asmalldyke’s Reviews > Otros valles > Status Update

"No. She walks up to me and smiles. In a playful,
almost skeptical, loud voice she asks, Oh my god, are you trans? I love
tr***ies! She doesn't introduce herself, she doesn't sit down, she
simply stands there grinning like she's just won a fucking prize."
Huh, this is very similar to a bit in Ryka Aoki's To The New World, iirc...

Trying to decide how much to read into this book's meta analysis of itself, projected or otherwise:
"But this book has done the opposite – it welcomed me with its fluid
prose, kept me close with the uncertainty of the narrator regarding her
language, history, and place in the world, a narrative that seems to
wander yet cuts ever nearer to a specific concern, even as it already
nears the next object of interest."

I am blown away each time this book brings up like, being autistic or asexual, with relation to being trans. These concepts were not in my head in 2014 and I wish they were.

Ay wait a sec:
"But on the other hand, the book reminds me of other books I've read
which give the reader a thin layer of narrative to stand on, which works
in the service of arguments the author seeks to advance, books in which
the narrative is an afterthought, books in which the characters are but
thinly veiled representatives for certain philosophies or beliefs,
cardboard cut-outs being moved around an empty set."

There's a lot about community, both as a queer person and broadly in this book, and personally I have mixed feelings about it. What's so great about community anyway?

Y'know, pathetically, I think this is the first book I've ever read with a non-binary transfemme protagonist.

I hate to "Like Nevada But" this book, however they draw comparison because(intertext aside!) the nameless woman in this is so deeply in touch with her personal, social, mental, societal problems, compared to Maria Griffiths' constant detachment. Sincerity Nevada, a stream of consciousness that is tender and considered instead of brash and weird.

"like the white trans women who proudly made a collection of trans women's fiction and only published white trans
women,"
Actually drawing a blank on what this is referring to. Not *The Collection*, but what?

"On the internet I keep hearing about it, but I never read Imogen
Binnie's book. I read the first pages in the used bookstore in downtown
Lincoln, and as I was reading it I kept thinking that it was good, that it
had good ideas and those ideas might even help with the issues I was
already running into – coming out at school and work, dating while
trans."
*points enthusiastically* LOOK, INTERTEXT!!!

"A family might
rather you were weak and miserable with them and their thousand
daily acts of invalidation and insult than elsewhere out of their
controlling hands and happier and supported by others."
This book is really good at making very heavy observations very saliently.