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November 15, 2021
Essayist and UC Berkeley professor Lavery debuts with a surreal speculative memoir that’s by turns engrossing and impenetrable. As indicated by the book’s subtitle, Lavery aims to rub out the dividing line between the intellectual and the bawdy to subvert the typical transgender memoir (or, as one friend interprets the genre: “expositions of trans life as it is lived”). Recounting how she solved her “penis problem” and began taking synthetic estrogen, Lavery explores transcendental erotic self-realization, her history of drug and alcohol use, and the paradigmatic concept of the penis (“an organ defined, at least in the Lacanian tradition, by its failure to be a phallus”) through absurdist tall tales. She receives a series of bizarre letters from a group of clowns; relishes a sexually charged FAQ for finger limes (a podlike type of citrus) from “Hole Foods”; and ruminates on a parodic column about Little Shop of Horrors from Trump biographer (and former media mogul turned convicted faudster) Conrad Black. It’s not the blurring of distinctions between fantasy and reality that clouds the book’s clarity, however, but Lavery’s deeply academic discourse; without a comprehensive knowledge of Dickens and Lacan, many readers will too often be left in the dark trying to decipher what it is Lavery is attempting to say. LGBTQ literati will find much to explore, but others may have more homework to do first. Agent: Alison Lewis, Zoë Pagnamenta.

January 1, 2022

Lavery (English, Univ. of California, Berkeley; Quaint, Exquisite) brings her writing talents to this collection of personal essays musing on everything from literary criticism to popular culture to feminism. Lavery tells her story as a story of bodies: messy, overlapping, intersecting, and intersectional bodies, each of which belongs to yet evades the language written on, around, and about them. Never shy at finding the humor in even the most mundane of situations, the author hilariously recounts her life a trans woman in the public eye. Her relationship with fellow writer Danny Lavery comes into focus with her trademark wit and occasional self-deprecation. The construction and artificiality, the boundaries, the beauty--it's all here, in Lavery's body and the bodies of lovers and friends. Chapters are at once meandering and conversational, like a long chat with a friend who's telling a story you have to hear. VERDICT These collected essays, letters, humorous anecdotes, and self-reflections play with form and genre and defy boundaries. While Lavery's book is ostensibly a memoir, it riotously disrupts generic conventions and brings readers along for the ride.--Emily Bowles

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