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Rainbow Reading: Exclusive “Lesbian Love Story” Cover Reveal!

A book in faded colors of the rainbow is open, and the words RAINBOW READING are on top of it.
illustration by A. Andrews

Hey howdy everyone!

The last two weeks have felt like two months, but in a full and warm and enriching way. Thinking about queer utopias sent me back to rereading the books that make me hopeful about human nature and nature generally — Taproot, Ursula Le Guin, midcentury gardening handbooks by Katherine White (wife of E.B. White!) and Vita Sackville-West, Summer Cooking by Elizabeth David (and then of course the work of David-devotee Laurie Colwin too!) etc. That’s what a Becky Chambers eco-utopia will to do the soul… The energy here is very “listen i love you joy is coming“. My houseplants are thriving. The windows are open. I’m putting new art on the walls. Summer dopamine takes me by surprise every year!

This is also a really exciting and special Rainbow Reading for me, because this installment features our first-ever exclusive cover reveal on this-here column! It’s a nice treat to get to be involved so early in the process, and I can’t wait for y’all to join me in celebrating the breathtakingly gorgeous memoir that just ROCKETED to the top of my TBR. I’m so stoked to throw the full weight of my enthusiasm and support behind this incredible book! Here is photographic evidence of me being a cool and chill and normal email-sender when I first read the description copy…

I am a delightful correspondent.

SO WITHOUT FURTHER ADO: Let’s make like a lizard and wiggle. On this week’s Rainbow Reading, we’ve got:

✨EXCLUSIVE COVER REVEAL OF LESBIAN LOVE STORY: A MEMOIR IN ARCHIVES BY AMELIA POSSANZA✨

iiiiisn’t she loooooovely, iiiisn’t she wooooooonderfuuullll

It is a truth universally acknowledged, and official Rainbow Reading canon, that I love all things archives. Historical investigation and imagination are endlessly fascinating to me, and I’ve been waiting so long for a book like this one. Amelia Possanza‘s debut memoir Lesbian Love Story: A Memoir in the Archives is everything I’ve wanted: intimate and voracious and utterly magnetic.

When Amelia Possanza moved to Brooklyn to build a life of her own, she found herself surrounded by queer stories: she read them on landmark placards, overheard them on the pool deck when she joined the world’s largest LGBTQ swim team, and even watched them on TV in her cockroach-infested apartment. But these stories rarely featured lesbians who could become her role models, in romance as in life.

This is the story of Possanza’s journey into the archives to recover the stories of lesbians in the twentieth century: who they were, how they loved, why their stories were destroyed, and where their memories echo and live on. Centered on seven love stories for the ages, Possanza’s hunt takes readers from a drag king show in Bushwick to the home of activists in Harlem and then across the ocean to Hadrian’s Library, where she searches for traces of Sappho in the ruins. Along the way, she discovers her own love—for swimming, for community, for New York City—and adds her own record to the archive.

At the heart of this riveting, inventive history, Possanza asks: How could lesbian love help us reimagine care and community? What would our world look like if we replaced its foundation of misogyny with something new, with something distinctly lesbian?

We’re all in luck: Lesbian Love Story comes out in Spring 2023, and you can preorder soon and follow Amelia on Twitter HERE.

Shelf Care: Reviews, Essays, and other Things of Note

“The book had me at lesbian Sasquatch, and then it took me for an even wilder ride than I ever could have predicted. All the best monsters live on reality television, and this novel knows that well.”

—Kayla Kumari Upadhyaya on Patricia Wants to Cuddle

Autocorrect: Books content from the last couple weeks at Autostraddle!

https://twitter.com/sofiafeycreates/status/1557121062906650624?s=20&t=vrZJcOQ_TWHi-ZaEZFlotw
the same goes for things you want me to read tbh

That’s all she wrote, folks! If you’re a queer writer, particularly an early-career queer writer: I’d love to hear about the cool things you’re up to so that I can share links to your published essays, book reviews, short stories, poems, and longform features on LGBTQ+ topics! Please email me links for consideration at yashwina@autostraddle.com with the subject line “Rainbow Reading Submission” — I’m an avid browser-tab-collector, and I especially want to hear from you if you’ve just landed your first publication or first major byline.

In LGBTQ Sci-Fi Anthology “Out There”, the World Is Screwed — But Queer Love Finds a Way

After her previous two LGBTQ+ anthologies — All Out and Out Now — explored the lives of queer teens in history and the present, editor Saundra Mitchell takes us to the inevitable next frontier: the future. In Out There, 17 authors put their gay, trans, and non-binary protagonists through their paces as they endure the toughest challenges in the universe: alien horror, the desolation of earth, and working out how to tell your BFF you’re in love with her. 

Once again, Mitchell has gathered a fine selection of authors, from those getting their first print credit to writers well-established in the world of YA, sci-fi or both. Keen followers of Casey’s book recs may have seen K Ancrum and Z Brewer’s speculative fiction highlighted before, while I would hope by now everyone is on board the appreciation train for Autostraddle fave, Leah Johnson. 

While I read and enjoyed the prior anthologies, it was this foray into sci-fi for which I had the greatest level of anticipation. Back when I was a teen myself in the 90s, reading such seminal queer anthologies as the Bending the Landscape series, speculative fiction was always what I reached for to hammer out a space for myself and my gay imagination. Over 20 years later, I was excited to see what this selection of authors wanted to explore now, both in terms of how a generation’s technological revolution may have reshaped their approach to the future, and as a weathervane for the hopes and expectations of today’s teens. For me, the joy of speculative fiction is about what, in these fantastical worlds, stays the same. In far-flung galaxies and distant futures, what is it that endures? 

Certainly, troubles declaring love for your crush are firmly established as an irrefutable fact of human existence in any era. “Crash Landing” helpfully sees a stranded alien workshop with the plucky heroine how she’ll make a love declaration. “Reshadow” is a rather more melancholy riff on this dilemma, where a boy is stuck in a virtual escape room of his school, and forced to run into the boy he is determined not to tell how he feels. 

What has its endurance questioned most throughout the anthology, though, is the world as we know it. A good third of the stories follow teens, their families, and their loves navigating life at the exhaustion of the Earth. Whether explicit or implied, the fallout from the zeal of human consumption has ravaged the planet to inhabitability — so what comes next?

In Alex London’s “Doublers,” humans can upload themselves to new bodies on Mars, at the expense of their existing ones on Earth. In “Concerto” by Abdi Nazemian, those who can afford it can buy a ticket through a wormhole to the past or the future, to escape the nuclear fallout of the present. In Emma K Ohland’s “Renaissance,” a girl looks at the stars through an increasingly hazy sky, knowing she doesn’t have the wealth to escape on a spaceship like her crush lying beside her.

The authors don’t shy away from how class, race and privilege dominate these scenarios of emigration at the world’s end. It’s inevitably these things that tear the protagonists from those they love, while we root for them to find their way back to each other. Initially, I was stung by the lack of optimism for the plight of humanity. On reflection, these narratives don’t lean too far into the dystopian; rather, the destruction of the world is presented as a fait accompli. What matters is the resilience of these youthful characters.

Three stories centre trans characters, each of them riffing on the theme of magical body transformation. “Aesthetically Hungry” by Mato J Steger sees a young trans man hooked on a drug that gives him the body he wants, but at a price he can’t afford; similarly, Z.R. Ellor’s “Like Sunshine, Like Concrete” offers transformative drugs to army recruits, turning them into supercharged soldiers in a story that reminded me of April Daniel’s Dreadnought series. In “Nick and Bodhi” by Naomi Kanakia, Nick is an omnipotent and vengeful interdimensional being causing havoc running Bodhi’s school, who offers Nick the body of her dreams — but of course there’s a catch. While I understand how the authors wanted to explore how identity is about more than the physical, after reading the trio I was still left rooting for a take where just maybe someone gets to look exactly how they want and everything is great.

With a lot of stories clustered around the same themes with similar outlooks, Out There does suffer from a bit of imbalance. I would have given a lot for a bit of Becky Chambers-esque hope-punk, or even a joke here or there. That’s not to overlook a whole host of interesting ideas that are explored. A girl trains with a government ghost agency so she can encourage her grandma’s ghost to rest; a couple of teens live out a whole life and relationship trapped in a time loop, repeating the same day for 20 years; and perhaps the best concept of all in Jim McCarthy’s “Present: Tense” (I won’t spoil it here!)

For me, Leah Johnson’s “Nobody Cares Who We Kiss At The End of The World” is the standout story, and ends the collection with an emotional gut-punch. When everyone in the world suddenly disappears, Kelendria thinks she finally has what she’s always wanted: the chance to love her girlfriend Coop openly, with no-one left to judge or deny them. The story beautifully explores the safety Kel finds through her solitude with Coop, plus the toll it takes. I ached as Kel weighs up risking the peace she’s found for the girl she loves.

If there’s any one theme that runs through this collection though, it’s that the world is screwed, but queer love will find a way.

Out There: Into the Queer New Yonder is out now.

“Body Language” Anthology Offers Invitation To Reckon With Our Messy Bits

Two truths, no lies.

  1. I am an essayist who typically hates essay collections.
  2. Body Language is one of the best essay collections I’ve read in a long time.

Last month, Catapult released Body Language: Writers on Identity, Physicality, and Making Space for Ourselves, an essay collection edited by Nicole Chung and Matt Ortile. It took me a month to get through it and write this review. Not because it’s one of those dense “ugh I can’t believe I have to finish it” texts, but instead for all of the right reasons –– the essays demanded my attention not only to the carefully crafted sentences by the 30 writers featured in the collection but also to my own spatiality and presence in this world.

The diversity of identities within this collection is astounding in the best of ways. Bassey Ikpi writes about home, family, and skin in “Connecting the Dots.” Natalie Lima writes about the fetishization of fatness in her brilliant essay, “Smother Me.” Marcos Gonzalez’s “Papi Chulo Philosophies” is an ode to the complexities of relationships, perceptions, and tenderness. Bryan Washington’s “View from the Football Field; or What Happens When the Game is Over” tackles the nuances of the sport, Blackness, and southernness in America. Autostraddle alum, A.E. Osworth’s “In Certain Contexts, Out of Certain Mouths” is an essay on trans thirst-trapping that I have returned to over and over again since it was first published on Catapult back in 2020. Seeing it in print was just the affirmation I needed during an incredibly tough (but still hot) they/them summer. And of course, sure, I read this with all of my identities — Black, fat, queer, disabled, nonbinary, middle-class, etc. — and in many of the essays, I saw myself, my struggles, and lingering questions silently grapple with on a daily basis.

But perhaps seeing oneself completely in the wide spectrum of perspectives offered through Body Language isn’t the point. This collection isn’t just a mirror of readers’ own experiences or a window into another world. These essays in Body Language are tinted windows sitting on 24s, a fierce subwoofer booming in the back –– a vehicle demanding your engagement with its audacity, pushing you forward to a reckoning with your own body in this world. And reckon I did, fam.

In “Surviving Karen Medicine,” Dr. Destiny O. Birdsong writes about navigating the racist healthcare system as a Black woman living with an autoimmune disease. In her account of how she finally got the basic care she deserved, Birdsong offers a new take on ancestor Audre Lorde’s ideas about the master’s tools. “In some instances,” she writes, “they (the tools a Black woman uses for survival) are the master’s tools, finessed and repurposed” (p.114). I huffed at this until I read it enough times to reflect on it — on my success thus far, on how my mama and my grandmama (and hers) had survived.

I read Rachel Charlene Lewis’ “When Your Body is the Lesson” aloud to my wife as we drove across the country and abruptly paused halfway through.

“Can you imagine posing naked in front of all of those people? The vulnerability it must require just to help these folks hone their craft?” The utter confidence you have to have,” I thought aloud.

“You kind of do that though — like in your writing and teaching,” my wife responded.

Lewis’ detailing of how she contorted her body into new poses, etching her figure into the  memories (and sketchbooks) of art students made me grapple with my own contortion. I thought about how much of the work I do as a writer and facilitator requires me to use my own body as a tool for others’ learning and development. It wasn’t a new revelation, but it was one I had buried deep beneath some other thoughts and experiences I’ve decided are unworthy of dwelling upon.

In many ways, this book is a shovel that is determined to unearth all of those pieces we have deemed inappropriate, uneasy, and too hard to face. Essays from Taylor Harris and M Crane (amongst others) depict the complexities of birthing and childrearing. There are also heartwrenching essays about the other side of life too — meditations and stories about dying, death, and grieving. The late Nina Riggs’ “The Crematorium” begins the entire book with an essay about her mother’s own death and her own impending final breath. She writes, “there are so many things that are worse than death: old grudges; a lovely life; insufficient self-awareness; severe constipation; a lack of curiosity; no sense of humor; this grim parking lot” (p. 8). And maybe she’s right — I spent at least five minutes thinking about the pain that I’d suffer if I walked around this damn earth severely constipated for all of my days — TERRIBLE. Others in Body Language deal with what comes after death, the coping and grieving we do as those who are left behind. “The Small Beauty of Funeral Sex” by s.e smith challenges society’s norms of mourning appopriately. Andrea Ruggirello’s “Camino de Santiago” shows us what happens when memories of loved ones, coincidences, and our adventures collide.

But we all know life isn’t just you’re born and then you die , so the majority of the collection deals with the messiness of the in-between — how our bodies struggle, survive, and thrive throughout this human experience; how they are perceived, erased, and omitted from consideration; how we fight for them to be seen; how we reckon with new challenges, failed dreams, and get to know curves, bones, scars, and skin again and again.

Body Language: Writers on Identity, Physicality, and Making Space for Ourselves is out now.

“The Bruising of Qilwa” Review: A Trans and Queer Fantasy Novella That Packs a Punch

Other than reading the “Riddles In The Dark” chapter of The Hobbit and mostly finishing The Lion, The Witch, and the Wardrobe as a child, I only started reading science fiction and fantasy recently.

This is partly because I’m typically bored by worldbuilding. I want to get to know the characters first, and care about them and what’s going on in their lives. Then, maybe, I’ll care more about the politics and the world and what’s going on around them. If I’m not invested in the people in the world, then it’s unlikely I’ll be interested in the world itself.

The Bruising of Qilwa, a new, short fantasy novel (It’s only 180 pages long, and I finished the entire book in a single afternoon at the beach) by Naseem Jamnia, is an extremely fast-paced, engaging read — probably because Jamnia focuses primarily on the specific struggles of our protagonist and lets the worldbuilding happen in the background.

Bruising didn’t feel like young adult fiction, and our protagonist is somewhere around 30 years old, but with its simple, straightforward prose it read like it. This simplicity belies, however, its heavy adult themes and quite a bit of somewhat graphic violence. The novel jumps right into the action instead of giving an in-depth overview of the world, region, planet, or political power players. These elements end up being crucially important to the plot, however, and toward the end their reveal leads to a very satisfying payoff that wouldn’t have been possible had their been a few dozen extra pages of exposition at the beginning.

Instead, we know enough to care: Our main character, they-Firuz, and their family — a teen brother and mother — are slum-relegated refugees in Qilwa, because they were chased out of their homeland Sassanid, to some degree because of war with a third nation, and to some degree because their people are being targeted, apparently because some of them practice “blood magic,” which is forbidden.

Firuz wants to be a healer and gets a job at the last free clinic in Qilwa, which operates to the benefit of all, including refugees — despite the government’s attempts to buy it out and thus gut it — using the acceptable forms of magic and science they know and hiding the fact that they are an adept blood magician. They come across a refugee girl, with the tell-tale signs of also being adept at blood magic, and attempt to teach her how to wield it — though her natural skills may be too strong for Firuz to handle. Even worse, more and more of Firuz’s patients are afflicted with a mysterious illness that, as it seems to target the blood, could be the work of a rogue blood mage.

Magic is part of the everyday fabric of this world and is presented as matter-of-factly as their language attaching gender pronouns to names during introductions. Queerness is entirely normalized, and “alignment,” what we might think of as a form of gender transition, is somewhat normal but still difficult, even when aided by magic. At least, it was normal in Sassanid, but now Firuz’s family are refugees in Qilwa. And as their brother begins puberty, getting his alignment underway, made even more difficult in a foreign land, another crisis is added to Firuz’s plate.

When one character does explain to another some of the intricacies of the political situation toward the end of the story, it gives context without being overbearing and complicates the narrative by raising tense, unanswerable questions. Qilwa is a newly independent nation in the shadow of its former colonizer, and Sassanian refugees in large numbers arrive seeking refuge. But are all of the power relationships between these three nations, with shared but strained and often divided cultures, as clear-cut as they seem? What do “homeland” and “immigrant” mean when one’s people have occupied a region for millennia — after originally colonizing its indigenous inhabitants? What does it mean to be a marginalized person living within and benefiting materially from the actions of a settler colonialist nation? What obligations do we have to “our people” and what to humanity as a whole?

These aren’t the only difficult questions The Bruising of Qilwas expertly explores. When the main villain reveals their actions, they — like all of the best villains — have an entirely admirable outlook and intention, but difficult-to-justify methods. They-Firuz is presented with multiple competing priorities: the refugee crisis, their job as a healer, the material well-being of their family, the young girl they’ve chosen to mentor, the mysterious illness spreading. They can’t do it all at once, and when they choose to act, according to their best approximation of ethics and morals, it’s not clear how they should prioritize or what the right move should be.

This fast-paced, deceptively simple, and thoroughly enjoyable short novel would be a wonderful introduction to fantasy for someone wanting to dip their toes in without committing to an epic like A Song of Ice and Fire. That being said, the world is so fascinating, and the characters so fully developed, I would happily read as many other stories as Jamnia decides to set in this world. It’s a tense exploration of weighty themes that can be easily mapped onto present-day issues, but grounded in lovable, sympathetic characters — many of them queer — and fun fantasy elements that are easy to understand but deep in their implications.

The Bruising of Qilwa comes out tomorrow, August 9 2022 and is available for preorder.

“The Golden Season” Is a Queer Love Letter to West Texas

The Golden Season by Madeline Kay Sneed opens with a poetic description of summer in West Texas that made me wish I could teleport there to experience every sensory detail fully.

Emmy is a college student who is about to start her senior year. She seems to have everything going for her in the eyes of her small West Texas town. Her father is a revered coach on the local football team, she has the support and love of the entire town, she’s a part of the right college sorority, and she’s a good Southern Baptist woman who will surely marry and good man. But Emmy is a lesbian and plans to tell her parents before returning to college for her senior year.

It doesn’t go well. Emmy’s mother shuts her out and tells her she is going to hell. Emmy’s father also preaches of sin and hellfire but is further motivated to protect his own reputation and career as a football coach and local celebrity. So when Emmy returns to college and is introduced to a cute openly queer grad student, she throws everything she has into the relationship.

The Golden Season is not a coming-out story; it’s a story of the reckoning between love and values. Emmy coming out is not the focus but the inciting action that sets up the rest of the character-driven plot, which was really refreshing. Emmy is already sure of who she is when the book opens. Instead, it’s everyone around Emmy who is unsure.

Emmy’s parents struggle to reconcile their religion with their love for their queer child. They each take a different path, believing they are doing what is best for Emmy. Meanwhile, Emmy experiences her first relationship with a woman, Cameron. Cameron tries her best to love Emmy too, but her own baggage prevents her from fully appreciating all of Emmy.

Ironically, Emmy’s father, Steven, and Cameron are in many ways the same. Steven is so focused on the correct ways of being a Christian and a Texan that he pushes his daughter away in a misguided attempt to protect her. He thinks he is doing it for God, for love, and for the chance to win a Texas state championship as the head football coach. Cameron is a strong-willed east coaster who often intentionally offends people — even when it hurts Emmy. She thinks Emmy should be willing to cut off her family and Texas roots completely. Ultimately, both want Emmy to be someone she can’t be and, as Emmy rightfully points out, “comfort can’t be given without empathy.” Both force Emmy to question what she is willing to sacrifice to live her truth.

The religious theme first drew me to the book, because I relate to it, and at times it made the story cathartic to read. But it could also be heavy and potentially triggering to those with Christian religious trauma. Occasionally, the characters quote from Bible passages, especially in the chapters told from Steve’s perspective. Steve’s chapters also contain a decent amount of football practice and games. Most of the time, the author does a good job making the football less about the game, which I don’t understand, and more about what is going on with the characters. Still, football could be a little much if it’s not something you like or understand.

The writing is gorgeous and filled with beautiful imagery and insightful quotes, which was my favorite part of the book. It often reads like a love letter to Texas, even when it’s critical. I gained a better understanding of what it’s like to be from West Texas and maybe learned to be slightly less like Cameron in her view of Texas.

If you’re looking for a light-hearted, easy summer read, this isn’t it. But if you’re interested in a thought-provoking story with beautiful prose, a character-driven plot, and people that hurt each other despite their best, good-Christian intentions, then I recommend The Golden Season.

The Golden Season by Madeline Kay Sneed is out now. Catch up on LGTBQ+ book releases in the Autostraddle Literature section.

New “Fire Island” Book Weaves Personal, Historical Narrative To Highlight Power of Community Solidarity

I first heard about Fire Island the way I think a lot of young queer people outside of New York first heard about Fire Island: by getting really into Frank O’Hara’s poetry. I remember reading “A True Account of Talking to the Sun at Fire Island” and imagining it as a place where magical, wonderful things (like having an extended conversation with the sun) could happen. After that initial introduction, I then learned about O’Hara’s tragic death on Fire Island and that some of my favorite writers — Truman Capote, Carson McCullers, James Baldwin — spent time there, too, but beyond learning the very basics of what Fire Island is actually like, I didn’t fully understand its impact on LGBTQ history and culture.

As I understood it then, Fire Island is mostly a haven for rich gay white men with a storied history of also being a haven for artists, writers, and musicians. Because of this perception, I’ll be honest in saying that I wasn’t thinking about Fire Island much until more recently when I was doing research on the gay island I currently live on. In the research I was doing about Wilton Manors, I learned that even though the population looks a certain way, there was still so much struggle in its birth. Like Wilton Manors, it’s tempting to paint Fire Island in very particular lights because of the parts of it that get the most attention, and I was guilty of that. It’s easy to think of it as a place where NYC’s most elite gays go to party and hook up, and while that’s still very true, there’s much more to it than that. As Jack Parlett proves in his new book, Fire Island: A Century in the Life of an American Paradise, it is also a place full of contradictions and of stories you probably wouldn’t expect.

More a place-based memoir than a straightforward history of the two parts of the island that have come to be most associated with the LGBTQ community, the Pines and Cherry Grove, Fire Island provides unique insight on the history, present, and future of this almost mythical place. For at least the last century, the region itself, a small island two hours away from Manhattan, has been a popular vacation spot for NYC families who had the means and ability to make the trip over to the island regularly. But over time, Fire Island’s seclusion drew people looking for privacy and a place to be more fully themselves without the threat of persecution or violence. As more “unmarried men and women” made their way over, it “offered space aplenty for frolics and transgressions, whether that was behind closed doors, or at a secluded point on the beach.”

Naturally, this drew artists and writers of all types who were looking for a place to escape the hustle and bustle of the cities where they were living to do work or to simply let loose in ways they couldn’t anywhere else. Throughout the course of the text, Parlett gives several accounts of the artists and writers who made Fire Island their temporary homes or permanent vacation spots. Everyone from the writers I’ve already mentioned to Paul Cadmus, James Dean, and Patricia Highsmith spent time there, and Parlett describes in great detail exactly how their time on the island altered their lives and what they did when they weren’t there. With these descriptions, Parlett helps us understand the heart of the project he’s doing in this book: showing the myriad ways that people are responsible for a community’s becoming, even if their work isn’t intentional.

Parlett’s descriptions of the ways the Pines and Cherry Grove grew from family-oriented vacation spots to bastions of queer celebration and expression illustrates the ways the communities come together in the face of great oppression. But they also reveal much deeper truths about what these communities look like and how utopias are very often not as euphoric as they seem. As Parlett documents so expertly, Fire Island has historically been exclusionary and inaccessible to people of certain identities — most notably Black queer people, single women, trans people — and still is to a certain extent today. What’s even more pressing about the history Parlett narrates for us, though, is how it shows the ways in which communities built on shared identity alone often fail to come together to create a cohesive vision of what that community should look like. Where the Pines was a place of sophistication, respectability, and an adherence to sharp gender roles, Cherry Grove was a place of letting go of inhibitions gender play, and queer radicalism. This set these places and the people who frequented them at different ends of the political spectrum, which meant they were often at odds with one another in terms of what the people there believed they needed to do for themselves and each other. As the histories of the Pines and Cherry Grove show, it takes a lot more than shared identity and shared space to build the kind of solidarity and kinship that leads to true liberation.

While there is much to be learned from the example of Fire Island and the people who made it what it is today, Parlett is at his best here when he’s weaving his ruminations on the events of his own life with the histories of those that came to Fire Island before him. The greatest example of this, perhaps, is when he intertwines his feelings about the also historically exclusionary and prejudicial gay dating scene with the poet W.H. Auden’s own experiences on Fire Island as a gay man with “famously pasty skin and an aversion to the sun.” These moments of recognition and reconciliation help give an even broader scope to Parlett’s work here. They serve as an important and welcome reminder that progress happens but it is also often slow, hard won, and impermanent. Whether he means to or not, these recollections and connections form powerful arguments about what queer liberation truly looks like.

At the end of the text, Parlett gives an accounting of what is going on in Fire Island today and how the communities there and the people who spend time there are trying to change it for the better. He notes the importance of these improvements but is also quick to remind us that we don’t have to think of Fire Island “as a false paradise, or a paradise already lost” but can instead think of it as “an extant, changing site, alive and livable, suspended in the present of a shared moment, and still ripe for rewriting.” And Parlett’s work here — from his personal reflections to his narration of the history of Fire Island — can help us learn what is possible when we’re willing to look back at history with intent and use what we’ve gathered to help us create a better future.

Fire Island: A Century in the Life of an American Paradise is out now.

“The Romance Recipe” Is the Steamy Beach Read You Need

From the first few pages of The Romance Recipe, it’s clear that author Ruby Barrett is writing more than just your average romance novel. The book opens with Amy, a restaurant owner, trying to do right by her staff at her latest venture, Amy & May’s. She pays her staff well, has a zero-tolerance harassment policy (which, honestly, is hard to come by in professional kitchens!), and if things go well financially, wants to offer her staff health insurance.

Amy’s head chef is Sophie, a former reality TV show contestant. Amy was so enamored by Sophie’s performance (and let’s be honest, Sophie herself) on “Pop-Up Kitchen” that one night after a strong Negroni, she emailed Sophie’s agent and asked if she would be interested in running her own kitchen. Crowds used to come to Amy & May’s to eat food prepared by a cooking show champ, but lately, tables have been empty, and the restaurant is struggling to stay afloat.

Amy’s crush on Sophie is belied by a grumpy exterior, one that Sophie matches. The pair butt heads often, arguing over what should land on the menu or if they should require guests to put down deposits in order to reserve tables. Beneath that anger, however, is the fact that they both care deeply about the success of Amy & May’s. Well, that, and the fact that they both want to rip the other’s clothes off.

Thankfully, Barrett doesn’t make us wait long for the simmering lust to boil into something more. We learn that Amy is a top with a soft side (dreamy!), and that Sophie, though relatively new to having sex with women, is determined to show Amy a good time. While the pair is insistent on keeping it relatively casual, their arrangement becomes more complicated when both Amy and Sophie develop feelings for each other — just in time for Sophie to make an appearance on another cooking show, which, by the way, is produced by her ex-fiancee.

The book alternates between Amy and Sophie’s perspectives, shedding light on both sides of this fledgling romance. We get to see the pair grow and change as a result of their time together. Amy navigates a challenging relationship with an emotionally abusive parent. Sophie takes up more space in the kitchen that is rightfully hers and even comes out as bi to her mother (who, by the way, takes it in stride, and only asks why her daughter hasn’t found someone to marry if she has “double the dating pool”). The character growth is half the magic of this novel, but the other half is how steamy it is. Seriously, Barrett is not kidding around — Amy and Sophie dance dangerously close to a health code violation!

As someone who, at one point, watched Top Chef religiously (entirely because of Kristen Kish), “The Romance Recipe” is my ideal beach read. It’s funny and fast-paced, with a healthy dose of yearning and a duo with palpable chemistry rounding it out.

The Romance Recipe is out now.

Michelle Tea’s Queer Pregnancy Memoir Is for Everyone — Not Just People Who Want To Become Parents

Like many queer people coming of age over the last 20 years, Michelle Tea’s work has been integral to my becoming. Growing up with an alcoholic parent as a queer, gender non-conforming person involved in my local punk scene and community organizing work, Tea’s work over the years has made me feel less alone, less angry, and much more equipped to handle whatever gets thrown at me as a result of my identity or the trauma I experienced as a young person. In a weird way, it always felt like because of our age difference, Tea’s books came out right around the time I was entering a stage in my life where I desperately needed to read them. And the timing of the release of her new memoir, Knocking Myself Up: A Memoir of My (In)Fertility, is no different.

For most of my life, I was convinced that some day, somehow, I’d be a parent. I talked about it with my friends and my parents, and when I started getting deeper and deeper into my twenties, I sought out partners who felt the same way. After failed relationship after failed relationship and many years in the classroom, I started to feel uncertainty about both the possibility of becoming a parent and my desire to raise a child in the first place. Now, in my early thirties and in the most stable relationship I’ve ever been in, I’ve mostly decided that parenthood isn’t something I want to pursue, though the ambivalence that has washed over the whole thing over the last few years sometimes pushes me into the “I guess it’s possible” zone once in a while. To my surprise, Tea’s journey actually begins in a similar state of ambivalence some months after she turned 40-years-old.

At that point, the ambivalence quickly turned into a decision to give getting pregnant a try: “From where I stood, deep into my fortieth year on earth, my remaining eggs hobbling down my fallopian tubes each month, tennis balls wedged onto their walkers, it seemed like having a kid was the only adventure I hadn’t undertaken.”

With the help of her friends, her sister, and some internet research, Tea devises a plan to inseminate herself at home. She contacts a young drag queen named Quentin, a friend-of-a-friend who is “dying to give his sperm away,” to ask him to be part of the process. She enlists the help of her close friend Rhonda to make sure the sperm makes it to its final destination. Eventually, she falls in love with Orson — the person who she will eventually co-parent with — and they become part of the process, too.

The quartet tries and fails to get Tea pregnant, and as she gets deeper and deeper into the process of trying to conceive, she realizes that the decree she believed in at the beginning of it all, of accepting whatever happens — pregnancy or not — is a lot harder to accept than she initially thought. After another unfruitful home insemination attempt, she says, “I had started this getting-pregnant project determined to graciously accept any inability to actually have a baby, but the feelings that accompany the surge of blood in my underwear are not so mild.”

The frustration of the failed inseminations leads Tea to enlist the help of a fertility specialist, who finds she has fibroids in her uterus and that her eggs aren’t very viable for insemination. Orson, however, still in their early thirties, has plenty of viable eggs, and the couple decides to get Tea pregnant using Orson’s eggs and Quentin’s sperm. Much like the at-home insemination process before it, the processes of IVF and embryo transfer prove to be similarly difficult, but their resolve to have a child only gets stronger and stronger.

Written in the present tense, we are given a front row seat to these three years that Tea and Orson (and their friends and their families) spent consumed with the hopes of them eventually becoming parents. Tea narrates the ups and downs of the process with her trademark humor and doesn’t shy away from giving us all of the gory, sad, disappointing, and heart-wrenching details that became parts of their paths to parenthood. Along the way, she reminds us how deeply heterocentric the birth industry is from the doctors’ intake forms only listing the possibility of women birthing children with husbands to the prenatal yoga class instructors who refer to everyone’s partners as male. She provides us with a heavy dosage of education on the subjects of insemination, IVF, and childbirth, but it never feels overwhelming. In the parts of the story that are the most devastating, Tea’s faith in the universe and in the world around her shines through her writing to show us how courage and resilience are powerful tools we should utilize in the face of any hardships we may encounter, whether they’re related to Tea’s journey here or not.

As with all of her other work, Knocking Myself Up is, of course, extremely queer — and not just because Tea is or just in the cast of past lovers and friends who show up in the narrative — but also in the way Tea approaches the memories of this journey overall. There are several instances in the text where she ruminates on the power of our chosen communities, of showing up for your people no matter what they need. She is constantly calling on her friends and her younger sister to ask for advice, to get guidance, and just to crowdsource opinions of what she should do or shouldn’t do. Sure, close friendship isn’t a hallmark of queerness, but as Tea shows in these ruminations, we often think about our friends as being as inextricable as our blood relatives, and Tea treats them as such throughout both the course of her journey and this memoir she’s written about it. The people she holds (or held) dearest are written about in the highest and sweetest regard, and it’s obvious that her faith in their abilities to take care of one another helps buoy her spirit in the most difficult parts of this journey.

These meditations on community make it clear that just as the original plan for at-home conception took a team of people she loves to complete, Tea knows that it will also take a team of people to help her and Orson raise their child — and that’s a good thing. In every way, Tea’s journey to parenthood already upends the ways people think about conception and about the people who want to conceive, and the reflections on the importance of delegitimizing the structure of the nuclear family in favor of a queerer, more open kind of family life provide another important and emotional layer to this already evocative narrative.

Some might see the subject of this book and think it’s simply not for them, but taken as a whole, Tea’s work here absolutely transcends any expectations someone could possibly have simply by looking at the description. She didn’t necessarily change my mind about parenthood, and I know that is not her intention here either. Tea’s insights offer much, much more than that. She provides us with new and powerful perspectives on not only childbirth and parenthood but on our understandings of our lives, of our bodies, of friendship and romance, and of the possibilities and potential for change that exists within us all. Like all of Tea’s best work, Knocking Myself Up embraces all of the joys and miseries and miracles that are part of existing in this world as a human being and gives us an opportunity to bask in that enfolding along with her. No matter what your stance is on the subject or who you want to grow up to be, every single person who decides to join Tea on this journey through reading this book will definitely learn something new about themselves and the lives they lead by the end of it.

Knocking Myself Up: A Memoir of My (In)Fertility is out now.

Did Somebody Say Lesbian Sasquatch Horror-Comedy “Bachelor” Parody?

Yes, the new novel by Samantha Allen Patricia Wants To Cuddle is a lesbian sasquatch horror-comedy Bachelor parody. Plus final girl slasher vibes. Plus a whole gorgeous epistolary lesbian romance suplot. Plus descriptions of the Pacific Northwest night sky and landscape so simultaneously lovely and haunting you will be torn by wanting to look closer and wanting to look away, which is fitting, because that’s exactly how I feel when watching the best episodes of reality television. It is, simply put, a delightfully strange and wondrous book, one that takes multiple high concepts and smashes them together, ultimately spinning a story about desire, the things we want, and what we’re willing to do and sacrifice to get them.

It all starts with a bloodbath:

Margaret Davies scrubs and scrubs but she knows she’ll just have to refinish the deck.

At least the spot where she found the dead sheep this morning. Not that she could recognize the animal at first. The poor dear had been bludgeoned and torn to shreds, hopefully in that order.

The gruesome prologue hints at what’s to come in this tale: ripped limbs, bodies bludgeoned, jaws blown off, heads ceremoniously removed. Otters Island, the fictional Pacific Northwest island where the novel is set, is a place of horrors — horrors that begin as a whisper, steadily crescendoing into a scream.

But for the first couple parts of the novel — broken into three parts, alternating between five perspectives, and doing some formal play along the way — Allen almost lets you forget you might be reading a gory monster book and shifts gears to a different form of horror: reality television and the making of it.

Four of the five perspectives are contestants on The Catch, a spin on The Bachelor, an American media sensation so over-the-top and deranged already that Allen plays it pretty close to the bone and still achieves a heightened effect. They’re all fighting for the attention of slimeball Jeremy, who made his fortune by making and then selling Glamstapix, the novel’s stand-in for Instagram. There’s Amanda, the straight daughter of dyke moms appalled by her decision to become, to borrow the words of real-life reality icon Sonja Morgan, an international fashion lifestyle brand (she hawks overpriced garbage on Glamstapix). There’s Vanessa, feisty and confident and hot Vanessa, who likes to torment third contestant Lilah-Mae, resident Christian Good Girl who sees The Catch as an opportunity to, quite literally, prosthelytize.

And then there’s Renee. Renee doesn’t really want to be here. A confluence of circumstances — or non-circumstances, really — brought her here. Her life has become monotonous, and she feels adrift, and The Catch becomes the dysfunctional liferaft she reaches for. She’s a blatant token, and she knows it. No Black woman has ever made it to the final four of The Catch let alone past the first couple weeks, and the producers and Jeremy all treat her like a pawn. She becomes increasingly less willing to play their game, her ambivalence about life like a pressure-cooker. For much of the book, Renee stands just on the precipice of finally figuring out who she is and what she wants, her disdain for her competitors complicated by the fact that she also would very much like to make out with Amanda. When Renee finally launches herself off the edge of the cliff of her self-actualization, it’s to join a community of similarly adrift and misfit women brought together by an ancient beast.

But you’ll have to read the book to really understand what I mean by that.

In addition to the four contestants, there’s also Casey, a producer on The Catch whose life revolves around her work. She spends her days wrangling the contestants and the aging Botox-laden show’s host Dex Derickson. Sometimes she hooks up with hunky cameraman Mike, who Casey tells us is merely stupid and hot but who probably has more going on beneath the surface if Casey were to actually get to know him. For Casey, there’s only The Catch. She loves her job, genuinely. As she rides in the production van with the contestants around Otters Island, a cacophony of giggles and vocal fry fills the car, but to Casey: “The sound is calming, almost, like the chirping of crickets outside a screened-in porch on a late-summer night.”

Casey is the type of person to immediately start producing in her head when she finds a dead body in the road, just like one of the contestants is the type of person to immediately start imagining what an episode about her death might look like after she’s abducted and dragged to a cave. There’s a literal monster in Patricia Wants To Cuddle, but the real monster is The Catch and the hunger for fame it courts. Casey has an outsized idea of her power and influence, and the end puts her supposedly pristine talent for manipulating to the test — and she fails.

As the suspense builds, Allen never lets us wander too far from that violent opening, working little bursts of the grotesque and the macabre into these early sections of the book. Take, for example, the brilliant setup and pay off of this moment from an Amanda chapter. Amanda wakes in the middle of the night to sneak into Vanessa’s room:

“No,” comes the response through the door. Amanda pushes it open, to find her friend sitting at the antique vanity ripping off her own face, her fingers scraping all the way down her cheek in one long, continuous motion, a thin translucent membrane caught in her fingernails. 

And then:

But once V finishes peeling off her detox mask, her flawless olive skin comes into view.

To render a face mask so chilling!!! The language and imagery in Patricia Wants To Cuddle surprises and unsettles throughout — in the best way.

Each point of view is told in such a close third-person that you really get into the heads of each character. If there’s one who leaves a little left to be desired, it’s Vanessa (whose full name, by the way, is Vanessa Voorhees, which I absolutely read as a Jason reference, especially since Part Three of the novel really does have a Friday The 13th vibe). But overall, the character development in Patricia Wants To Cuddle works to suture real stakes to the thriller twists and cultural commentary on media consumption, social media fame, and flattening one’s life into a reality television arc.

Interstitials between the alternating points of view also run through each of the novel’s three parts. In part one, those interstitials are excerpts from a The Catch fan forum that provide a glimpse into the culture of spectatorship and lore surrounding the show, threaded with humor (usernames like CatchTheseHands and CatcherInTheSky abound, but my favorite has to be the very straightforward DexIsMyZaddy). In part two, those interstitials veer into true crime parody. They’re blog posts from a woman whose sister went missing in the woods of Otters Island many years before with a few other women. Otters Island was once a haven for the gay community, but the cold case of the disappeared hikers became its undoing, tourism in steady decline ever since (hence The Catch scoring a good deal to film here). The novel’s mystery deepens.

The best interstitials come in part three. They’re love letters between two young queer girls living in Little Rock, passing secret notes back and forth and dreaming of a life beyond their homophobic community. We only ever get one side of these exchanges, and yet, we learn so much about both girls and their relationship in such a tight space. Part three is when the book goes full horror mode (once you get to this part, you won’t want to stop btw), and the fact that all the bloody action is interrupted by these truly gorgeous and intimate portraits of young queer love works shockingly well. In general, Allen is a maestro of smashing together seemingly incongruous things to make something singular, strange, spectacular.

The ways Allen describes the actual physical movements behind making reality television, for example, often draws from the night sky. There’s a playfulness between literal reality and “reality” as constructed by the show.

The cameras press in close, drawn in by the drama like planets drifting toward a collapsing star.

And, in a later passage:

The stars are shining over them by the thousands, an otherworldly reminder of the television viewers that all of this was ostensibly for, except unlike Nielsen sets, the lights in the sky are silent and permanent, completely unmoved by the proceedings below.

For as weird and surprising as it is, Patricia Wants To Cuddle isn’t some oddball on an island of its own. The book easily fits into conversation with two other books I’ve recently reviewed here. It maps reality television and its making onto horror, much like How To Be Eaten, which maps a Bachelor-style television show onto a twisted fairytale and similarly puts forth a scathing critique of the medium while also acknowledging exactly why people do love it. And as with Our Wives Under The Sea, there’s a subversion of the queer monster narrative here — not to mention a wonderfully constructed queer romance with an ache at its core. Actually, the Gay Ocean Horror Book and the Lesbian Sasquatch Horror book make a very good one-two punch if you want to spend a weekend with Julia Armfield’s and Samantha Allen’s work. They’re tonally and structurally much different, but they share enough threads in common to be a cohesive double creature feature.

Even as the novel throws many genres and forms into a blender, it’s all pureed to a smooth finish. There are meaningful connections between all of the characters and their motivations — even the most vapid among them. The young queer girls of Little Rock run away toward Otters Island in search of something new. Renee hurls herself into The Catch out of, essentially, existential boredom but then ends up finding herself. Lilah-Mae, Amanda, and Vanessa, well, they all want platforms, what they perceive as power and control. And everyone goes full feral with these wants and desires.

That knack of Allen’s for taking incongruous elements and fashioning them into a gorgeous monster yields delightful humor and horror throughout. The book had me at lesbian Sasquatch, and then it took me for an even wilder ride than I ever could have predicted. All the best monsters live on reality television, and this novel knows that well.

Patricia Wants To Cuddle by Samantha Allen is out now.

Honey, I Shrunk the Books: A DIY Guide to Making Miniature Book Replicas

Assorted art supplies on a bright blue cutting mat. Some tiny books and one normal sized book, a pulp fiction novel called Odd Girl Out.

Here is something true about me: I forget things a lot. All the time, really. Maybe it’s an ADHD thing. I forget to text people back; I forget what stories I’ve told. I forget my friends’ birthdays — sorry, friends! I love you! I forget what season of a TV show I’m on and whether I ate lunch today. And maybe more than anything else, I forget which books I’ve read.

When I used to spend way too much money on books, this wasn’t much of a problem; I could just check my shelves. But last year, when I started checking books out from the library, I realized I was putting books on my waiting list over and over again, only to get five chapters in and remember I’d already read them. The problem was compounded when I started checking e-books out from the library and reading them without ever even seeing their covers.

Then, on one of those days when I’d accidentally ended up on the crafty straight mom side of TikTok, I saw a video by a woman who was creating small replicas of the books she’d read that year and tossing them into a decorative jar. I scoffed at her jar — is it even TikTok if you’re not judging, just a little bit?  But I knew right away that I wanted to start making tiny books.

I began with office supplies, a few colored pencils, and a dream. Those first books I made were cute, but very crooked. They were cut unevenly with sewing scissors and held together with staples. They didn’t even open. I can’t do these things halfway! So I bought some craft supplies and tried to remember what I’d learned in my one-hour bookbinding seminar in college. Now, every time I finish reading a book, I get to work on its tiny counterpart, and I’ve got a shelf full of minis that make me happy every single time I look at them.

Wanna make one with me?

Today, we’ll be recreating the cover of Odd Girl Out, a pulp fiction classic by Ann Bannon. I haven’t read this one in years, but the cover is so gloriously pulpy, I couldn’t help myself.

Three photos illustrating the tiny bookmaking process described in this post

First, we’ll make our inner pages. Using your white paper, cut 15 sheets that measure four by three centimeters each. I use a ruler and an exacto knife, but you can use scissors too.

Three photos illustrating the tiny bookmaking process described in this post

Fold your sheets in half, hamburger style (was that a thing at your elementary school, too?). If you want to get fancy, use a folding bone to set the crease; I’m using the little red tool that came with my iPhone’s screen protector. Then, sort your pages into three sets of five sheets each. Nestle the five sheets into one another.

Three photos illustrating the tiny bookmaking process described in this post

Once you have your little signatures of five sheets each, you can sew each signature together. I usually use white thread, but I used red here for visibility. My stitches definitely aren’t proper bookbinding technique, but they work! If you want to be fancy, you can create a miniature awl by pushing the eye of a needle into a cork and poke your holes before you sew them together so you don’t wrinkle your pages while sewing.

Once you’ve sewn up your signatures and tied them off, set them aside. You may want to put them under a heavy book — or clip them with a binder clip — so they’ll stay flat later.

A collage of photos illustrating the bookmaking process described in this post

Now it’s time to design your cover! I use Canva, but you could easily use Microsoft Word if you’re comfortable working with images and text boxes. I find my cover images on Goodreads. If you’re artistic and don’t have a printer, you can also hand-draw your cover! You’ll want the cover to be slightly larger than your signatures, so the front and back covers should be about 2.4 cm wide by 3.4 cm tall, with a spine that’s about a half centimeter. Print or draw your cover on card stock, if you have it. Cut your cover down to size.

A collage of photos illustrating the bookmaking process described in this post

I find that scoring the card stock makes it much easier to fold. Placing the cover right side-up, use a nail or the blunt end of your needle to press four dots into your cover to delineate the edges of your book’s spine. Turn the book over, and run the blunt end of the needle along the ruler to score your two folding lines.

Now that you’ve got your cover, you can put it together with your signatures! Pressing your three signatures together, run some glue down the spine, and then place them directly into your cover. Wipe away excess glue and put your book under something heavy to dry. We did it!

A 1:12 scale, Ikea-style bookshelf full of tiny books

These books fit in some 1:12 scale dollhouse bookshelves, like this one I found on Etsy!

Someday, maybe, I’ll get to the stage where I’m printing a chapter of the actual book inside. For now, these tiny blank pages are there to do what I like with. How will you fill yours?

