the guts to accept that some portion of people will go, nope. Anyway.
You do not need to be trans to enjoy this book--if you're not, you'll have transformed anyway by the last page. :> Also love love how Tucker brings in the Torah, the Bible, philosophers, poets, and writers old and new, also personal images and photos, to make this a very personal but relatable text, both extremely up-to-date (last updated in 2024) and touching all the way back into antiquity.
March 10, 2025
This book will make you trans. So it promises. Everyone who reads it becomes trans, and trans is “a flexible beginning” for which “you can pick your own secret suffix”. Now that I’ve read it, I have the happy privilege to dwell awhile on what suffix I’ll pick. In Lieberman’s work both fictional and non, everything is connected to everything, so this book is all about being trans while also mostly about other things: part memoir of mental illness, part freewheeling atheistic Torah exegesis, part interloping philosophical musing, part raspberry blown at corporate cowardice and absurdity. “You could be a vice president by now if you could hold the soup from both sides of your spoon,” kvetches the Serious World at us. (We smirk and ignore it. We put the trans in intransigent.) Lieberman warps and wefts all these fascinating threads together with inimitable gentle humour and wisdom.
September 6, 2022
"Usually, we are not seeking our true selves because we are already right here inside ourselves. We are, more precisely, trying to pronounce our own names."
This is an intelligent and moving memoir. As the author explores their own life and what has informed and created them, the reader is taken on their own personal journey questioning who and why they are.
It is honest, and both frightening and enlightening being confronted with how our own mind can terrorize us.
Highly recommended.
This is an intelligent and moving memoir. As the author explores their own life and what has informed and created them, the reader is taken on their own personal journey questioning who and why they are.
It is honest, and both frightening and enlightening being confronted with how our own mind can terrorize us.
Highly recommended.
Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews