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It’s been a little over a week for the reason that publication of Elliot Page’s memoir, Pageboy, and the haters have settled in on Goodreads. This isn’t stunning. Page is maybe essentially the most publicly seen trans celeb to publish a memoir in latest reminiscence. What’s extra, although he does write about his profession in Hollywood, the making of flicks like Juno and Whip It, and his relationships with well-known actors, in some ways, the e book isn’t a conventional celeb memoir. Pageboy is an intimate, weak, and poetic coming-into-self story about one trans man’s deeply private and particular journey. It’s not a chronological story, both — it’s a queerly stunning assortment of recollections and moments. Page strikes round in time, skipping from childhood to the near-present to his early performing profession and again. This nonlinear construction will really feel bone-deep true to many queer and trans readers. It actually felt like house to me.
It’s additionally what some readers appear to have such a drawback with. After ending the e book, utterly delighted by the inherent queerness of this construction, and with a queasy feeling in my intestine that folks had been going to hate it, I spent about seven minutes scrolling by way of Goodreads. I didn’t learn each evaluate, however seven minutes was sufficient to substantiate my suspicions. There are, fortunately, many glowing critiques. But the theme of the damaging critiques is constant: Why couldn’t he have advised this story chronologically? It was so complicated to maintain observe of the timeline! I couldn’t make sense of the nonlinear construction. None of those are precise quotes — I’m paraphrasing from a lot of critiques.
What’s much more telling is the stunning variety of optimistic critiques with a caveat. I learn a number of four-star critiques praising Page’s writing and honesty, exclaiming how a lot they loved the e book on a entire after which — however why did he have to inform it this fashion? It would have been so significantly better and simpler to observe if it has been advised chronologically. Again, I’m paraphrasing.
Before we get into it, I’ve to ask — did we learn the identical e book? Because, readers, Page explains it within the third paragraph of the creator’s notice. The third paragraph. He actually couldn’t be extra clear about why he wrote the e book the best way he did:
“These memories shape a nonlinear narrative, because queerness is intrinsically nonlinear, journeys that bend and wind. Two steps forward, one step back. I’ve spent much of my life chipping away toward the truth, while terrified to cause a collapse. This is reflected on the page intentionally. In many ways, this book is the story of my untangling.”
He lays it out, explaining his decisions for an viewers which may not perceive the best way queer time feels — and nonetheless, readers are livid as a result of the e book doesn’t adhere to their thought of what a trans memoir ought to appear like. It doesn’t adhere to neat, binary notions about transition and alter.
Queer and trans lives don’t all the time observe the identical timelines that cis and straight lives observe. We don’t all the time hit the identical milestones on the identical occasions. Our lives aren’t all the time legible to these on the surface. This is without doubt one of the most stunning issues about queerness — the best way it invitations us to shed methods of shifting by way of time that don’t serve us. This thought isn’t new. Queer scholar José Esteban Muñoz famously theorized about queer time in Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity (and plenty of different works). Most queer folks I do know intrinsically perceive this concept; we frequently see it mirrored in one another.
Pageboy follows a distinctly queer, distinctly trans timeline. By refusing to inform a linear story that strikes merely from then into now, by as a substitute sharing his journey as a assortment of interconnected moments — painful, joyful, difficult, difficult, stunning — Page refuses to divide himself in two. He refuses to present any area to the violent concept that trans lives are solely actual after they’re seen. There is not any “before” and “after,” no arrival at a longed-for vacation spot. He writes about popping out as homosexual, transition, gender dysphoria, childhood trans pleasure, falling in love, the deep ache of being closeted, queer teenage friendships. It’s all change; it’s all motion. There are dozens and dozens of longed-for locations. Memories spark different recollections, result in sudden locations, reveal hidden truths years and years later.
This is the great thing about queer and trans chronology: it doesn’t bifurcate lives. It permits for expansive understandings of self, for moments of boundless pleasure within the midst of unimaginable, painful years, and for experiences of deep disappointment even amidst abundance. This is the chronology that whirrs alongside in each line of this memoir, in Page’s gradual “untangling.”
Page is actually not the primary trans author to play with time like this. Pageboy is a part of a lengthy, wealthy lineage of queer and trans storytelling that refuses simply legible linear timelines. Vivek Shraya infuses her stunning e book People Change with trans chronology. She explores all of the methods by which binary understandings of change — destroying an outdated self with the intention to turn out to be somebody new — are dangerous to everybody. Writer and performer Travis Alabanza’s unimaginable e book None of the Above is a memoir that strikes round in time, delving into the sweetness (and necessity) of fluidly. Alabanza explodes binaries of every kind, exposing their violence, rooted in white supremacy and colonialism. They think about a world that doesn’t dissect and bifurcate and worship finality, that as a substitute celebrates course of.
All of Eli Clare’s books play with time. In each Exile & Pride and Brilliant Imperfection, he writes in regards to the intersections of queerness, transness, and incapacity. In Brilliant Imperfection, which is about his personal and different folks’s complicated and contradictory experiences with remedy — the persistent concept that disabled folks have to be mounted — he writes away from a sure vacation spot, and as a substitute in direction of trans lives lived all the time in a state of changing into.
I might go on at size. Cooper Lee Bombardier’s memoir-in-essays Pass with Care is much like Pageboy in its strategy to chronology: Bombardier jumps round in time, following threads of emotion from reminiscence to reminiscence. Jeanne Thornton’s novel Summer Fun is a wildly unusual and gloriously queer novel that builds its personal trans timeline, web page by web page. Fierce Femmes and Notorious Liars by Kai Cheng Thom is a novel in memoir type that’s equally creative: the timeline could also be chronological, but it surely messes with style conventions in particularly trans methods.
None of those authors are well-known the best way Elliot Page is known. Most of them aren’t well-known in any respect. Their books have largely been learn by queer and trans folks (although everybody ought to learn them!), a readership more likely to instantly perceive their nonlinear buildings. Pageboy goes to have a totally different form of viewers, individuals who, just like the early Goodreads reviewers, have most likely by no means considered trans storytelling buildings, like alone trans chronology.
The nonlinear construction isn’t a gimmick. It’s not there to confuse you. If you don’t prefer it, take a second to consider why. Why does it make you uneasy to not be capable to simply untangle the timeline? Is it since you’re attempting to suit all of it collectively — wait, was he out as trans on this second, what 12 months was this, how outdated was he right here, had he already transitioned throughout this interplay?
These aren’t the correct questions. These questions don’t matter. Elliot Page doesn’t owe anybody simple legibility. Trans folks don’t owe the cis world binary timelines. Queer and trans storytelling is sacred, and typically it doesn’t really feel or sound like straight storytelling. You can select to go away a petty evaluate about how a e book was arduous to know as a result of it doesn’t mirror your expertise of the world. Or you’ll be able to select to be taught from it. You can select to let it broaden your concepts about queer and trans lives — entire, messy, nonlinear lives lived in stunning flux. You can select to step away from your individual timeline, and within the unfamiliar however not unwelcome strangeness of a totally different one, possibly you’ll even uncover one thing new about your self.
Elliot Page was bookish lengthy earlier than he wrote a memoir! While you’re ready to your Pageboy maintain to return in, you’ll be able to learn all about his literary life.
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