Queer Naija Lit: “Under the Udala Trees” Honors the Past and Paints the Future With Hope

Chinelo Okparanta’s Under The Udala Trees is nothing short of revolutionary. The novel was published in 2015, a year after Nigeria’s then-president Goodluck Jonathan signed the SSMPA into law. Okparanta doesn’t shy away from the political and lived realities of the time period the book was published in. Rather, she engages with these tensions (and, by extension, the tensions within Nigeria itself) directly. Due to her literary courage and outstanding execution, queer Nigerians — and the world — have been gifted with a book that captures the past and ongoing resistance of a people.

Under The Udala Trees is the story of Nigeria. To understand the Biafran War — the central conflict that upturns the life of the novel’s protagonist, Ijeoma — you must understand Nigeria. In January of 1966, the Prime Minister, Premier, and several members of the newly independent Nigerian Government (and some of their family members), were assassinated by a class of junior military officials. Leadership of the country was then transferred to a military head of state, General Johnson Ironsi.

By July of the same year, there was a counter-coup that replaced the head of state once again. The initiators of the first coup claimed the government was corrupt and acting against the interests of the people, and their coup was an attempt to reset a corrupt government and return power to the people. Yet, from the outside, most of the people who took part in the coup were from one tribe (Igbo), while most of the people being deposed were from another (Hausa). Furthermore, the person that took command after the January coup, General Ironsi, was Igbo. A common  narrative — and fear — was that the coup was an attempt by Igbos (Easterners) to usurp power from Hausas (Northerners).

The first coup spurred the killing of thousands of Igbo people in Northern Nigeria. The killings only increased after the July counter-coup targeted Igbo military officials and led to the death of General Ironsi, as well as the installation of a New — Hausa —  Head of State, Yakubu Gowon. The increased violence against Igbo people, as well as the fact that Nigerians didn’t get to choose to be Nigeria, contributed to Eastern Nigeria cesseeding. The Nigerian Civil War began on May 30th, 1967 when Colonel Ojukwu declared Eastern Nigeria to be the independent country of Biafra. In response, the Federal Government of Nigeria set out to reinstate Biafra as part of Nigeria through military conquest.

Ijeoma’s childhood in the novel takes place between the first two coups and the civil war. At the start of Under The Udala Trees, Ijeoma believes — because her father believes — the war is a far-fetched impossibility. She doesn’t believe there will be bomber planes over igboland and military blockades intended to starve out millions of civillians. Despite her father’s reassurance, the visibly rising terror of the adults and community members in her life prompts Ijeoma to ask god for help. A year later, Ijeoma and her family are avoiding bomber planes in an underground bunker.

The war and its violence arrive quickly, and Ijeoma isn’t spared from it. Neither are readers. Okparanta’s account of Ijeoma’s wartime experience is meticulous and the best telling of the Biafran War I’ve read in fiction. This meticulousness also makes the stories contained within the novel, at times, difficult to read. The 30 months of war are bitter, and Ijeoma emerges on the other side of it a changed person — and not just because of the violence.

The war, and Ijeoma’s temporary separation from her family because of it, causes her to meet Amina. Ijeoma happens upon Amina and brings her home to offer her food and shelter. Ijeoma’s host family (a grammar school teacher and his wife) agree to take her in, though their reasoning isn’t selfless — they want another helping hand. Still, they likely saved Amina’s life.

Ijeoma’s relationship with Amina deepens as they grow up, and they fall in love. Their blossoming relationship is complicated by a few things. First, Amina is Hausa, and their friendship alone is enough to draw consternation. Second, they are both girls. Even while the war deepens tribal division amongst Nigerians, different groups unite in the joint persecution of queer Nigerians. This persecution is justified through religion.

In Nigeria, both Christianity and Islam establish strict, largely patriarchal, systems of government that centralize power. This is because the systems that establish the authority of these religions in Nigeria were developed concurrently with colonization. In the South, South-West and Eastern parts of Nigeria, Christianity was used to establish and expand European colonial authority. While Islam in the North and North-West Nigeria predates European colonisation, the establishment of Islam in West-Africa was also an attempt to centralize and expand power by pre-colonial Hausa Kingdoms. This worked so well that even after the fall of the Hausa Kingdoms to the Sokoto Caliphate in the 1800s, European colonizers were able to use established religious governing structures to consolidate their power.

As a result of the alignment between religious and colonial authority in Nigeria, much of governmental authority is an extension of these  powers, even in 2022. The persecution of queer people — despite the Nigerian government’s claim to be doing so in the interest of African culture — is one manifestation of this oppressive alignment.

So, even after the war, Ijeoma is confronted with a different challenge: living as an igbo lesbian in post-civil war Nigeria. As an adult, Ijeoma contends with the ever-present threat of being discovered, of being outed and subject to beatings — or murder. The suppression of identity Ijeoma faces is so strong that “lesbian” is not a term she uses herself. Ijeoma doesn’t have the space to create and refine linguistic authority. Much of her mental energies are spent deconditioning herself.

Ijeoma’s awareness of and participation in her internal world and forming an intentional identity is cathartic, even more so because it’s a consistent aspect of Ijeoma’s character. Her persistent reading of the bible — a genuine attempt to understand her “sin” — ends up being what frees her from seeing herself as wrong. Okparanta takes the time to craft both the arguments many queer Christians hear growing up and the ways they fail to hold up under scrutiny.

Like Ijeoma, I was warned about Sodom and Gomorrah, but when I came to my teachers with questions about the references to hospitality, I was met with a shrug at best and, more commonly, anger or violence. Like Ijeoma, I learned to keep my questions to myself. When I was older and learned how exactly my parents and grandparents came to hold the beliefs they now browbeat me with, a lot of things started to make sense. It didn’t take long after that for me to detach from beliefs meant to cause me to see myself as less than.

Reading Ijeoma experience a similar religious journey validates my lived experiences and provides the affirmation I didn’t get when I chose to love myself. For that alone, this novel is dear to my heart.

Okparanta’s focus on religious oppression is intentional. The author’s note at the end of the book cites a 2012  global study on Religiosity and Atheism that ranks Nigeria as the second-most-religious country surveyed.

Okparanta’s analysis of religious authority in Nigeria goes beyond outlining its connections to the oppression of queer Nigerians. In my experience, sexual oppression is rarely far removed from misogyny, classism, and ableism. This holds true in Under The Udala Trees as well.

Ijeoma’s choices are shaped in part by her sexuality, but also by her womanhood. Even the women around her who aren’t queer are confronted with restrictions on their freedom, often backed by religious justification. People who occupy positions of difference in various forms are marginalized or ostracized in the novel.

These other forms of marginalization form nucleuses of power that, by the end of the book, show a larger, sinister web of oppression than what is directly facing queer Nigerians. Sinister, because it’s impossible to reinforce oppression on one end without subjecting your own freedoms to oppressive conditions. Yet, different groups of people are being eagerly offered up by governments seeking to expand power and control by any means.

In the novel, Ijeoma’s awareness of her marginalization also feeds her awareness of other people’s conditions. If you can justify your own oppression by agreeing with another’s, then understanding your marginalization helps connect your liberation with someone else’s, which builds solidarity. This is the gift of self-analysis, one Ijeoma continues to nurture as her story develops and she’s met with different types of oppression.

Neither discrimination nor manipulation are solely tactics of colonizers. An easy way to unite and distract two people is to scapegoat a third person. Suffering people are angry people, and angry people often need to be given an outlet for their anger before they start to ask too many questions about why they’re mad. It’s no coincidence that the hyper-vigilance of queer Nigerians is on the rise again as the 2023 presidential elections draw near. The SSMPA was signed into law in 2014, a year before the 2015 Nigerian presidential elections. The further criminalization of queer people in Nigeria will do nothing to alleviate many of the economic and social burdens currently facing Nigerians, but it does provide a smaller, unprotected portion of the populace for the majority to vent their anger on.

In light of current conditions for queer Nigerians — and global conditions facing queer people — a book like Under the Udala Trees is ever-timely. Okparanta succeeds in creating a character that lives, despite survival being tenuous. By the end of the novel, Ijeoma is rooted in her love of herself and has gone past surviving to manifesting a life beyond the boxes she was forced to construct herself in.

Here’s to all our unseen-but-hoped-for futures.

Queer Naija Lit is a monthly series that analyzes, contextualizes, and celebrates queer Nigerian literature.

In Verse: Poetry Collections for a Summer Picnic

Feature image photo by ivan-96 via Getty Images

I don’t know where you are reading this from, but for me, this summer has been hellishly hot. Almost too hot to enjoy the splendors outside, the hostas in my front yard, my neighbor’s fig tree, the bumblebees dug deep into flowers. I hope you have or have planned some time outside on a cooler day, preferably for one of my favorite activities: a summer picnic.

Some of my favorite memories involve a picnic at a local park at one of the shelters on the grounds. Playing music and singing along, taking a date to a special spot, riding my bike through the designated bike paths, then settling down for a light snack and an ice cold drink.

What makes these summer picnics even better is literature. Whether that entails talking about all the new books you are reading or bringing a book to read to yourself or a date, something about reading a book in the sun with birds chirping, surrounded by greenery, is heaven.

Here are five books that I think are perfect for your summer picnic reading. Whether you’re new to poetry or a fanatic, these books will be a way into deeper reflection and conversation with yourself or your date.

Pilgrim Bell by Kaveh Akbar

There is room in the language for being
without language.

This book of poems was highly anticipated by many, including myself. After reading Akbar’s first collection, Calling a Wolf a Wolf, I was stuck in this place of wanting more. I gifted another copy of the book to a friend and talked about it with other poets. I read it more than once. I listened to him on podcasts talking about his work, which is what I do when I know there is so much more I can learn and understand about poetry and poets.

What is so great about this collection is that it is so personal, and that makes it awe-inspiring for me. The language does that thing that good poetry does, it surprises me. I don’t see the next line coming as I go along, it is beautiful and languid. But there is also loss and struggle in this collection. One of the things that first drew me to Akbar’s poetry was knowing that he was a sober person, like me. I wanted to read poets reflecting on sobriety to prove to myself that I could be a sober poet, that the magic wasn’t in the drink.

In “There Is No Such Thing As An Accident Of The Spirit,” Akbar writes

Show me one beast
that loves itself as relentlessly
as even the most miserable man.

and in those lines, there is truth, yes, but also vulnerability and an understanding of what makes us human. I think about myself when I come to this line, which is kind of the point of it. To love oneself “relentlessly” even at your worst moment, to have an elevated sense of self. I don’t find judgment in this though, only observation.

I come to this book when I want to learn something, when I want to be challenged and swayed in the same note.

Dispatch by Cameron Awkward-Rich

I used to fear my body
was a well anyone could toss
their wishes into

Pulling from the above lines, I think this collection says a lot about who has claim to the body, with the speaker working that out through the poems. Poets are always musing about the body, but this collection is different, as it explores being a person that is both Black and trans.

As I’m sure many of the people reading this understand, historically, those that are Black, trans, and queer have had untold violences enacted on their bodies and their psyches, which I think this book delves into as well. What is the psychological toll of watching another Black person murdered by police, another Black trans woman murdered by an angry man; what do we do with ourselves when we learn of these violences?

There is a poem in this collection that very often gets quoted or passed around on the internet, and for good reason. I think it contains the answer to the questions I’ve just asked. “Meditations in an Emergency” chronicles the way the speaker moves through a day in a perpetual state of heartbreak. The poem ends with the lines:

“Like you, I was raised in the/institution of dreaming. Hand on my heart. Hand/on my stupid heart.”

I read these lines but especially the entire poem as a mediation on how it is easy to despair, but it is vital to dream and make a better world. To have faith that things can be better, despite what we know of the world.

Trophic Cascade by Camille T. Dungy

I have loved every cell of her body from the time I could count them
until now

What first drew me to Dungy’s work was her reflections on the natural world. The way she listed and described flowers, greenery, animals, mountains, all seemed so careful and attentive, and soon I sought out more of her work. What I love about Trophic Cascade is how much it contains. From meditations on motherhood, sex, the dwindling natural world, to racial violence, so much intersects in these poems.

The poem “Nullipara” begins:

I have learned love rests on the odd assortments of petals.

pick buttercup, pick sweet pea:
You love me. You love me.

and these reflections on love, whether they be between lovers or between mother and daughter, are also rich with the language of the green world. In Dungy’s poetry, I find that we can find ourselves in nature, that we are not so different from the flowers and the beasts, though we find ourselves to be far superior.

This comparison is evident in the titular poem, where the speaker muses on how becoming a mother changed everything about her world just as the reintroduction of gray wolves to Yellowstone changed everything about that ecosystem.

The more we can learn and cherish about the world around us, the better we will understand ourselves.

New and Selected Poems: Volume Two by Mary Oliver

Let the unknowable touch the buckle of my spine

If you are going to read one poet in a park, let it be Mary Oliver. Her poetry is widely quoted for a reason. This book is the most “loved” that I own, meaning it is dog-eared, coffee-stained, and post-it noted. Years ago, I found myself trying to connect with the world and turned to Oliver’s poetry as a way to get out of myself and my incessant worrying.

What I think makes Oliver so quotable is she states things that we want to connect so plainly. Where we are struggling to make sense of the world around us, she has a grasp on it and has decided to share that knowledge with us.

In “This World” she writes:

As for spiders, how the dew hangs in their webs
even if they say nothing, or seem to say nothing.
So fancy is the world, who knows, maybe they sing.
So fancy is the world, who knows, maybe the stars sing too

and it makes me think that everything has a song, we just don’t know the language in which they sing, the tone and melody cannot be heard with the naked human ear. This wonder is so pertinent in Oliver’s poetry, making her one of the most celebrated of our time.

frank: sonnets by Diane Seuss

To return from paradise I guess they call that
resurrection.

This collection is one of the most talked about and celebrated books of 2021, and for good reason. Seuss takes us into the past, into girlhood and its struggles, with these mesmerizing sonnets that play with the form.

These poems are untitled and untraditional. They are playful yet unflinching in their honesty. When reading this book, I first struggled with some of the poems that lacked punctuation, but once I got a reading groove going, it became so easy to get lost in the world of each poem.

The poems in this collection that got to me the most were those documenting the often brutal life on a farm. In one poem, the speaker tells of a sow giving birth:

“Mama/suffer to rid herself of each fancy body. Pigs have more hair than you’d/ think. Ice-white, and long white lashes.”

This almost angelic description of the mother pig is contrasted with the deaths of two of her children, one of them crushed by her in the night.

The poems are just so honest, about the speaker’s life and her relationship to the literature she is creating. The language isn’t trying to hide behind itself or shield the reader from horrors. It just is, and that kind of writing is something that I’m drawn toward.

If you want to impress your date with your poetry knowledge, I definitely recommend reading this book.

Rainbow Reading: Queer Utopias Are Necessities

Feature image photo by master1305 via Getty Images

A book in faded colors of the rainbow is open, and the words RAINBOW READING are on top of it.
illustration by A. Andrews

Hey hi hello!

I know we all talk about “staying up late reading under the covers” as a nostalgic shorthand for illicit enjoyment, but we’re all adults here, and when was the last time we actually did that? For me, it had been a minute, but following a top-tier recommendation by Tor.com’s Molly Templeton (and a co-sign from Autostraddle alum A.E. Osworth) the latest installment in Becky Chambers’ Monk and Robot series had me reading in bed, turning out the lights, and switching on my little camping lantern for the full experience. That’s the highest praise i can fathom —gosh, I’ve needed something utopian desperately and this series is healing everything that has ailed me. Sibling Dex, a nonbinary tea monk, bicycles around their post-apocalyptic eco-utopia with a sentient robot named Mosscap, surveying what it is that humans want in a world where they have everything they need. If Ursula Le Guin wrote The Little Prince, I imagine it would feel something like this.

