Thanks to Viking Books for the free advance copy of this book.

Meredith Talusan was born a boy with albinism in the Philippines. After a childhood of being treated like a public spectacle, Talusan immigrated to the U.S. at fifteen and discovered that in America, she was perceived as white. Her memoir covers these years as well as her education at Harvard and beyond, where she struggled to fit in to white gay male culture, eventually coming to the conclusion that she did not want to fit in the box labeled "man" at all.

FAIREST is one of the knottiest, most intriguing memoirs I've ever read. It takes a close look at the malleability of race and gender and how Talusan slides between labels based on where she is and who she is talking to, whether she wants to bend the barriers or not. And her trans-ness isn't even always the center of the story. FAIREST also encompasses stories we're familiar with from other "types" of memoirs - child of immigrants, child star, queer coming of age, and more.

I was a bit leery of the blurb on the back of the galley describing Talusan as a boy who became a woman, but that turned out to be accurate, and one of the best things about this memoir. Rather than your now-standard-if-outdated story of "a woman trapped in a man's body," Talusan doesn't generally struggle with physical dysphoria and does not tell a tale of knowing she was trans from a young age. Instead, as an adult, she simply comes to find that she cannot express her full self when performing masculinity. It's a broadening of the trans canon that I think is greatly needed.