I started Detransition, Baby as research for the final critical paper of my MFA program, but also at the suggestion of a very dear friend! With both leisure and academic reading occurring at once I was admittedly nervous; I didn’t want to miss anything, or worse have to read it twice when I was already so pressed for time. Although after one page, I wasn’t sure what I was so worried about: the prose was so smooth and engrossing, while also being charming, comical, and just a dash heart wrenching.
The story tells of three women-- two trans and one cis-- as they tackle an unexpected pregnancy and what it means, to each of them, to be(come) a parent. You can’t predict one moment of the plot, which I loved, but also you almost couldn’t predict the tone; there are moments of hilarity that blended right into hard-hitting somber scenes that saw me taking me a break before coming back. There are entire passages I copied down in my notebook to have whenever I need them. Peters knew where to hit and struck perfectly and carefully.
As a trans man, reading this book was such a breath of fresh air. While this is written by a trans woman about the lives of trans women, I felt so seen by this story and the struggles of the characters-- while also learning some things too. Peters makes the pages of Detransition, Baby a safe space to explore preconceived notions, prejudice, and privilege, even if it’s about your own community.
Torrey Peters is supposed to publish another book this year with Random House (INFECT YOUR FRIENDS AND LOVED ONES) and I can’t wait. If it’s anything like Detransition, Baby, it’s going to be a treat for us all.
Hello everyone! Book club time! I want to start 2022 off by saying I’m going to be sharing more of my reading choices and thoughts with you all, like a little book club-- starting off with a recent ARC I received: Motion Sickness by Dion Anja!
Maybe you remember last term I read Anja’s first poetry collection, My Dawn Is Only Five Hours Away and it was so lovely and captivating. It had so many hidden gems of verse and prose that I frequently turned the page feeling like I had found something special: a secret between me and my copy. Motion Sickness delivers in the same way (no surprise at all, coming from Anja)! “Alone” in particular is a ten line poem that struck me so deep, I immediately had to copy down the last three lines to keep for myself.
The collection is an exploration in personal growth, intergenerational struggles, mortality, and personhood (especially when alone)-- all while being in early adulthood. It's a fantastic read, and leaves just enough space in the proverbial margins for the reader to mull over Anja's work for multiple days.
Motion Sickness comes out February 8, 2022! Be sure to pick up a copy!
Thank you @dionyrtal for crafting such wonderful collections and for sharing them with us.
My Dawn Is Only Five Hours Away my first piece of “pandemic” reading for my graduate reading list; everything had been written before March 2020 and hadn’t been touched by that whirlwind of global and personal emotions. I was so eager to dive in and because of the intentional “raw feeling” editing style, the poems that were going to hit me (in terms of being able to relate, not “taste”) hit twice as hard. Most pages completely transported me back a year.
My Dawn was grounded and human, with creative and unique figures of speech I’m still thinking about after my first read (people as pomegranates?! i’m in love with that). The collection is beautiful as it is actively hurting, something buried just deep enough for our hands to find within the pages. It was an extremely cathartic read. I appreciate the heart and honesty put into the 20+ poems documenting an extremely traumatic time-- both the present or in the memories it brought up.
I finished this collection in one sitting absolutely dying to immediately reread to discover new meanings. It is layered and able to be read at many levels-- something I, a non-frequenter of poetry collections, will be taken to task with in the most delightful way. Thank you for sharing your work @dionyrtal !
Favorite Lines:
-“no, it can’t find the courage to yearn in words.” [Let Me Pass This Earth]
-“Extra Extra / Everyone is at home and why are you awake” [Extra Extra]
-“[...] the gasoline / burning already with no flames apparent / fumes of alarm at the heart long gone.” [The Story of The Man Who Burned Himself]
~ If you can, please considering supporting the author and purchasing this incredible collection. ~
“The Way We Live Now” was recommended during the last workshop of my MFA residency this past June-- for the life of me I can’t remember what type of story we were workshopping... maybe one with a ghost? Something spiritual, where someone was dead the whole time, or dying, rather. Doesn’t matter; I got this story out of it. In the ~7,800 words of this piece it’s almost as if there is a ghost haunting the page: floating from line to line, mouth to mouth, Quentin to Max to Kate to Aileen, all the way back to you. And what will you do with the fluctuating health of the central character that is never the main narrator?
I don’t mean to state the obvious with something written by Sontag, but there is such a possession that happens when you start reading this story. Sontag begins at break-neck speed, introducing you to everyone and no one at the same time. In the first sentence alone, you are introduced to five people that are, for the moment, just mouthpieces for the secondhand, almost “things you’d be hearing at a cross-friend group-coffee-meetup” information about the nameless central character.
