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3.98 AVERAGE
3.98 AVERAGE
funny
lighthearted
reflective
medium-paced
Some parts of this I really liked. Others didn’t quite hit or feel like they made much sense.
As much as I really LOVE parts of this, as a whole it is disorganized
emotional
funny
hopeful
medium-paced
Witty, personal, one of few books about transness I’ve actually enjoyed and found proposed new ideas.
i have really mixed feelings about this one. i think daniel lavery is obviously a great writer and there were moments/individual essays in this book that really shone with the trademark wit and intelligence that i expect from his work, but there were also sizeable chunks that kind of dragged for me either because i wasn’t quite smart enough to understand the references or (more often) because a lot of its content felt so profoundly personal and introspective that i found it a little bit uninteresting. like, i love personal essays, i don’t necessarily need to be able to relate or share the writer’s point-of-view in order to enjoy them, but i feel like there’s a lot of stuff here that could’ve been edited out or published in blog post form instead. that said, i know there’s probably plenty of trans readers who really benefited from lavery’s experience and insight and it’s not like we’re drowning in an excess of trans literature so i can’t really bring myself to resent this book even though i can definitely say not all of it worked for me personally
emotional
funny
reflective
slow-paced
There were parts of this that were laugh-out-loud funny and parts that I underlined furiously, and parts that made it somewhat obvious I am not the target audience for this book. Overall, a smart humorous look at the experience of transition, and a reminder that not all trans narratives follow the same pattern, and that the cultural things beloved by women inform the transmasc experience, too
There's a cool zine maker I support on Patreon, and when she said that she couldn't stop laughing at this book, I bought it on an impulse. I didn't know that so much of the book was about Ortberg's transition. Or that he would use scriptures as a support for his feelings during transitions. Or that there would be SO MANY pop culture and medieval/classical literature references. I'm saying these things like they're bad, but they made for a very interesting book. There were, as promised, several hilarious chapters, and I laughed a lot. There were chapters I didn't really know how to feel about. I loved the chapter where Ortberg imagined Paul writing a letter in modern English, with the kind of familiarity we would email each other today. I loved the queer? reading of the story of the Green Knight. And Ortberg's vision of William Shatner as a lesbian will never leave me.
Ortberg transitioned in his early 30s, which I think is unusual in popular depictions of trans people. The way he described his long-term resistance to thinking about transitioning was really interesting to me. The usual trans narrative has someone who knows they are in the wrong body from childhood. Ortberg was more in the "ignore my body as long as possible" (yet was very depressed) camp.
Ortberg transitioned in his early 30s, which I think is unusual in popular depictions of trans people. The way he described his long-term resistance to thinking about transitioning was really interesting to me. The usual trans narrative has someone who knows they are in the wrong body from childhood. Ortberg was more in the "ignore my body as long as possible" (yet was very depressed) camp.
really liked this! some parts REALLY got me, other parts i felt less personal connection to but were still interesting and fun to read. a solid 4.5, rounded up
emotional
funny
inspiring
fast-paced