Publishing loves its dystopian novels, and true utopias feel even nicer for their scarcity. The last time I read a book that felt utopian, it was the 1915 novel Herland by Charlotte Perkins Gilman (best known for AP English staple The Yellow Wallpaper), and that was, uh, before this mixed-race dyke learned about Gilman’s virulently racist and eugenicist principles. That’ll spoil the vibe for sure 🙃 so please, what other utopian novels should I read? Are there (gasp) any other particularly gay utopian novels? I’ve got a hankering for more! My favorite printmaker Cj of Black Lodge Press has a poster that declares “Queer utopias are not fantasies, queer utopias are necessities!” and that’s never felt truer.

Alrighty, let’s make like a volcano and rumble. On this week’s Rainbow Reading, we’ve got:

Shelf Care: Reviews, Essays, and other Things of Note
QUEER UTOPIAS ARE NOT FANTASIES, QUEER UTOPIAS ARE NECESSITIES!
https://www.instagram.com/p/CgX2IZwMwW0/
New Sadie Dupuis Poetry!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! By now y’all should know better than to expect chill from me!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

“It is tension: living well on a viral warming planet is too much to ask of any person. And yet it is what our circumstances are asking of us.”

—Joe Osmundson in conversation with Vanessa Friedman about Virology!

Autocorrect: Books content from the last couple weeks at Autostraddle!

[Kings of Leon voice] oHHHHhhHHHhh, this section’s on fiiiIIIiiiiiIIIiiiiRE~

Early Career Queer Spotlight:

Jessie Ulmer’s debut chapbook, Bewildered, combines poetry and prose to reimagine the story of Hansel and Gretel! Chapbook, zine, and indie press culture are some of my favorite corners of the queer literary scene, and it’s such a delight to celebrate these.

That’s all she wrote, folks! If you’re a queer writer, particularly an early-career queer writer: I’d love to hear about the cool things you’re up to so that I can share links to your published essays, book reviews, short stories, poems, and longform features on LGBTQ+ topics! Please email me links for consideration at yashwina@autostraddle.com with the subject line “Rainbow Reading Submission” — I’m an avid browser-tab-collector, and I especially want to hear from you if you’ve just landed your first publication or first major byline.

Joe Osmundson on Expansive Science Writing and Living in an Impossible World

When I speak to Joe Osmundson over Zoom on June 30, the frustration in his voice is palpable. It is the last day of Pride month, he is in the middle of a self-funded book tour for VIROLOGY, and history is repeating itself — again. “It has been really, really difficult to be on book tour for a book called Virology as yet another, quote unquote, emerging virus [monkeypox] is negatively impacting queer people, including people that I know very well,” Joe says. “It has been incredibly painful to sit in meetings with people from the CDC, and the federal government, and the White House, and once again be pleading for action as people are getting sick.”

Joe and I met a few years ago, before I knew what the words “global pandemic” really meant, at Tin House Writers Workshop. I promptly started following him on Twitter and listening to his podcast, Food 4 Thot, getting to know him as a funny, kind, brilliant, queer creative writer and scientist. When alarm bells started sounding in early 2020 about a novel coronavirus, it was Joe and his tweets that I turned to. His feed held the appropriate level of concern about the harm the new virus may cause and the actions we could all collectively and individually take to mitigate that harm. He and the other scientists in his community seemed more equipped to guide the public through a pandemic than the government or any of the people actually tasked with helping us.

When the pandemic hit in full force and then marched on (and on, and on, and on), Joe became my north star for realistic information. Though we are not close friends, I DMed him all sorts of questions. He always answered. The way he cares for other humans is evident in all of his work. His studies of both viruses and queer history positions him perfectly to speak factually and candidly about bodies, viruses, and the ways the two interact; to borrow from his book title, he is literally an expert on “the living, the dead, and the small things in between.”

It came as no surprise to me that Joseph Osmundson wrote the perfect book for the COVID pandemic. It is incredibly depressing that upon publication, the book is more relevant than ever. “I’m a bucket of rage,” Joe says, the day we speak, just one month ago. “We’re all grateful to be in a place where we can advocate for our community… where we can push on the levers of power to work faster, even as people are actively getting sick. But it’s been really painful to have to see the levels of inaction.”

He could have been talking about February 2020. But he wasn’t. He was talking about June 2022. He was talking about right now.

Virology: Essays for the Living, the Dead, and the Small Things In Between is an ambitious book that succeeds in its efforts to shed light on viruses with science writing, yes, but also to shed light on the messy realities of life with queer theory, journey entries, archival data, personal essays, and above all else, naked honesty.

“It’s only looking back that I can see the four pillars of the book,” Joe says, “which are science writing, literary analysis, queer theory, and memoir. And only looking back can I see what I was trying to say — that viruses, especially in this viral moment, are biological but biology is insufficient to really understand them… all of those things together, actually may allow us to wrap our mind around these sub microscopic particles that are the most abundant things on planet Earth. That can also kill us sometimes.”

The book is made up of eleven essays, each one weaving a different story relevant to virology: “On Risk,” “On Replication,” and “On Going Viral” may seem like obvious titles in a book about viruses, but “On Private Writing,” “On Mentors,” and “On Whiteness” find their places comfortably in the book, too. The hybrid nature of the text makes its messages vast and expansive; Joe’s ability to collaborate and to parse through dense theory and make it relatable give the book texture and layers that may surprise the casual reader or someone who picks up the book expecting a scientific textbook. In my opinion, it’s a welcome surprise.

“I’m a writer who, you know, if I weren’t making a certain type of reader feel uncomfortable, the book would not be a success,” Joe says. “I want to write science work from the point of view of a scientist that says, hey, scientists do have sex. We are people with emotions, doing science is emotional, we live in a biological world, but also a world that is more than just biological. And all of that needs to be contained within the pages of science texts, if we’re going to be honest about who we are and what we do.”

When I ask Joe how this book came to be, he says very simply: “The book discovered itself every day through the writing and editing process.” He explains that he’s been writing about viruses — mostly HIV — for a decade, but when “the writing was on the wall” in February 2020 with regards to COVID, he couldn’t write.

“I was just doing activism,” he explains, “because I felt like the thing that I could do was use my molecular biology virology expertise. We were in these rooms with city, state, and federal health officials. This was the Trump administration. It was a very difficult political atmosphere… I loved being a resource for people, it made me feel good to be able to help people understand what was going on. And my friend Alex Chee said, well, writing is an extension of that. You know, you don’t have to just help your friends, you can write, and help people understand this moment, who aren’t your friends. And so then I started writing, in addition to activism.”

Mo Crist, the editor of Virology, reached out and asked if Joe had a book. Joe said, yes, a book about viruses, about COVID. No, Mo countered — not about COVID. About viruses. To be honest, perhaps that is why this book feels (at times, unfortunately) truly timeless.

“And then we conceptualized the book together with my agent at the time, and with Mo and with me, doing the collective work of thinking,” Joe says. “It was a community project… it’s my political belief that no book is written by one person. It has one name on the cover, but I really wanted to queer and disrupt that sort of sole ownership.” He is quick to point out his collaborators in this book: He co-wrote the chapter “On War” with Patrick Nathan, he includes the interior worlds and thoughts of his quaranpod mates in the snippets of his COVID journal featured in “On Private Writing,” and one of my absolute favorite chapters, “On Activism and the Archives,” is made up of a lot of archival material including multiple conversations with Steven D. Booth, professional archivist and one of Joe’s dear friends.

And then there is Joe’s community of writers. “Lacy Johnson suggested the order in which the essays find themselves,” he says. “She specifically suggested that the first essay of the book as it is now needed to be the first essay of the book. And so many readers have said that essay introduces the book in the perfect way, and that’s Lacy — that’s not me, nor even my editor — who was so thoughtful about every single word. So it’s really important for me to allow that community of thinkers and makers to be visible so that other people who are writing or younger folks who are writing have that notion that this is how books are made. No capitalist notion of one person crying in their room. I know some people make books that way, but I don’t, and a lot of us don’t.”

While Joe has seen their book in the science section of a bookstore, they say it’s also important to them that the book is situated in its proper queer lineage, too. “I love queering science,” they say. “But I also want to make sure that the book exists in the legacy of queer theory that it was built out of — in the legacy of contemporary queer essayists like Alexander Chee and Hilton Als, the legacy of the poetics of the 80s and 90s that the book is built out of, poetics of folks who were living with or living around or very near to HIV and AIDS, the legacy of queer essayists like Audre Lorde and Susan Sontag, who wrote about bodies and illness from a very explicitly lesbian point of view. The book sits in a literary lineage that does not actually include much science writing. So not not only should the book sit in the science section of the bookstore, but it should carry the science section of the bookstore into the legacy that gave me the tools as a writer to be able to do the work that I tried to do in the book.”

If there is one beating pulse thrumming behind every page, every sentence, every word in this book, it is the value of community care.

When Joe and I talk about life in general, about the ways in which his book can help us all make sense of this moment (just like Alexander Chee suggested to him a couple of years ago), we land on how we’re both coping with the current realities of being alive right now. We compare our masking strategies, we talk about exposures we’ve experienced, we express frustration that the government has told everyone to stop wearing a mask on an airplane. And then we talk about how challenging it can be to spend years avoiding a virus, to really not wish to become infected with the virus, and then to accept the reality if you do become sick, and to find ways to care for yourself and for others around you while not catastrophizing when that is the case.

“That is the mental gymnastics of being alive on a viral planet,” Joe says. “We are being asked to live in an impossible world. Being alive in late capitalism, being alive as so many of the structures that we thought protected us are either being dismantled or shown to never have existed in the first place… it is tension. Living well on a viral warming planet is too much to ask of any person. And yet it is what our circumstances are asking of us. So what do we do but rise to those circumstances? We have paths that we can use those circumstances to make life significantly different. In our wake, significantly better.”

I’m publishing this piece almost one month after my initial Zoom conversation with Joe; the monkeypox outbreak and the government response has not gotten better. It has gotten worse. On Sunday, July 24, Joe tweets: “The queer community’s overall response to monkeypox should be viewed as an example for all. We’ve led by demanding tests, vaccines, and treatments. Since May. When the government failed us, we devised strategies to care for one another even as we continue advocating. We were trained by HIV and COVID work. And were working SO HARD to help people who are sick and to prevent more suffering. We’re tired. But we show up.”

I think about HIV, about COVID, about monkeypox. I think about what viral outbreaks might happen next. I think about what it looks like to care for each other in difficult circumstances. I think about the living, and the dead, and the small things in between. I pick up Virology and I start reading Joe’s essays again. I want to learn how to live in an impossible world while building a better one with the people around me. I know the lessons I need — the lessons we all need — exist in this book.

Virology: Essays for the Living, the Dead, and the Small Things In Between is out now.

Michelle Tea on Queer Pregnancy and Writing a Memoir in Present Tense

Michelle Tea has been one of my favorite authors since before I came out as a dyke. The very first time I met her, I exclaimed “Valencia taught me how to be a lesbian,” which is one hundred percent true. Now, more than a decade later, Michelle has written another memoir that gives a front row view into another chapter of being a lesbian: knocking oneself up.

Though it really does selfishly feel as though Michelle is forever writing the books I personally need to read to live my best dyke life, Knocking Myself Up is a delightful tale for all readers, whether you’re deeply interested in parenthood or happily child-free-forever.

Michelle and I chatted about how this book came to be, its iconic cover, the differences of publishing with a mainstream publisher versus an indie one, urgent storytelling and writing in the present tense, what her kid thinks of this memoir, and an anecdote she shared with me in 2019 that it turns out I incorrectly embellished and have been misremembering since then!

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Vanessa: I’m very curious about the process of how the book became a book! I remember your column about this subject for XOJane, but that website doesn’t exist anymore… I want to hear how this went from an idea in your head, to a column, to this book that people can buy soon!

Michelle: Well, it was an idea in my head the minute I started. When I made the decision to try to get pregnant, I felt like I’d immediately catapulted myself into some sort of strange world, like I immediately had strange errands to run, you know, errands that I’d never run before. And I was 40. At any age, it’s pretty easy to feel like you’re not doing anything particularly new, and so I was really struck with how new everything felt and how I had to think about myself differently, my body differently, my life differently, dating differently. And as a writer, of course, I just immediately want to write about that. It’s just how I process my own life. So having so many things feel new all at the same time was really overwhelming and exciting.

I’d been in touch with XOJane for something else, and I really like Emily McCombs a lot… I had wanted to [write about getting pregnant] more than anything, but I knew that [having a column] would help me stick with it. I get a lot of ideas all the time, and then I just don’t have the time to do it. But if somebody says, yes, write this column, then I’ll do it. And so I just pitched it to her. And she said yeah! I remember when I was signing my contract, they wanted to own everything, like all corporations do. And I remember the part about a book, I crossed it off, because I just knew that I was going to write a book about this, and that these blogs would be a sort of study for that, a way for me to hold on to my memories about how things felt really immediately in the moment. Those funny little details that can get lost but are so wonderful to have in there, you know? I’ve never really worked from source material, like a diary or journal or anything, because I don’t really diary or journal. But I do have the entirety of all the blogs on my computer, and it was really helpful to go back and look at them and just remember.

I’ve always had people ask if I would do a book about [getting pregnant], and once I learned that [the xoJane column] wasn’t accessible anymore, I felt more motivated to really do it. And it also felt far enough in the past that I felt curious about it. There was enough space that it felt like, oh, that era is over now. I ran it by my agent, and she loved the idea. Thankfully, Peter Kispert at Dey Street really fell in love with it… and then he ended up leaving, and I ended up working with Kate Napolitano, my editor right now. And she was my editor for How To Grow Up. So it was really cute.

Vanessa: That is cute! How is working with a major press different from working with an indie? Especially as a queer writer who tells her stories very honestly?

Michelle: There are a lot of differences. Thankfully, with the passage of time, I don’t think there’s that concern that your queerness will be censored or stamped out or anything like that. I think that at this point in time, the big publishers understand that queerness is actually the value, like, that’s the point, and it’s good, and it’s important. I certainly didn’t feel that my queerness was a problem or needed to be toned down.

But, you know, my point of view is not only queer — it’s also other things. It’s weird. My humor can be really dark; I think that you can get away with making more underground references [with an indie]. Having your humor be a little darker, less accessible… you can get away with being a little less accessible with indie presses. With mainstream presses, they are going to try and sell your book to the masses, so they want you to be a little bit more accessible. I didn’t find that it was my queerness per se that was a stumbling block, but more other temperate parts of my temperament or state of mind or reference points. Definitely a lot of weird dark jokes got cut from [the manuscript], …but I just was like, it’s fine. I don’t care. My friend Ali Liebegott is also a queer writer with a very dark sense of humor, one of the funniest people that I know, and I would text her all of the fucked up jokes that were getting taken out. [Laughs] So that was pretty funny.

And also… I share the same agenda as my publisher. I also want this book to be really accessible for the masses. I have loved publishing more indie less accessible work with Feminist Press and indie presses. I’m a writer who’s always been like, what’s the best press for this book? Because I write kind of differently around different things. But I’m super into the idea of this book being comedic, accessible, and, hopefully, still a little weird.

I’m not invested in being a niche market. You know what I mean? I’ve always wanted my books to reach as many people as possible. The older you get, or the more experience you get under your belt with publishing, you start to understand more. The realities, whether you like them or not… it’s just fucking capitalism. Which sucks. But it’s like, I’m okay with some of my sharp edges being a little rounded as long as I don’t end up just like a weird little bouncy ping pong ball by the end of it.

Vanessa: Yes, that makes sense. Thank you for talking so candidly about that. In other news, I am obsessed with the cover of this book. Like, obsessed. I would like a frame of this on my wall. I hope that’s not weird.