“At first he was just losing weight, he felt only a little ill, Max said to Ellen, and he didn’t call for an appointment with his doctor, according to Greg, because he was managing to keep on working at more or less the same rhythm, but he did stop smoking, Tanya pointed out, which suggests he was frightened, but also that he wanted, even more than he knew, to be healthy, or healthier, or maybe just to gain back a few pounds, said Orson, for he told her, Tanya went on, that he expected to be climbing the walls (isn’t that what people say?) and found, to his surprise, that he didn’t miss cigarettes at all and reveled in the sensation of his lungs’ being ache-free for the first time in years.”
Now, for context, this story was published in The New Yorker in 1986. There would be very few people that would read Sontag’s opening line and not immediately begin to think of the AIDS crisis-- probably not many that weren’t already thinking about it before picking up Sontag’s story. For even further background-- sorry, I just think the full picture is important for those who didn’t live during this time/have a chance to study it in school (first one, not me; second one, me)-- it was declared by the CDC that in 1985 more people were diagnosed with AIDS than in all earlier years combined. Additionally, ACT UP (an activist group that is, dare I say, responsible for getting the US government to improve funding, testing, research, and get results and save countless lives) wasn’t created until 1987 and it wasn’t until 1996 that there was the breakthrough of combination therapy. So, this story’s publication sits right in the cradle of panic, grief, fury, and the Reagan administration. And Sontag wasn’t an outsider, simply writing what she saw. This story is embedded with intimate personal fears, anger, and grief (and after brief research apparently she wrote this story immediately after hearing a friend was diagnosed with AIDS? So there is that.)
So, with all that in mind, while there is no direct reference to “HIV” or “AIDS”, and the central character’s illness is referred to only as a “disease” (never capitalized), there is no mystery to this story. The thing that pulls you through is not the medical mystery of what is happening to this person, but rather: God let me live with him for one more moment. Tell me he lives. And there is a moment when the hearsay you are getting (the only way the story unfolds, by the way) twists from being helpful and welcome-- you want to know everything that’s going on in the central character’s life-- to distracting.
The speaking characters begin talking about who’s visiting the central character and how often, who’s getting more “credit” and is it fair-- the world shifts to the outside, to the world that is still living while the central character might be dying. And you get furious: why is no one telling me for certain how he is doing? How do we know? Someone take me to him instead. But the story never does. You live on the outskirts of his survival, just praying that the details keep coming-- that Aileen has something different to say than Quentin because it means that people are there and they are seeing the unseen central character.
Not to say that this perspective of Those Who Are Not Sick takes away from the story. The speaking characters wade in the complexity of how to handle being Healthy while your friend is ill with a disease that, at that point, is a death sentence that gives no warning of its arrival and will just relentlessly take. To read from a speaking character that going to the hospital frequently “is a way of our trying to define [themselves] more firmly and irrevocably as the well, those who aren’t ill, who aren’t going to fall ill,” feels like an exposure of Healthy Outsiders (to any illness) that shouldn’t have been said-- but it is and goes on.
The speaking characters acknowledge they could be ill next, but they also discuss the discomfort of going to visit just to go, of not wanting to see their friend withering away but God what if it’s the last time they have time to see him and they went to the movies instead? They actually turn the story, very briefly-- like a tangent in a free-flowing conversation-- to the last person they knew to become ill: Zack. After his name is mentioned, there is an aside, “you never knew Zack, did you?” which pulled me forward into the story by the collar before proceeding to talk about how the central character was uncomfortable at Zack’s hospital bedside and felt useless. The last line of this tangent reads: “Oh, he was one of those, Aileen said. A coward. Like me.” After a second read, I know that Aileen is saying the last two sentences. But for a moment it felt like a shift to the unacknowledged person recording all these crossing conversation (me?!). I felt yanked into the story again, and felt as if I myself was being called the coward. Was called to analyze how would I react in this situation. What type of friend would I be? What kind of human being? Have I already had a moment like this and let my logic derail from the main concern: the person terrifyingly ill? To be forced-- even in a fleeting moment of misunderstanding the sentence structure-- to evaluate myself is just another moment that makes this story living and breathing 36 years later.
The final thing I will say about this story is that if you can handle the heaviness and emotional exhaustion of this piece, please read it. And my god read it for the ending. I was going to insert the last sentence here but I think arriving upon it on your own gives such an energy, fight, and drive to the entire story in retrospect. It reevaluates-- reinstates-- the power of the story and leaves you (or maybe just me) writing the last few words of the story in my notebook in repetitive lines just drilling it into my head for days to come.
All in all, if you are going to start anywhere with Sontag, if you haven’t already, start with “The Way We Live Now” and never stop. Be alive and read (and write).
