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A review by sydneythekydneybean
Pageboy by Elliot Page
emotional
inspiring
reflective
medium-paced
2.75
Man, I hate saying this about a memoir, but I just did not like this at all. I'll admit that some parts of Elliot Page's Pageboy are interesting and intricate. Especially the sections about how he was treated in the industry and his family and the mental and physical journey of his transition. I specifically loved hearing about his time filming Juno and Whip It. As someone who loves both of those movies, getting a behind-the-scenes view from the main character is something I will cherish forever. After the first couple of hours of listening to this, though, I found those interesting stories to become repetitive. Meet someone new, fall in love, something happens to lead to a fallout, rinse, repeat (especially when the memoir is not written linearly! of course, if you made that mistake at 25, you're also going to make that mistake at 16! what is the point!). And I will say that it felt like a lot of those rinse-repeat sections were centered around a romantic or lustful of some kind, and they are littered with graphic scenes for, in my opinion, the sake of being graphic. I never thought I was a prude before, but more than a few sections in this memoir made me skip forward. Like damn, maybe I'm the problem, but I don't want to have to listen to Elliot explain in detail yet another graphic sex scene. I know it's important to normalize queer sex (like, yes, sex between women is still sex), but my god, there is such a thing as beating a dead horse. And that horse is dead, buried in the ground, dug up, and beaten again.
The main issue, though, is that this memoir doesn't feel like it's ready to be read. It's difficult to look at someone and say, "I need you to really look into your past and dive into what went wrong and what you would have done better now that you know better." There are more than a few moments in this memoir that were worrying. From an undiscussed eating disorder to an understandable but still unacceptable level of lesbophobia, I feel like the reader could have gotten so much more out of this memoir if Elliot could look back at those moments and say that while he had those thoughts, they were not what he thinks now. Introspection is kind of the name of the game in memoirs, and I feel that Elliot could have waited a few more years (and a couple more therapy sessions) until he was ready to write a memoir.
The main issue, though, is that this memoir doesn't feel like it's ready to be read. It's difficult to look at someone and say, "I need you to really look into your past and dive into what went wrong and what you would have done better now that you know better." There are more than a few moments in this memoir that were worrying. From an undiscussed eating disorder to an understandable but still unacceptable level of lesbophobia, I feel like the reader could have gotten so much more out of this memoir if Elliot could look back at those moments and say that while he had those thoughts, they were not what he thinks now. Introspection is kind of the name of the game in memoirs, and I feel that Elliot could have waited a few more years (and a couple more therapy sessions) until he was ready to write a memoir.