laura_sackton's Reviews (170)

Reread: Look, my people. It's my favorite book. What can I say?

Perfect. Perfect. Perfect. It is perfect.
The most earnest book I have ever read.
To be alive--what wild, beautiful grace.

We take care of ourselves by taking care of each other.
We take care of ourselves by taking care of each other.
We take care of ourselves by taking care of each other.

Forgiveness but make it real & tangled.
Hilarious and cutting!
With a tender, opening heart.

Intergenerational queer wonder.
The specificity of this singular queer language.
Oh, my beating heart.

Gender is made up!
Queerness is performance!
Lots of sex, lots of eating, lots of existential anguish! 

Your gender is up to you.
You can be a fig tree or a bee.
You can be stardust, you can be a canoe.

Bicycles! Bicycles!
All about them!
Drawings and charts and photos and letters and stories and scribbles, too.

Maximilist manifesto.
Wtf is happening?
In love, for sure.

I mean. Okay. I don’t know what happened. I don’t know if this book has a plot. The whole book felt wet and heavy and long a monologue or stream of consciousness but also like a fantasy and a dream, some blend of meditations, journals, letters, confessions, philosophy, records, witness, gossip.

What I can’t stop thinking about is this idea of a certain kind of language. Like, what language is this book written in? I just started listening to Aster of Ceremonies and so I’m thinking about the kinds of language we use and how we use it, and who language is for, and I’m wondering: is this book a kind of trans language? The way Aurora writes about her life, which is decadent, in your face, teasing, very lush and flowery but also funny and sharp…who is she speaking to? What kind of language is she using? What is the alphabet? 

There’s something so compelling about this book because it does not cater or coddle. Aurora describes brutality and pleasure with the same kind of visceral detail. She doesn’t seem interested in creating a cohesive narrative, and the book certainly doesn’t end with any kind of resolution. It’s more like: here are all the messes I lived, here are some things I thought, I was a fairy, I’m a trans girl now, here is some love I loved, some horror I experienced, I’m going to write it like a fairy tale/dream/song/album/gossip column, I’m going to write it and not make myself into a heroine. I’m not going to go on a journey. It’s all a jumble. Mixed in with this are musings on songs, literature, empire. 

I’m thinking a lot about the musings on empire because I think a lot of this book is trying to find a way to tell a trans story outside of empire’s grasp. It’s that and the decadence of language that makes this book feel like a sister to Lote. Both are about women who are trying to build their own archives, who are trying to tell their story in a way that empire won’t be able to co-opt. That's what will stick with me, this idea of writing against empire, and doing it by writing something deeply trans and deeply incoherent, so that you can’t really hold it all at once. So that there is nothing in it to commodify. There is nothing in this book that can be turned into money. Even the pain. Maybe that is why the awful parts did not feel gratuitous. The density with which the text is woven makes it impossible untangle and use for something it’s not. It’s too much itself. You can’t unbend it.  

The book ends like this:

“But whatever this is, it’s still happening. I’m here. I’m about to strike a match.”

And I think that sums up a lot of it. Aurora is here in her queer trans life and she’s here. She’s going where she’s going and she’s lighting matches. There is no bigger meaning.

I loved all the music and poetry references. There is also this whole section where Aurora is trying to sell her first book and agents keep rejecting her and sending her these emails about how she has promise, and it’s so interesting to think about that in the context of this book, not only because it’s a book that sold, but because it's a book that's so far outside, so deeply queer, so deeply immersed in trans language, that it’s wild it got published, and it’s also kind of hilarious reading about the publishing nonsense the character goes through. 

More and more I am turning to queer and trans lit to teach me how to be in the world. Not to make sense of the world, exactly, but to teach me how to witness, how to record experiences in ways that are both hidden and plain. This book showed me one way.

Someone on Goodreads said it was unapologetically maximalist and building a new grammar, and yes, I agree. I think that is what is so interesting about it, the way she reframes the novel as an exploration, excavation, divination, not as something to move through from point A to point B. 

There are: text messages, emails, letters, songs, poems, translations, photos, illustrations, footnotes, texts-within-the-text, social media posts, religious images, screenshots. It’s so expansive. 

Four translators.
Thinking about cultural translations as well as lingual translations.
Thinking about what I missed.

Such a tiny world in a city.
Such an infinite world in a city.
Black queer endlessness.