Like a Boy but Not a Boy
Navigating Life, Mental Health, and Parenthood Outside the Gender Binary
-
- USD 9.99
-
- USD 9.99
Descripción editorial
Inquisitive and expansive, Like a Boy but Not a Boy explores author andrea bennett’s experiences with gender expectations, being a non-binary parent, and the sometimes funny and sometimes difficult task of living in a body. The book's fourteen essays also delve incisively into the interconnected themes of mental illness, mortality, creative work, class, and bike mechanics (apparently you can learn a lot about yourself through truing a wheel).
In “Tomboy,” andrea articulates what it means to live in a gender in-between space, and why one might be necessary; “37 Jobs 21 Houses” interrogates the notion that the key to a better life is working hard and moving house. And interspersed throughout the book is “Everyone Is Sober and No One Can Drive,” sixteen stories about queer millennials who grew up and came of age in small communities.
With the same poignant spirit as Ivan Coyote’s Tomboy Survival Guide, Like a Boy but Not a Boy addresses the struggle to find acceptance, and to accept oneself; and how one can find one’s place while learning to make space for others. The book also wonders it means to be an atheist and search for faith that everything will be okay; what it means to learn how to love life even as you obsess over its brevity; and how to give birth, to bring new life, at what feels like the end of the world.
With thoughtfulness and acute observation, andrea bennett reveal intimate truths about the human experience, whether one is outside the gender binary or not.
This publication meets the EPUB Accessibility requirements and it also meets the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG-AA). It is screen-reader friendly and is accessible to persons with disabilities. A Simple book with few images, which is defined with accessible structural markup. This book contains various accessibility features such as alternative text for images, table of contents, page-list, landmark, reading order and semantic structure.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In this layered collection, bennett (Canoodlers) assembles 13 essays on mortality, pregnancy, and being a millennial nonbinary person. Spanning from their tumultuous and emotionally abusive youth and persistent obsession with death to their anxiety-ridden pregnancy and attempts to learn to take life slowly, bennett's essays fit together like pieces of a puzzle, each exploring a given idea bicycle repair and its relation to the mechanic's own body; bipolar disorder and needing to be one of "the good sick" while allowing its implications to ripple out among the rest. In the title essay, bennett describes the experience of gender dysphoria brought on by aggressively feminine language surrounding childbirth; in "Milk and Generativeness," they ponder whether the act of lactating itself has, culturally, "ceded a right to gender." Muddying the waters is "Everyone Is Sober and No One Can Drive," a series of 16 short interviews with other nonbinary individuals (edited into third-person narration) interspersed between each essay, which add flavor to the collection but also introduce so many people that it becomes difficult to remember what has and hasn't happened to bennett themself. Both moving and illuminating, this stirring series of reflections is definitely worth picking up.