Book review – Imogen Binnie – “Nevada”

June 23, 2023

Liz Dexter 20booksofsummer, Pride Month, Reading challenges, Social justice - gender sex sexuality , , 19 Comments

A copy of Imogen Binnie's novel Nevada on a desk

It’s come to my attention that my using the same pile of books as the image for all my 20 Books of Summer challenge books (hosted by Cathy from 746 Books) might be a bit confusing, so here’s an image of the actual book this time! I’m reading 20 books bought from our local independent bookshop, The Heath Bookshop (find them on their bookshop.org page!). You can see the book lists and results from all my previous attempts here. I bought this one when it came to my attention as I think their first book group read (even though I didn’t intend to go to their book group) and it fell into my second book token haul – I note I have read the book I collected when I bought it, “How Green was My Valley”. I promoted this novel up the pile to read this month to fit into Pride Month.

Imogen Binnie – “Nevada”

(18 January 2023, second book token splurge at the Bookshop)

It’s always impossible to tell what anyone’s assumptions are. People tend to assume that trans women are either drag queens and loads of trashy fun, or else sad, pathetic and deluded pervy straight men – at least, until they save up their money and get their Sex Change Operations, at which point they become just like every other woman. Or something? But Maria is like, dude, hi. Nobody ever reads me as trans any more. Old straight men hit on me when I’m at work and in all these years of transitioning I haven’t even been able to save up for a decent pair of boots. (p. 6)

Of course I knew I was going to like this book because I generally choose carefully and well, but I LOVED it. Although weirdly, it was written in 2008 onwards and first published in 2013, but it really read like something I’d have eagerly read in the mid-to-late 1990s when I was reading loads of diverse stuff from Lewisham Library – it would have fitted right in then. I think it’s the punky, DIY vibe of the characters and their situations – and of course, being fairly timeless (apart from having mobile phones) it’s able to be the classic that it is. It also reminded me of Larry McMurtry, obviously a very different author in a different time, but the absolutely believable in every detail, reportage style of the book, inside the main character’s (and other characters’) head, the grungy American setting, the road trip, the small town, they all remind me of that favourite author of mine.

So Maria is a young trans woman who works in a crappy bookshop in New York and whose relationship with Steph is failing. She would carry on forever, being chaotic, forgetting to take her oestrogen injections on time, messing around with her co-worker and repeatedly walking out of the bookshop to get a bagel, but there’s more than that, the ever-present mental, physical and emotional work of being trans, the fact she dissociates whenever something really difficult comes up. And all of this coincides in a perfect storm when she loses her relationship – thus her home – and her job and goes on a road trip in a “borrowed” car, only to encounter a young lad, James, an unhappy stoner who works in a Wal-Mart in a small town in Nevada, and sees her old self in him. Will she bring him along a path to enlightenment? The ending – which is perfect – suggests not, but who knows what Maria and James have learned in the process?

What is really striking about this book is the visceral, detailed, reportage-style narrative of what it is like to live in a trans body (see the quote above, for example). This aspect is funny, savage and heart-rending. It’s also very much universal and applicable now – worrying about transphobic women and their banning of trans women from their spaces, considering male privilege, pushing against the narrative of people feeling they were trans from small childhood which is basically what the medical establishment need everyone to subscribe to in order to access health care (I learned about this in “Trans Britain“, a much later book).

Funny, sad and so absorbing I couldn’t put it down – this is one of those books I wish I’d read earlier so I could be re-reading it now.

This was Book 7 in my 20 Books of Summer challenge and Book 4 for Pride Month. You can buy a copy from The Heath Bookshop’s page on bookshop.org,

Book review – Riva Lehrer – “Golem Girl”

June 7, 2023

Liz Dexter Book reviews, Pride Month, Social justice - disability, Social justice - gender sex sexuality , , 13 Comments

I read Bookish Beck’s review of this book back in October 2021 and while a lot of the medical memoirs she reads are too medical for me, this one, even though it quite obviously featured a lot of medical detail, appealed to me, I think because of the queer and art themes, so I went ahead and bought a copy in the October. Notably, the paperback had quite small print: I did manage it but it made it that tiny bit less accessible, which I felt was a pity. I’m glad I didn’t have to resort to the e-book copy I bought, as I wanted to see the reproductions of Lehrer’s art works and that’s still usually better in a book. Weirdly, I don’t seem to have recorded this book coming in to the TBR so I can’t comment on what I bought at the same time, but it was the oldest book on my print TBR when I took it from the shelf last month.

Riva Lehrer – “Golem Girl”

(07 October 2021)

There was no one left to tell me how to take care of myself. I clattered alone inside my body, not even sure what was left of me after all my operations. Mom had been my librarian, my architect, my surgeon general, my curator. She had left me half-formed; for all my teenage rebellion, I was unprepared to take over the task of inventing myself. (p. 172)

Riva was born in 1958 with the congenital condition of spina bifida. Countless operations and medical treatments – not all listed here – later, she’s still affected by her condition in terms of her appearance, her gait, her health, and her need to endure further medical interventions. But she’s not defined by this: she’s defined, if anything, by her uncompromising art and art practices. Boyfriends and girlfriends (and a wife before it was legally possible) have come and gone; her friendships and brothers have endured, and so has her art.

I was particularly impressed that in her “risk” series of collaborative works, she intentionally leaves her subject alone with her portrait of them, obliged to make some sort of intervention in the portrait. Crucially, many of these portraits as well as other series and self-portraits, are included in good copies in the book, with a section at the end explaining a lot of them and even including feedback from their subjects.

The first part of the book deals with Riva’s childhood under the fierce protection of a mother who ends up with her own back issues and surgery in a closely symbiotic relationship. It’s testament to Lehrer’s fierce independence that she manages to have any more adult experiences living in this almost suffocating environment. But she’s so independent that she manages not to interact with D/disabled culture at all until she joins an art group and has her eyes opened; she describes in similar honest detail her explorations of race and intersectionality which start in ignorance but blossom in learning.

Later in her life, she helps others learn, too, being an artist in residence in a medical school making sure the first person with a disability the students meet teaches them compassion and empathy and how people are different, not wrong, and having them sketch specimens as real people and present biographies of living people with the same condition: powerful work.

An epilogue brings the book into the pandemic period, just when she was about to stop writing, and hammers home the different experiences of the general population and the vulnerable. Searing honesty that links her life story telling and art seamlessly makes this indeed a book that was a worth winner of the Barbellion Prize, which is awarded “to an author whose work has best represented the experience of chronic illness and/or disability”.

This was Book 1 for Pride Month (not an organised challenge, just thought I’d note them and have rearranged my 20 Books of Summer pile, too).