Michelle: Oh my gosh, stop, I love that.

The cover of Knocking Myself Up: A Memoir Of My (In)fertility features Michelle Tea in a red bra and matching red panties laying on a couch with her arm on her forehead and her other arm dangling off the side of the couch. On the floor in front of the couch, there are a bunch of dishes and food and a pair of red pumps.

Vanessa: How did the cover come to be?

Michelle: There is a queer photographer in San Francisco, Sophie Spinelle, and she does classic boudoir portraits, but you know, retro and super body positive. She’s just a great queer femme photographer. And she had this idea once I was pregnant to do this series of me and just like really use my body, my pregnant body. So much gets projected upon a pregnant body. I was of course game for it. Her pictures are beautiful. I love collaborating with artists. There’s a whole series… my favorite is the one I originally suggested [as the cover]. I’m sitting in my underwear and a ribbed tank undershirt, sitting on a mountain of cheeseburgers with ketchup on my shirt. And that was being pregnant to me. Just constantly eating. I’m a slob. When I eat, I eat kind of like a monster. And when I was pregnant, I was eating more ravenously. My body was extra, my dimensions were extra mysterious. I was a mess. I always had food on me. And I was like, this is what being pregnant is.

Vanessa: I love that. And you suggested the series to the publisher?

Michelle: I did. Yeah. They wanted to know if I had any pictures of myself pregnant. And I was like, do I! I wanted the hamburger one, but they… you know, that’s like such a perfect metaphor for… you know, it’s like, I’m still very happy with this. This is still real, right? It’s great. It’s not me on a bunch of dirty hamburgers, but it’s okay, you know?

Vanessa: Yeah. Well, I love it. I love that story.

Michelle: It was really fun to just like, wear a bullet bra and a wig.

Vanessa: Yeah! Now I have so many ideas for when I’m pregnant.

Michelle: Do it all! It’s so fun. Your body just becomes so many different things. It’s like you’re a walking art installation!

Vanessa: I can’t wait. My girlfriend is always like “you’re gonna look so hot when you’re pregnant” and I’m like, “I know.”

Michelle: You are! And you can have so much fun with it. It can be so many things. It can be hot, and it can be weird, and it can be challenging and provocative.

Vanessa: Truly cannot wait. I’d love to hear about your process when writing, especially a memoir like this that is so grounded in the voice of the version of yourself you were as this was happening. How do you stay so in the present? What’s it like to sit down and write this without letting the Michelle who knows what happens get in the way?

Michelle: You have to shut that Michelle up! [Laughs] I mean, the short answer is, I have no fucking idea. Because what is writing? It’s magic. It’s so subconscious. I don’t know what I’m doing, you know? But then that’s not the whole answer either.

So… there is a little trick, I think, especially when you’re writing about things like real hardships — and I don’t know how I do it, but I know that I read work where it’s being done — and it’s where you get this sense that the person is okay. In spite of [whatever’s happening in the story], you trust them somehow that they’ve gotten through it, even though that might not be something that’s in there. So the You Of Today does come through somehow. But it can’t be The Voice, you know? Or it can be — some people want to write that book, but I really like thinly veiled memoirs, so I wanted mine to be in that style. I wanted to take the tropes of fiction, to have it read like a real story. That’s the kind of memoir I really like, where you can sink down into it. So I guess to write it, I just kind of sink down into it.

I can tell when I want to put my own Today perspective into it, because usually, it’s a false note. It’s a clunk. It’s like, I am wanting to apologize for somebody; I’m wanting to control a little bit; I want the reader to hate my ex; I want the reader to not hate my mom; I want something instead of just presenting what happened and letting the reader figure it out. Don’t tell them how they should feel about these characters. Just show them what the characters did, and let them make up their own mind. I think having any kind of agenda can really compromise the writing. You have to guard against having an emotional agenda.

Vanessa: Was it an obvious choice for you to write it in the present tense? Was there any part of you that wanted to write it like, this is how it happened? Or was it just like, oh, duh, the present tense is the way to tell this story?

Michelle: No, I really wanted it to be present tense. I really want it to feel like you fell down a rabbit hole into this world, because that’s how I felt. That was the reality of the experience for me. That’s why Valencia was written like that, you know, because I felt like I’d fallen into a rabbit hole of San Francisco dykes. That tone helps tell the story. So yeah, it was really important to me that this book had that urgency of the biological clock, the urgency of just like, whoa, what are we going to do today? I didn’t want it to be like, oh, I’m looking back on it from where I sit with my child. I didn’t want any spoilers that I could help.

Vanessa: In the Afterword of this book, you write: “Writing such a book in the shadow of a divorce is certainly a bizarre experience.” What was it like writing about your ex in such a present tense?

Michelle: Well, I edited out a bunch of the romance between me and Dashiell, because I’m not feeling particularly charmed by them anymore. But at the same time, I didn’t want to remove that story. I mean, first of all, I couldn’t remove the story, because I could not have given birth without Dashiell’s help at that point. And also, I wanted to give a love story, I wanted to be true to the moment. That’s always the case with memoir, right? You’re always trying to go back and link up with however you felt in a moment, knowing that it’s different than how you feel now. It almost always is, but this was so acute — it was such a huge difference. And the break was so relatively recent that I really didn’t have a lot of separation from it. So I was actually really grateful that there were some pre-written little lovey parts [from the xoJane column], because I don’t know how I would have conjured that freshly in that moment. So that was really great.

I really wanted it to be present tense. I really want it to feel like you fell down a rabbit hole into this world, because that’s how I felt. That was the reality of the experience for me.

Vanessa: What are some books you’re reading right now that you’d recommend to people who like your writing?

Michelle: I’m reading the Cookie Mueller released from Semiotext(e), Walking Through Clear Water in a Pool Painted Black, which was her collection that came out from Semiotext(e), I think in the 80s. And then after that, High Risk did a book called Ask Dr. Mueller, which were all her columns from when she wrote for The Village Voice and did a recreational drug advice column sort of? And I guess they combined those two books and then maybe also found some other unpublished stuff, so there’s this whole new volume of Walking Through Clear Water in a Pool Painted Black, and my god it’s like — just reading like the first chapter, I’m like can I just get a back piece tattoo of Cookie Mueller’s head or something? I just love her so much, and I was so inspired by her. Her work was introduced to me right when I was starting to write in San Francisco, right when I was starting to write the stuff that would become both my first book and Valencia. So that work is really heavily influenced by Cookie Mueller, and it feels so fun to reread it and then read new stuff and just kind of really soak in her vibe. I’m also rereading The Greatest of Marlys, the Lynda Barry comic, and there’s some new stuff in the beginning that’s almost about how she found Marlys. She’s written so much about her creative process, and it’s all very immediate and about accessing memory and really sinking into those memories. And so I love her. I love her so much. Oh! There’s this really great book, it’s called Literally Show Me A Healthy Person, by Darcie Wilder. I didn’t know anything about this writer. I just saw it at my local bookstores, and I was like I need to buy this book to thank this person for titling a book with the best title… and then I’m obsessed with it. I’m also reading another great book called Aesthetical Relations, by Christina Catherine Martinez.

Vanessa: Thank you for all of those recommendations! Back to your book — I love the way the title suggests that it’s a solo project, but then almost immediately, that’s upended. Like, it’s disrupting how a nuclear straight cis family might make a baby, but it’s also disrupting the idea that people maybe have in their head of like, a sad lonely lesbian making a baby all by herself. I love that.

Michelle: Yeah, it’s so funny, you know, we landed on that title, and I was aware that it’s maybe only accurate for the first two chapters of the book, and not even then really, because my friend Rhonda is knocking me up, Quentin is knocking me up. So I was never really only knocking myself up. But when I think about the overall spirit of the book, it really all began when I was just like, I’m gonna get myself pregnant. I don’t know how I’m gonna do it, but I’m gonna get myself pregnant. And I liked that energy, and I wanted that energy to color the whole story, even as it morphed into it taking a few villages to get me pregnant.

Vanessa: Yeah, I mean, I loved that. It felt intentional to me. Speaking of taking a few villages, I would love to hear more about Mutha magazine!

Michelle: It’s a project that even though I’m not quite as involved with it anymore, it continues to thrive. It’s a great online resource.

It’s a web magazine, and it’s all first person stories about parenthood, from all different kinds of people who came into parenthood in all kinds of different ways. It’s exactly what I wanted when I was trying to get pregnant. I was trying to Google my life, like Google myself a baby basically. And I couldn’t really find anything that I could relate to. Even when I was able to source some sort of helpful practical information, it always came through these weird white straight and middle class portals. When I was in the TTC [trying to conceive] community, all these message boards had all these women who were very straight, cisgender women, I think a lot of them were Christian, and it was just so not my world. The vibe on a lot of these sites was also very I’m living for my baby, this is my purpose in life, I’ve got to have a baby, and I didn’t relate to that either. I didn’t know a ton of people with babies, you know, as a queer person, I just didn’t, but I was like okay, I do know some people with babies. I know some writers who ended up having babies, and I was like, what’s their story? I want to read something by Megan Camille Roy, or I want to read something by Beth Lisick, or Joey Solloway, or Jennifer Natalya Fink. Who can write something not even necessarily queer, but just weird? What is it really like? What kind of stories can I expect to really live out?

So I just kind of made a WordPress and took a close up picture of my sister’s kid’s play food and put it up! And I just started doing it. And people just started sending me stuff. And it was really incredible. I had new stuff to post every day, and it really kept me afloat. During that whole time I was trying to get pregnant, I was also doing Mutha magazine. Even though I don’t talk about it very much [in the book], that was a big thing that I was doing. And it really did sustain me to know that there was just this wealth of people and information and that these people would be my people when I was pregnant. Because that’s another thing too — there’s this weird ego identity shift, and you’re like, well, who am I if I have a baby? These things always feel so dumb when you’re confronted with them, but they are truly very deeply rooted in us. We have egos, and we have these senses of ourselves that we’re not even hardly aware of, but we are operating on them. They’re pulling us through the world every day. So it was really great to find this lineage of weird people having kids and writing about it. So yeah, it’s still out there! If you happen to live in New York, there’s going to be a great Mutha magazine panel at the Brooklyn Book Festival this year. It’s so cool, and they’re always looking for writing.

Vanessa: That’s so cool.

Michelle: Yeah, it’s very cool. It’s not only queer, but it’s very queer.

Vanessa: Amazing. Okay I have to ask… I’m so curious what your kid thinks about this book.

Michelle: I don’t know if he knows what to think about it. It’s really funny. I remember at one point, he sort of like… he took offense, but he loves to take offense. He loves to find something to take offense about and be mad at me about! So at first, he was like you wrote a book about me! And I was like I actually didn’t, I wrote a book about me. I wrote a book about me, and you were in my belly. And I do write a little bit about you when you come out of my belly, just to end it, so that people know you are alive and you’re well. But like, it’s really not about you.

He’s a little… he’s curious. You know? I think he likes looking at the cover and looking at my big pregnant belly and knowing he’s in there. You know, he’s always been really fascinated by that.

But yeah, he’s definitely at the age now where he’s seeing and comprehending more of the world, and he wants his privacy, which I totally respect. I know I’m going to be writing a book exploring my adventures in polyamory, and part of my experience of that was being a parent who was being polyamorous and having poly relationships… but I don’t know how much I’m gonna be able to talk about it, to be really honest. I guess I’m not going to worry about it until I’m writing it.

But when I think about the overall spirit of the book, it really all began when I was just like, I’m gonna get myself pregnant. I don’t know how I’m gonna do it, but I’m gonna get myself pregnant. And I liked that energy, and I wanted that energy to color the whole story, even as it morphed into it taking a few villages to get me pregnant.

Vanessa: I remember when I took your class at Tin House, I told you I was nervous that people weren’t going to universally love my book, and you were like, they’re not going to because queer people will judge you no matter what, and you need to have a thick skin about it! And I was like oh my god how?! And then you told me about that girl who dumped the popcorn on your head, like on behalf of your ex.

[Michelle makes a confused face]

Vanessa: It was after Valencia and some girl… you were at the movies? And it was like, not your ex, but it was your ex’s friend? And she was like, how dare you have written all that stuff about so and so, and then she dumped a thing of popcorn on your head?

Michelle: She didn’t dump popcorn on my head! But I love that that’s how it morphed!

Vanessa: That’s how it is in my head!

Michelle: She did see me at the movies, and she was like, oh, look, it’s Rona Barrett!

Vanessa: Right, right, right! And then in my head, she dumps popcorn all over you.

Michelle: That’s amazing! You should make that happen.

Both: [Laughter]

Vanessa: But in terms of handling negative reviews or mean commentary about your writing…?

Michelle: The worst thing you can do is to seek it out. You know what I mean? So you have to just ignore it; you really do. I can imagine it can feel like, but I have a duty, I need to read this, I need to respond, and I need to be accountable or tell them to fuck off, or I need to defend myself or apologize. And it’s just like, no. You actually don’t. I mean, of course, we need to be accountable. But that’s not what we’re talking about, right? We’re talking about the more petty shit. And you just can’t seek it out. You have to deliberately ignore it. Because you have to train yourself to not dwell upon it. And then, according to Buddhism, the flip side of that is you can’t crave those good reviews either, right? And so, it’s hard, but you have to try to find a middle ground. Like I know there’s a really bad review out there of How to Grow Up on NPR — something that I respect! — and I’ve never read it, and I will never read it. Sometimes I have to Google myself to find press clippings or whatever and it’ll pop up and I’ll be like, no, not reading you! And then obviously you’re gonna read the good reviews, you’re gonna feel good, like, oh, good, I did what I set out to do, it seems, according to this person… and then you just gotta let it go. You just gotta fucking let it all go. It doesn’t even matter anyway.

Vanessa: Ugh, thank you for that free therapy.

Michelle: Oh, I’m always here for free therapy.

Knocking Myself Up: A Memoir of My (In)Fertility by Michelle Tea comes out August 2. Stay tuned for Autostraddle’s review of the book, also coming out August 2. You can find Michelle this fall promoting her new book in the US and the UK, on the Sister Spit 2022 Tour, and on her podcast Your Magic.

12 Books to Read to Be a Better Ally to Disabled People This Disability Pride Month

July is Disability Pride Month, but, like with queer pride, disability history and experiences are not something taught in schools or represented in the media. In fact, studies have shown that while about a quarter of the US population has a disability, less than three percent of characters on TV are disabled. So, if you want to find disability representation or learn to be a better ally to disabled people, it requires some extra effort to find those perspectives.

To help, I’ve put together a list of a dozen books (in alphabetical order by last name, this is not a ranking) that will help you learn about the disabled experience and its many variations – or help you feel seen if you are disabled. This list will make you laugh out loud, bring you to tears, make you question things you believed to be true, and even make you want to blast Demi Lovato.

1. The Pretty One: On Life, Pop Culture, Disability, and Other Reasons to Fall in Love with Me by Keah Brown (2019)

Book cover of The Pretty One: On Life, Pop Culture, Disability, and Other Reasons to Fall in Love with Me by Keah Brown (which has pink and yellow lettering a photo of the author Keah Brown, who is a black woman)

Keah Brown’s personal essays of her experiences living in a Black disabled body in a white disabled world are absolutely charming. It balances emotionally heavy moments with anecdotes about teenage crushes on Usher and a review of Demi Lovato’s best albums. Brown went viral on social media for her #DisabledAndCute, celebrating self-love and representation. Similarly, the essays largely focus on how Brown experienced music, film, TV, fashion, and makeup throughout her life – from the empowering moments of seeing Black women represented on TV to the frustration of trying to learn to use makeup with a physical disability. This book felt like chatting with an old friend. The book was published in 2019, but Brown came out as bisexual in 2020 and wrote an article for Autostraddle recognizing the people who helped her realize she is bisexual.

