wastedfork

Total: 9 books

-- Our Lady of the Flowers by Jean Genet (technically only read like the last 100 pages in November);
-- Walking Practice by Doki Min;
-- Penance by Eliza Clark;
-- The Darker Proof: Stories from a Crisis by Adams Mars-Jones and Edmund White;
-- All S/he Wanted by Aphrodite Jones;
-- The Zombie Pit by Sam D'Allesandro;
-- I Look Divine by Christopher Coe;
-- Diary of a Misfit: A Memoir and a Mystery by Casey Parks;
-- Disciplining Gender: Rhetorics of Sex Identity in Contemporary U.S. Culture by John M. Sloop/

I know I also read 1 or 2 books which were not findable on Goodreads, but I didn't note them down anywhere and they're slipping my mind. DEATH BOOK by Bruce LaBruce may have been one, but I think that was last month. 

Our Lady of the Flowers: New favorite book, probably my new favorite author. Wrote a short story inspired by the vibe, a quick little flash fiction piece about a prison guard, a prisoner, and their power struggle and sexual tension. 

Walking Practice: This is a very short novella, yet I couldn't torture myself into finishing it. I got 75% through before acquitting myself from the prison sentence. OK, it wasn't THAT bad, it just felt very derivative and boring; the prose was not nearly good enough to justify the fact that the story itself was just rehashing sci-fi concepts that haven't been new/exciting since the 90s. 

Penance: Hard to rate, mixed feelings. On the one hand, I was totally riveted and have actively recommended this book to two people. On the other hand ... this is a faux-true crime book with an unreliable narrator who is himself a skeevy true crime author. The book's real claim to literary merit is that it's a critique of the true crime industry. But other than some half-hearted swipes at the narrator, it doesn't exactly make any scathing points. Worse, as it attempts to indict true-crime exploitation, the book itself exploits a real true-crime case. It was so blatantly based off Shanda Sharer's murder that I recognized her case without being told -- I'd read Aphrodite Jones' true crime book on Shanda a few years ago and recognized it immediately. 

I also think that just having an unreliable narrator is not in and of itself impressive, especially when, like in Penance, that unreliability never amounts to much. It doesn't have anything to say; knowing that he's unreliable doesn't really inspire deeper thought about the narrative. We're told exactly which parts he lied about and why. The unreliability isn't meaningful or significant, it's Just There. 

The Darker Proof: This is a collection of AIDS-related stories by two gay authors, one British and one American, all published in the late 80s. Excellent stories. IIRC the blurb on the back claims it's the first AIDS collection with literary merit, and while I can't say it's the *first* I can definitely confirm it's literary -- meaty prose, and each story presents with a casual everyday-life veneer that you can really dig into and think about for a long time. 

All S/he Wanted: I wanted to reread Aphrodite Jones' Shanda Sharer book after Penance, but I got distracted and reread this instead. It's about the Brandon Teena story, and I did write a lengthy analysis of the book in a previous post. If you didn't read that (because it's very long and manic), All S/he Wanted is the first + only full-length nonfiction book about Brandon's life and death, and it's both highly valuable and highly ... chewy. Jones flip-flops between pronouns, indulges in some sneering transphobia, sympathizes at times with Brandon's killers, and casts some irresponsible aspersions on certain real people's characters. She also does her typical shoddy journalism, failing to cite sources, admitting outright that she fabricated or fictionalized elements without marking those scenes so readers know...

The Zombie Pit: Short stories by Sam D'Allesandro, a gay writer who died of AIDS at 31, just as his literary career was taking off. These stories are, imo, even better than The Darker Proof, which I already gave 5 stars. There's an almost-magical surreal quality to these, while at the same time they're very slice-of-life. Time slips, sexuality slips, reality slips. But you never feel unmoored. The details are so crisp and the characters are simultaneously so real and so enigmatic that you always feel grounded. 

I Look Divine: This is a wonderful novella, Christopher Coe's first; it's a first-person narrative from an unnamed man who is inspecting his younger brother Nicholas' apartment after Nicholas' murder. The narrator moves back and forth in time to paint a picture of Nicholas, who is vain, gay, incestuous, and entirely unknowable -- even though the narrator has known him literally his entire life. It starts with a story of 7-year-old Nicholas tweaking his brother's balls during a Christmas photoshoot and ends with a haunting examination of a photograph of Nicholas as a young, beautiful man wearing a kimono, compared to the never-described un-beautiful old man that Nicholas inevitably became. 

Diary of a Misfit: A fun and frustrating read. This is a memoir by Casey Parks, a butch lesbian who grew up in the South in a highly volatile, religious family. When she came out as a lesbian in 2002, Casey learned that her grandma was once in love with a man named Roy: a local country singer who was handsome, sweet, and secretly AFAB. Casey becomes obsessed with learning more about Roy, and for more than a decade she returns periodically to Louisiana to hunt down Roy's acquaintances and find the diaries he kept religiously until his death. 

Part of what made this so interesting is that Casey is from the same general area my ex-wife is from, so I recognized all the small towns. The town where Roy lived, Delhi (pronounced Dell-high), is one my ex and I visited so we could meet up with her ex-boyfriend, a white trans man a little older than us, about the same age as Casey Parks. 

What made it frustrating is that it's very much billed as Roy's story, not Casey's -- and that's very much NOT how the book shakes out. I'd say 90% of the book is a straight memoir about Casey's childhood and adolescence; the remaining 10% is about her search for Roy, which is in itself very frustrating. While Roy is still alive, Casey makes no effort to find him; after his death, she frequently chickens out of interviewing his friends and searches for excuses to justify why she canceled. By the time you hit the last 100 pages, you've completely lost your optimism and you're certain she's never going to find out anything more about Roy than what her grandmother told her in Chapter 1.

But the ending really hits amazingly well. Casey's story hits hard, for sure, and connects more solidly to Roy's, via their mothers -- Casey's abusive opioid-addicted mom, with all her complexities, and Roy's forgotten mother, who may have kidnapped him when he was a toddler. And finally, Casey's investigation into Roy hits pay-dirt. She finds his diaries and shares excerpts with the readers -- at some point you might think, "Fuck you, I don't want excerpts, I want the full diaries!" but Roy was a day-laborer whose diaries primarily consisted of, "I mowed Jane's yard today, the weather was cold," so you kind of simmer down and trust that Casey's pulled the important parts for you. And the parts she does pull are extremely affecting. 

Disciplining Gender: This was a fun but very dry academic book with chapters on Brandon Teena, David Reimer, and k.d. lang. The first two chapters focused on media reactions to Brandon and David Reimer (Reimer was the boy from the John/Joan case -- his penis was damaged during a circumcision and he was surgically altered and raised as a girl, then asserted his gender identity around the time he hit puberty). The k.d. lang chapter was the most interesting to me, positing that her gender presentation was most troublesome and confusing to the general public *before* she came out as a lesbian -- that people were more bothered by her when they couldn't categorize her easily, and that when she did come out, the public breathed a sigh of relief and happily sorted her into a new musical genre where she "belonged." 

Overall, the only book I disliked was Walking Practice; the books I'm most ambivalent toward are Disciplining Gender, Penance, and All S/he Wanted; everything else was 5-stars.