Very very dense, for something I'm not that interested in. Got 200 pages in and realized I was still not into it.

I don't get it 

It didn't rock my world but it was nice enough. glad the protagonist worked on her casual transphobia.

I read this book in one go, thought "this was amazing, probably just a bit too bleak to be a believable story". Then I opened The Storygraph to mark it as complete and found out it was a memoir.

Bon.

I really liked the division of the book into short scenes of daily life, or of an extraordinary nature. The love of languages and the loathing of every horrible thing life can throw at us meshed into a heartbreaking story that I think I'll read over and over and over, when I'm ready to face it again.

That was a lot of wasted paper just to have an excuse to call trans people dangerous and perverted.

I wanted to read a book about female Ethiopian warriors. What I got instead was the story of a man who likes to rape everyone he runs into. Stopped midway as there were more pages detailing sexual assaults than pages without.

Also, this book has my pet peeve of not marking dialogue. Why do you do this, authors? Why do you want to confuse your readers?

This aged surprisingly well, but is very surface level (which can be forgiven, given the landscape of the time on the topic). Good as an intro or to read classics.

 

In a memoir & investigation very similar in structure and messaging to Alex Marzano-Lesvenich's The fact of a body, Casey Parks tells us her own story as she tries to uncover the life of a (seemingly) transgender man in rural Louisiana in the 70s.

The memoir begins as her mother makes it very clear that Casey being a lesbian is a sin and that she'd be better off dead. Except that her grandma barges in, defends Casey, and gives her one mission:

From there, Casey begins an 18-year long process of investigating in her grandmother's hometown. During this time, we see her leaving Louisiana for Mississippi, then for Portland, where she can be the lesbian that she is without judgment - but she's far from home, and she longs for this state that never could accept her as she is. Starting from there, we slowly, excruciatingly slowly, learn about Roy alongside her, and hear everyone call Roy a she, a he-she-it, a morphodite, and learn of how much Roy hated himself for it, just as much as his devout Christian neighbours did. In the meantime, Casey mends; she tolerates Louisiana, learns to love her mother again against all odds, they dance together and they get so close to happiness, and that's the real story, of course.

I read this book in two sittings, mostly because I was too tired from crying to finish it in one go. I had to take regular breaks to cry, actually, and probably ended up more dehydrated than I should have. And as I put the book down every half hour to breathe and remind myself that I wasn't there, that I'm allowed to exist, that everything will be okay, my partner asked me: "why don't you just stop reading it if it makes you feel so terrible?" I laughed in their face, and got back to reading, and crying, and reading.

All in all: please read this book.