2. More Than Organs by Kay Ulanday Barrett (2020)

Book cover of More Than Organs by Kay Ulanday Barrett (which has orange bold type over a navy blue background)

Kay Ulanday Barrett is a self-described “queer brown Filipinx disabled transgender boi.” This poetry collection is described as “A love letter to Brown, Queer, and Trans futures.” It is appropriately heavy, but it also finds moments of joy and a sense of community. Barrett has said that the title “More than Organs” is inspired by the experiences of being a sick, non-binary person who often interacts with medical settings where bodies are gendered, labeled, and held up to certain medical standards that may not fit. It is defiant and intersectional, heavy but hopeful.

3. Exile and Pride: Disability, Queerness, and Liberation by Eli Clare (1999)

Book cover of Exile and Pride: Disability, Queerness, and Liberation by Eli Clare (which is swirled in black and white)

Eli Clare, a disabled transgender author and advocate with cerebral palsy, was a part of a critical wave of queer and BIPOC disabled people who redefined the fight for disability rights to center on justice and intersectionality. His book was groundbreaking, first published in 1999, and is essential to queer disability history, justice, and organizing. It explores gender, the notion of home, environmental justice, capitalism, gender, sexuality, and accessibility while calling for change and accountability within social justice movements.

4. Lord of the Butterflies by Andrea Gibson (2019)

Book cover of Lord of the Butterflies by Andrea Gibson (which is an illustration of grey butterflies against a light blue swirl and a navy blue sky, with a red figure of a person in the front)

Nonbinary poet Andrea Gibson writes beautiful heartfelt prose about the experience of being queer, dealing with gender dysphoria, living with Lyme disease, and coping with mental illness. This collection includes “Gender in the Key of Lyme Disease” and “Tincture,” which confront the pain, grief, and loss of chronic illness and see Gibson trying to come to terms with a diagnosis that took the life of someone they idolized. One of my favorite lines from the collection shows the intersection between physical and mental illness: “Good god, there isn’t a healthy body in the world that is stronger than a sick person’s spirit. Thirty times last month, I thought, I can’t do this another day. Thirty times last month, I did it another day. I lived with the hurt burrowing into my bloodstream and still wanted more time.”

5. We Are Never Meeting In Real Life by Samantha Irby (2017)

Book cover of We Are Never Meeting in Real Life by Samantha Irby (which features a bright yellow background and wet cat hissing)

Samantha Irby is a Black queer woman who writes humorous personal essays about her life, including her experiences with Chron’s disease, arthritis, and mental illness. All of her books are great, but I recommend this one because it has been framed as “putting a funny face on Chron’s,” so that seems like a good place to start for a better understanding of what it means to live with inflammatory bowel disease. Irby is so funny and relatable and honest that I read all of her books back to back, often laughing out loud and occasionally crying.

6. Care Work: Dreaming Disability Justice by Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha (2018)

Book cover of Care Work: Dreaming Disability Justice by Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha (which has the words Care Work in olive green stamped font and beige and orange watercolor coloring in the background)


Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha is another writer and activist whose work and influence are essential to understanding the history and progress of the disability justice movement. They are a self-defined “mixed-blood, middle-aged, nonbinary femme disabled and autistic writer, disability and transformative justice cultural and movement worker,” and this collection of essays feels like reading about a vision for a better, more inclusive, and accessible world. I was inspired and surprised to learn how Lakshmi has helped organize collective care and mutual aid in queer, disabled, BIPOC communities. As a queer disabled person, it felt free to hear Lakshmi’s vision and principles for a world where organizing and activism are truly accessible and where disabled people have access to the support they need regardless of their financial resources. I recommend it for allies, especially because it will give you a better understanding of what it really looks like to show up for disabled people.

7. I’m Special: And Other Lies We Tell Ourselves by Ryan OConnell (2015)

Book cover of I'm Special and Other Lies We Tell Ourselves by Ryan O'Connell (which feature what seems to be a gazillion gold stars covering a piece of notebook paper)

In recent years, Ryan OConnell, a gay man with cerebral palsy and complications from getting hit by a car, has become a powerful advocate for queer disability representation. He started as a culture writer, and this collection of essays inspired the Netflix show of the same name. This book, and O’Connell’s work generally, is sex-positive and shares the joy, shame, and unique awkwardness that can come with having sex in a queer disabled body. O’Connell is also starring in Peacock’s new Queer As Folk, where he further increases the representation of disabled queer sexuality. This book is a great and hilarious place to get acquainted with his work.

8. Sitting Pretty: The View from My Ordinary Resilient Disabled Body by Rebekah Taussig (2020)

Book cover of Sitting Pretty: The View from my Ordinary Resilient Disabled Body by Rebekah Taussig, which features a white woman with a blonde bob in a yellow shirt, black shorts, sitting in a wheelchair in front of a red-orange background)

Rebekah Taussig is a disabled educator, and because of that experience, she does a great job explaining and breaking down ableist stereotypes, harmful tropes, and microaggressions. She has been disabled most of her life, so her book highlights how her experiences differ from those of someone who develops a disability later. Her essays include frustrating experiences of people insisting on helping her with her wheelchair only to make things harder for her and able-bodied family members that don’t understand why she feels marginalized. She attempts to teach high school students about ableism even though they fight her and say some terrible things. She tries to buy a house, gets married and divorced, and gets pregnant despite being told she might not be able to have children, and she does all of this while explaining how her disability impacts her.

9. The Body is Not an Apology: The Power of Radical Self Love by Sonya Renee Taylor (2021)

Book cover of The Body is Not an Apology: The Power of Radical Self Love by Sonya Renee Taylor (which features a plus size black woman with with purple flowers covering her breasts while laying on top of a bed of blue, orange, and red flowers styled like La Virgen de Guadalupe)

Sonya Renee Taylor is not strictly a disability writer but an advocate for self-love. Her work breaks the stigmas and judgments of having a body different from the ideal. This is a must-read for anyone struggling with shame around their body because, as Taylor explains, “living in a female body, a Black body, an aging body, a fat body, a body with mental illness is to awaken daily to a planet that expects a certain set of apologies to already live on our tongues. There is a level of ‘not enough” or ‘too much’ sewn into these strands of difference.” It also lays essential groundwork for breaking down ableism because ableism is based on a view of bodies as a means of productivity, function, and the ability to fit into a mold.

10. A Sick Life: TLC ‘n Me: Stories from On and Off the Stage by Tionne “T-Boz” Watkins (2017)

Book cover of A Sick Life: TLC 'n Me: Stories from On and Off the Stage by Tionne “T-Boz

I was obsessed with TLC as a child, so I was excited when I came across this book via some recommendations algorithm. TLC, for those unfamiliar, was an R&B / Pop group of all Black women who broke many records and accomplished many firsts in the music industry; they remain one of the best-selling “girl groups” of all time. This book is a first-hand account from T-Boz about her experience of being on top of the world surrounded by signs of success, fame, and influence while being very ill with sickle cell disease. T-Boz was told from an early age that she wouldn’t live very long, and she spent a lot of time in and out of the hospital, including during tours with TLC. The book shows how she struggled to balance her career and the demands of chasing her dreams with a chronic illness and offers a behind-the-scenes peek at TLC.

11. The Collected Schizophrenias: Essays by Esmé Weijun Wang (2019)

Book cover of The Collected Schizophrenias: Essays by Esmé Weijun Wang (which is styled like a composition notebook cover with swirly patterns, clockwise: of green and blue, blue and red, red and yellow, and burgundy and teal)

Esme Weijn Wang’s collection of essays about schizophrenia is important for its first-hand, non-clinical account. I did find the essays to feel a bit academic at times because it goes into detail about diagnostic criteria and the Diagnostic Manual definitions of schizophrenia, Lyme, PTSD, and other diagnoses that Wang deals with on the path to getting a correct diagnosis. But overall, I learned a lot about schizophrenia, and it helped break down some of the ableist stigma and myths I didn’t realize I was still holding.

12. Disability Visibility: First-Person Stories from the Twenty-First Century by Alice Wong (2020)

Book cover of Disability Visibility: First-Person Stories from the Twenty-First Century by Alice Wong (which features brightly colored geometric shapes in pink, purple, blue, aqua green, and yellow in front of an off-white background)

Alice Wong is an absolute icon and force for disability justice and representation, and no list on the topic would be complete without her work. Disability Visibility is an anthology of first-person disabled writing, representing a wide range of experiences. Disability is, of course, not a monolith, so this anthology is essential reading to better understand the wide range of experiences and needs within the disability community. It includes the perspectives of BIPOC, queer, and trans-disabled people, including Jen Deerinwater, Keah Brown, and Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha.

Nicola Griffith’s Spear Is a Gender-Bending, Queer Arthurian Adventure

The best thing about Arthurian legend is that it’s straight up fanfiction. Everyone is riffing off of someone else’s story, and all those stories are just riffs of the stories that came before them. Swords on swords and grails on grails and even Arthurs on Arthurs, if you happen to be reading a time-traveling AU. There’s just so many threads to pull on! But outside the realm of fan fiction for BBC’s early aughts cult classic Merlin, and of course every time Daniel Lavery gets his literary paws anywhere near Camelot, there’s not too much queerness to speak of in modern day Arthurian writing. Enter lauded, countless-award-winning author Nicola Griffith, whose LGBTQ+ novel, Spear, flips the whole legend on its head, while keeping a keen eye on all the mythology that came before it. There’s magic! There’s sword fights! There’s sapphic romance! And, best of all, there’s Griffith’s melodic prose, which will weave you up in its spell in a matter of pages.

Our heroine, Peretur, is raised by her mother, far away from Caer Leon, in complete isolation. And that’s on purpose; she’s running and hiding and determined that no one will ever find her or her child. She’s got some things some very powerful men want, and some things even more powerful men would come after if they knew her treasures existed. Peretur spends her days frolicking through the hills and valleys of her rural land, learning to forage and fish, brew potions and weave baskets. She grows strong and agile, a whisper on the wind, and only ever journeys into the nearby village to leave gifts for the farmer’s wife who sets her heart ablaze. A chance run-in with the fallen body of one of the Knights of Artos, King of Caer Leon, supplies her with a broken spear, sword, and some piecemeal armor — and a feeling she can’t shake, that she was meant for something greater than life alone in the forest. Despite her mother’s protests and promise that goodbye is forever, Peretur sets out on her hero’s journey, disguised as a young man.

I never get tired of gender-bender stories, from Shakespeare to Mulan, from Virgina Woolf to She’s the Man. And what I particularly love about Spear is that none of Peretur’s potential love interests (or mentors) flip out when they fall for her (or agree to train her) and she reveals her gender to them. Some folks see right through it, of course; others are like, “Cool no problem, shall we continue on to the hayloft and get to smashing?” It’s sexy and powerful and she doesn’t stay hidden forever. There’s also nothing quite as satisfying to me as that old Lord of the Rings play where a woman warrior flings off her helmet on the battlefield and declares I AM NO MAN before driving a sword through the heart of some misogynistic monster.

Spear is more than adventure and romance; it’s also a rumination on what it means to ‘belong’ to someone else. How much of who we are is where (and whom) we came from? And how much is who we’re desperate to become? What if our destiny calls us away from a person who feels like we’re their destiny? What do we owe to those who love us? And what do we owe to ourselves? Griffith examines these — very queer — questions with both deftness and gravitas.

Oh, and as a bonus, just a small and special treat: Spear throws open the door on the Lancelotian triad you’ve waited your whole life to see. When I say it’s queer, I mean it’s queer. The whole time I was reading, I was giggling to myself imagining Nicola Giffith doing her Arthurian research as Merlin from Disney’s The Sword and the Stone: What a mess! What a medieval muddle! We’ll have to modernize it!

Spear by Nicola Griffith is available now.

Chris Belcher’s “Pretty Baby” Examines the Power of Shame in Our Culture

You don’t have to look very closely to see that shame is one of the foremost organizing principles of our society. From the minute we become conscious beings in the world, we’re taught how to use shame to create and navigate our boundaries, desires, and hopes for who we become. We use shame to govern our behavior, dictate our decisions, and help others do the same. In this way, the structure of shame as a guiding force becomes entirely inescapable as the models of those who have been ashamed and who are ready to shame us are everywhere in our lives, from our parents and teachers to our peers and friends to the media swirling all around us. But of course, our experiences with and internalization of the culture of shame has different consequences and complications — especially if we’re not cis, not white, not heterosexual, and not men.

Throughout the course of her debut memoir, Pretty Baby, Chris Belcher explores the ways in which shame infiltrates and influences every corner of our society. Growing up in small town West Virginia, the rules about what people could and couldn’t do were explicit: men had their roles and women theirs, femininity (even in the women who performed it) was seen as weakness, empathy was rarely awarded to those who needed it, and queerness was expressly forbidden save for a select few who people tried their best not to think about. Belcher sought out ways to take her power back from the rigid, patriarchal world around her and thought she’d found it through sex, lying to men on the internet, and, eventually, through her own performances of queerness and masculinity.

Belcher’s pursuits of power led to her transformation from a popular high school cheerleader to an outcasted queer kid who was regularly harassed about her appearance and sexuality. As she grew into herself and the shame of her sexuality and gender performance slowly dissipated, Belcher realized this was the motivating factor for all of the persecution she was experiencing from the people and culture around her: “I had taken something that didn’t belong to me, and they were determined to get it back. If they couldn’t get it back, they wanted to know how I managed to pull off the heist. […] That thing I had taken that didn’t belong to me: it was myself.”

During her first years at a college close to home, Belcher is introduced to sex work through her then-girlfriend, Megan, after inadvertently seeing an email from Megan’s acquaintance Tony. In an attempt to regain some control over the situation and her relationship with Megan, Belcher insists that Megan let her “in on it.” Her and Megan spend an evening with Tony that doesn’t exactly go as planned, but it leaves Belcher reflecting on the financial freedom it could provide: “In my lifetime of minimum wage jobs, I’d only ever worked for seven dollars an hour. Tony lasted far less than that, and I made $250. What we had done with him wasn’t pleasant, but neither was working at the Taco Bell drive-thru.” Belcher’s relationship with Megan implodes soon after, and later, her graduation from college and acceptance to a Ph.D. program in Los Angeles provides an opportunity for Belcher to escape the confines of her small town life.

It’s in Los Angeles where Belcher is re-introduced to sex work when she meets and falls in love with a professional dominatrix named Catherine. With the extra costs of attending graduate school and living in an expensive city weighing down on her, Belcher is encouraged by Catherine to also start working as a professional dominatrix also. As Belcher learns the ins and outs of working as a dominatrix, she’s forced to reconcile with her own femininity and learn to use it as a source of power in the dungeons where she does her work and, in turn, she’s also forced to closely examine the ways power and degradation operate in our society at large: “Domination is one of the only professions in which femininity is worth more than masculinity[…].” The collision of her encounters with her clients in the dungeon, her experiences and conversations with Catherine at work and in their life outside of work, and what she was learning in graduate school help pushstart Belcher’s reckoning with the role shame played in her life and in the lives of the people around her.

In the dungeon, Belcher was in complete control of her clients as “Men paid [her] to make them feel: ugly, dirty, cheap, whorish, and feminine. All the insults that humiliate women at work, on public transportation, in schools and strip clubs, online, and in any other place they might go,” but she realizes quickly that not all of the clients she saw were using BDSM to work through their traumas. It’s at this point in the memoir where Belcher really begins to analyze how shame operates differently for people depending on the amount of power they hold in our society. Since many of the men she saw never experienced the kind of debasement that marginalized people do, it becomes obvious to Belcher (and to us) that they are hiring dominatrixes to help them feel that shame and degradation they’re “missing,” to give them what is often denied to them because of the fact of their power. Similarly, she explains how within the sex work community, there is a hierarchy of which jobs are considered more or less shameful, with dominatrixes coming out on top because they don’t “have sex” with their clients. It becomes more and more obvious that shame is everywhere and in everything, even deep down inside of Belcher where the material comfort of her new life had less of a soothing effect.

