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A review by deerfangs
The Unfamiliar: Making a Queer Family by Kirsty Logan
emotional
sad
fast-paced
3.0
This book was not for me. (And that's okay.) I thought the prose and pacing were really good, but I developed an almost antagonistic relationship with the book as I read it. Many reviews say that the use of the second person draws the reader in — for me, it had the complete opposite effect, because I feel so differently about the subject matter than the author. Beyond a few cursory mentions of trans/non-binary people and bioessentialism, Logan didn't really acknowledge that people like herself face the least stigma among LGBT+ people when it comes to reproduction and parenthood, and that her positionality enables a very different relationship to medical institutions than a lot of the wider community.
Ultimately, that's fine — it's her memoir, after all! — but as a trans/intersex person with my own complex feelings and history around parenthood, I, personally, just don't have room in my heart for cis queer infertility angst. And for better or worse, this book is extremely angsty: it takes place wholly in the author's stream of consciousness, sometimes revealing perspectives that again, as someone with a very different experience of navigating medical institutions, I just couldn't empathise with. (How do you get through multiple fertility treatments without ever having googled the success rates??? I literally cannot imagine this, and it's just dropped in casually at the end of a section, like 'sooo, after failing many many rounds of fertility treatment and becoming horribly depressed, we googled it and realised how low the success rates are, which no one ever told us.' Are yous really just walking into clinics and...trusting them to make things happen??? Without doing your own research??? We live in different worlds.) The writing is really smart and often funny, I mean, I read the book in one sitting, but I just found a lot of the content frustrating and alienating.
There's also one very uncomfortable comment towards the beginning about how she thinks semen is gross and so a person with a penis but no testicles, like a character in a book she read, would be "perfect." A lot of trans and intersex people actually match that description so can cis women just noooooot fetishise variant bodies like this please they/we do not exist to be your fantasy of idealised non-yucky maleness okay thanks.
Also, cool that she didn't use pronouns for the baby but dear god if I ever have to read the words "the baby" again my head will explode and therefore I have to end this review now. In conclusion, obviously all my reasons for disliking this book are quite personal and other people might enjoy it a lot and I would probably quite like to read another book by Logan that is not a memoir. That is all!
ETA: Okay, to be fair, a few more positive comments.
Ultimately, that's fine — it's her memoir, after all! — but as a trans/intersex person with my own complex feelings and history around parenthood, I, personally, just don't have room in my heart for cis queer infertility angst. And for better or worse, this book is extremely angsty: it takes place wholly in the author's stream of consciousness, sometimes revealing perspectives that again, as someone with a very different experience of navigating medical institutions, I just couldn't empathise with. (How do you get through multiple fertility treatments without ever having googled the success rates??? I literally cannot imagine this, and it's just dropped in casually at the end of a section, like 'sooo, after failing many many rounds of fertility treatment and becoming horribly depressed, we googled it and realised how low the success rates are, which no one ever told us.' Are yous really just walking into clinics and...trusting them to make things happen??? Without doing your own research??? We live in different worlds.) The writing is really smart and often funny, I mean, I read the book in one sitting, but I just found a lot of the content frustrating and alienating.
There's also one very uncomfortable comment towards the beginning about how she thinks semen is gross and so a person with a penis but no testicles, like a character in a book she read, would be "perfect." A lot of trans and intersex people actually match that description so can cis women just noooooot fetishise variant bodies like this please they/we do not exist to be your fantasy of idealised non-yucky maleness okay thanks.
Also, cool that she didn't use pronouns for the baby but dear god if I ever have to read the words "the baby" again my head will explode and therefore I have to end this review now. In conclusion, obviously all my reasons for disliking this book are quite personal and other people might enjoy it a lot and I would probably quite like to read another book by Logan that is not a memoir. That is all!
ETA: Okay, to be fair, a few more positive comments.
- As previously stated, the writing is very incisive. Logan is often witty without being trite. It also takes a lot of guts to write so straightforwardly about something so personal and I have a lot of respect for that. The dissection of reviewers' accusations of "navel-gazing" in the context of a memoir about pregnancy was very clever.
- The end sections comparing pregnancy to the process of writing was great. As a writer, this was my favourite part of the book, and also the part where I most felt the most drawn in and connected to Logan's experience.