While one of her graduate seminars talked about shame “like it was something that happened naturally: always on accident, never on purpose,” Belcher was in a unique position to see how that isn’t true. Shame is a construction, something that was built to create and maintain power over other individuals. At the very beginning of the memoir and towards the end, Belcher invokes queer theorist Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s claim that “we distinguish shame from guilt because guilt attaches to what one does, whereas shame points to what one is” and takes it a step further by reminding us that “Shame moves us simultaneously in two directions: revulsion and empathy.” In the dungeon, Belcher was manufacturing temporary shame for her clients, something they could easily get out of or choose to forget if they wanted to. In the outside world, she was being shamed by those same kinds of men and from so many others just for simply existing in it: “…when I was in [the dungeon], it did sometimes feel good to say no. But when I stepped back outside, back into the light, back into the world of men, my eyes never quite adjusted.”

From the beginning to the end of the memoir, Belcher’s ability to skillfully invite us to take on this examination on our own is what makes the work here so admirable. Of course, she makes a lot of admissions about her life and her experiences as a domme that people will call “brave” and “courageous,” but for me, the boldest and most daring part of it is the way she holds a mirror up to her readers so we can grapple with our own biases and understandings of what is considered shameful. Her explanations of both the “whore hierarchy” and the complicated feelings she felt about domming — both for her and for Catherine — when she left that world for the academic one help thoroughly reveal the complexities of the way shame operates in our lives, even when (maybe especially when) we try to push it as far from our consciousness as possible. In doing this, she asks a lot of her reader but in the best way possible. We might not have the experiences she does, but because we’re all part of the system that keeps us mired in shame and wanting to shame, it’s easy to connect with the feelings and reflections those experiences bring up for her.

Like many of the other compelling memoirists who precede her, Belcher uses her experiences as a young queer person in rural America and as a lesbian dominatrix in one of the biggest, most economically disparate cities in the country to help expose this much larger truth about the world we all live in. She shows how omnipresent the power of shame is and raises questions about how we can take that power back without attempting to fully answer them or to try to tie everything up in a neat bow at the end. She approaches this ongoing examination with a great deal of nuance and allows us to continue thinking about and having this conversation with ourselves beyond the constraints of the text. On top of everything else that is fascinating and wonderful about Belcher’s work here, her insistence on leaving this conversation unfinished reveals her faith in her readers and in her communities to come up with the answers to these questions that feel most appropriate to how we are living our lives.

Pretty Baby by Chris Belcher is out now and is the inaugural book for the new A+ book club.

In the Sexy and Smart New Novel “Sirens & Muses,” the Art World Is Hell

In Sirens & Muses, a confident and captivating debut novel from Antonia Angress, characters take turns being sirens and muses — sometimes embodying both at once. They tempt each other, desire each other, inspire each other, question themselves, their art, their relationships with one another. Collaborating on art becomes a sensuous act. Art becomes the way characters connect but also hurt each other. Tension seeps into their brushstrokes. Angress paints a world suffused with flawed and distinct characters often undone by their own ambition, insecurity, and the capitalist trappings of the art world. Art and the making of it carries so many emotional, political, and symbolic layers, and Sirens & Muses makes those underpinnings beneath the surface of art its main source of character and relationship development to great effect.

Set in 2011 — on the campus of an elite arts college called Wrynn for the first half and then in New York City for the second — Sirens & Muses is backdropped by the Occupy movement, themes of capitalism and political art permeating the narrative. The art world becomes a mystifying place where business and art are inseparable and often contradictory forces. As three of the four main characters come of age and come into their artistic visions and styles (and the fourth reevaluates his life and motivations and inspirations in a classic Artist’s Midlife Crisis), they’re significantly impacted by the outside world, by class, by other’s perceptions of who they are and who they should be, by the agonizing quest to make art that is not only meaningful but profitable.

The novel is told in four alternating perspectives: Louisa, Karina, Preston, and Robert. Louisa Arceneaux, a student at Wrynn from Louisiana, stretches her own canvases and skips meals to save money as, even with her scholarship, the expensive world of Wrynn remains inaccessible to her. This is not at all the situation for her roommate Karina Piontek, daughter of art collectors and a big name on campus because of her family’s status and also because of a much-gossiped-about moment in her recent past. Louisa is drawn to Karina, and the two begin a fraught, undefinable relationship that blurs lines between art and desire. But Karina’s also tangled up with Preston Utley, an anti-capitalist edgelord who focuses more on his surreal digital art blog than on his Wrynn coursework. The love triangle between Louisa, Karina, and Preston is fraught and frenetic, all three such different artists who, again, operate as sirens and muses for each other in turns (Angress is a maestro of chaotic characters and the novel does indeed fit very neatly into the “disaster bisexual canon” of literature that she coined a couple weeks ago). The fourth perspective comes from Robert Berger, a professor at Wrynn who built his career on political art but newly contends with the ways in which he might not be as radical or boundary-pushing as he once thought.

Angress makes art romantic and sexy, but she does not romanticize it. The mess of the art world and of an exclusive college like Wrynn is on full display and provides much of the novel’s tension, affecting characters on individual and interpersonal levels. Karina doesn’t even think about her plethora of art supplies, her pre-stretched canvasses, they are givens for someone who grew up surrounded by an art collection. Louisa, meanwhile, is not allowed to merely make art at Wrynn. She has to constantly think of money, of her supplies. The classroom setting at Wrynn is cutthroat and full of pretension and presumption.

The depth and detail Angress brings to descriptions not just of the art itself but the art-making are breathtaking. The brushstrokes used to paint each character are precise but dynamic. The simultaneous sexual relationship and artistic relationship between Karina and Louisa brims with desire and tension. It’s incredibly hot. And queerness is woven into the novel gorgeously, Karina and Louisa’s queer identities distinct and intricate, their feelings for one another complicated moreso by the fact of Wrynn’s competitive environment pitting them against each other than by anything having to do with queerness. The eroticism of a roommate romance but also of two artists entangling amid their art is irresistible, and Angress writes fucking with the same level of lovely yet simple detail as she does the art-making:

At first they only booked up in Louisa’s studio, late at night when the building was empty and silent, but after a few days they began having sex in their room, as well. It was surreal, Louisa thought sometimes: there were her posters on the wall, and there was her green plastic shower caddy, and there was her towel on its hook, and here was Karina’s pale pink nipple in her mouth, and here were Karina’s fingers moving insider her, and here was Karina’s tongue on her neck, and here—

Even the rote process of Preston creating posts for his tumblr is rendered somehow elegant, the passion each of these artists have for their work leaping off the page, buoyed by language that feels specific to each. The technical and emotional aspects of their art receive equal attention. I found myself particularly surprised by how invested I was in Preston’s arc, even when he gives into some of his worst tendencies — tendencies that play into one of his worst fears of being too much like his father. Louisa, Karina, Preston, and Robert’s dreams, desires, and fears are all fully felt in their art and their actions but also in their relationships to their art. Robert’s crisis of feeling like a sell-out could easily feel reductive or cliche, but Angress makes him, like the others, more complex than meets the eye.

Here are four imperfect characters who sometimes make terrible choices and yet who you can’t help rooting for as they figure out who they are as people and as artists. Louisa often does not say what she really means or ask for what she wants, self-sabotaging along the way. She internalizes too much from workshop, stymied by her classmates’ suggestions that she paints too many landscapes. But home is an indelible part of who she is, and so why shouldn’t place play into her work so profoundly? The artist workshop setting can be so stratified and counterproductive to actual creativity and self-exploration, and Sirens & Muses explores that well. Karina, meanwhile, is charming but full of herself, success coming easily with loads of help from her family’s status. She can be cold and distant with both Louisa and Preston, but she also struggles with mental health. Much of the conflict between Louisa, Preston, and Karina hinges on the differences between them but also their refusal to actually talk about or acknowledge any of it, instead giving in to jealousy and resentment.

A less interesting approach to the book would have been to make it entirely a campus novel. Instead, Sirens & Muses begins as a campus novel and then expands into an NYC art world novel. Both worlds of Wrynn and NYC are full of possibility but also harm. The artists are exploited by both — sometimes violently, as is the case with an assault Karina experiences. The big art competition built to for much of the beginning of the book would, in a lesser novel, be an endpoint or near-endpoint. But instead, Angress places it midpoint and uses it as an opportunity to blow everything up, sowing a twist that sends the characters scattered in new directions.

The art (and art-making) descriptions and rich sentence-level textures of Sirens & Muses make it a propulsive and immersive read, but the novel’s most compelling work is its relationship work. There’s that central thorny triangle between young lovers, but Angress writes some of the other relationships embedded in the novel with equal care and detail. Louisa has a close relationship with her artist mother and ailing grandfather back home and a meaningful relationship with home itself. Preston’s childhood friend back home also adds to our understanding of Preston and how he moves through the world. Karina is intensely lonely, her lack of meaningful relationships for much of the book contextualizing her choices. And there are fascinating moments that emerge when Robert begins work as a private instructor for a promising young boy whose high-strung rich lesbian moms want to nurture his artistic abilities, deepening Robert’s identity crisis about his art and career but also allowing him to reconnect with work.

Sirens & Muses is structurally ambitious and wonderfully crafted. It checks a lot of boxes for me personally: I love an alternative perspectives novel, and I love novels with hot queer sex, and I love a chaotic art school tale as a former chaotic attendee of an art school. But I was impressed by the book’s ability to surprise me at several turns. The closer you look at these stories of these four interconnected artists, the more overlapping, touching, and parallel lines you’ll see. It’s like a painting you don’t want to look away from.

Sirens & Muses by Antonia Angress is available now.

Rainbow Reading: Happy “Our Wives Under The Sea” Week to All Who Celebrate

A book in faded colors of the rainbow is open, and the words RAINBOW READING are on top of it.
illustration by A. Andrews

Hi hi, friends!

I’m sure you can all already imagine how little chill I have this week: my favorite book of the last [redacted amount of time], Our Wives Under the Sea, came out in the U.S. this week, I’ve been banging pots and pans together about it in this column for as long as the grown-ups left me unsupervised, and I cannot WAIT to have more friends to discuss this marvel with. Kayla wrote a superb review (with a superb title) and I’ll be interviewing Julia as well —you know how we get here at Autostraddle when we’re fully #obsessed with a book! Between this one and Chris Belcher’s Pretty Baby, it’s been a very, very good time.

The best part is, there are many amazing new books out — and many, many more good ones on the horizon too. I’ve included some of the September and October books I’ve got my eye on in here, and although it feels ridiculous to imagine autumn while it’s ninety bazillion degrees outside, it’s nice to know how much there is to look forward to.

Alrighty, let’s make like a banana and split. On this week’s Rainbow Reading, we’ve got:

Shelf Care: Reviews, Essays, and other Things of Note

  • OUR WIVES UNDER THE SEA IS HERE AND IF YOU DON’T KNOW WHAT I’M GONNA SAY BY NOW, I CANNOT HELP YOU
  • New Becky Chambers, too! A Prayer for the Crown-Shy is out this week, and I cannot wait to attend Becky’s Portland reading — if you’re going to be there on Friday, come say hi!
  • Gay Vampire Summer? Sure seems that way!
    • Baby Teeth by Meg Grehan — vampires in verse! Remember when YA novels-in-verse had that whole moment back in the 00s? I hope that’s coming back…
    • Youngblood by Sasha Laurens —vampire dark academia! This one’s out next week, and gets this week’s Trashwina Banter Blurb Award: “This is the lesbian vampire boarding school story I’ve always needed, but it’s smarter, nastier, and more fun than I ever could have dreamed,” according to Kylie Schachte
  • Yashwina Canter Plays The Long Game: Jeremy Atherton Lin, author of NBCC-Award-winning Gay Bar, just sold his next book: a novel about gay marriage, gay partnership, and the ways that queer people have built lives and pursued stability both within and without legal structures. Sign me tf up.
  • Lots of fun gay food romance happening now too — first there was Love and Other Disasters, and now there is The Romance Recipe!
  • LOTE is out in the U.S. at long last, and I’m consumed with envy that I won’t be in NYC to attend this event next week. You lucky shits! I hope you all go and I hope you all have the best time and make me fantastically jealous, because that is the best way by far to celebrate the arrival of Shola’s brilliant bubble of a book.
  • Ever since Kayla told me about this one last week, I’ve been smitten from afar — Sirens and Muses by Antonia Angress is an art school riff on Trust Fall, The Secret History, and Writers and Lovers, a social and creative coming-of-age story set in 2011 against the backdrop of #Occupy, economic turmoil, and more.
  • My friend Ahna has been live-texting me her read of the latest K-Ming Chang, and Gods of Want sounds breathtaking! (Plus, if you haven’t read Bestiary yet, you’re in for a treat.
  • I’ve been yelling at everyone in earshot about how much fun I had reading Body Grammar, and it seems like a nice time to revisit Jules’ interview with Angel Olsen from a few weeks ago or her list of books about queer selfhood from Electric Lit!
  • I keep hearing excellent things about Louis Bayard’s book Jackie and Me, which I mentioned a few weeks ago! (I do stand by my Jackie x Marilyn stance, however.)
  • Technicolor Space Opera? Oh hell yes! August Kitko and the Mechas from Space came out last week and has one of the most delightfully bonkers sci-fi premises I’ve seen in a minute. I’m excited about this one!
  • What’s the word on The Work Wife? The blurbs on this one are very impressive: power, ambition, and sacrifice collide amidst Hollywood glamour!
  • I was so delighted to discover more desi queer lit in the last installment of RR, and it’s led me to this fantastic list from bookstagrammer Maya of @mnmbooks!
  • Beloved paranormal mystery webcomic Blackwater makes its graphic novel debut next week too — preorder this one here!
  • Revised, reissued, and coming this fall: TikTok sensation Piper CJ’s The Night and Its Moon!
  • Are we staring down the barrel of Hot Memoir Fall? Be honest.
    • Chelsea Manning’s long-anticipated memoir README.txt has such a perfect title.
    • Autostraddle Beloved Jeanna Kadlec’s memoir Heretic comes out the following week; it’s going to be a very good October!
  • CHAOS MILF ROMANCE: Also this October, Mistakes Were Made is a cheeky, playful, and sweet age-gap romance!
  • Queer Nature: A Poetry Anthology came out a couple months ago, but I think I might be drifting into another one of my poetry moods, and this one sounds perfect for reading outside while making the most of the summer…

“Armfield has written a novel so chock-full of stunning sentences that that urge to scream needled its way into me throughout my firstandsecond reads of the book. The language inOur Wives Under The Seais like a fork’s tines moving through perfectly cooked fish: grotesque and lovely all at once, flesh and skin pulled from bone.“

—Kayla is, as ever, right about Our Wives Under the Sea

Autocorrect: Books content from the last couple weeks at Autostraddle!

Another couple of banger weeks for books coverage!

That’s all she wrote, folks! If you’re a queer writer, particularly an early-career queer writer: I’d love to hear about the cool things you’re up to so that I can share links to your published essays, book reviews, short stories, poems, and longform features on LGBTQ+ topics! Please email me links for consideration at yashwina@autostraddle.com with the subject line “Rainbow Reading Submission” — I’m an avid browser-tab-collector, and I especially want to hear from you if you’ve just landed your first publication or first major byline.

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