Please Miss
A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Penis
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- €9.99
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- €9.99
Publisher Description
A memoir of gender transition and recovery from addiction, a dance across genres, a ripping-up of the rulebook, Please Miss is unlike anything you've ever read before.
Grace Lavery is a reformed druggie, an unreformed omnisexual chaos Muppet, and a 100 per cent, all-natural, synthetic female hormone monster. How could her story be straightforward when she is anything but? The telling of her tale is kaleidoscopic, wild and audacious: Grace performs in a David Lynch remake of Sunset Boulevard and is reprogrammed as a 1960s femmebot; she is targeted with anonymous letters from a mysterious cabal of clowns; she writes a socialist manifesto disguised as a porn parody of QI (or is it vice versa?).
As Grace fumbles toward a new trans identity, she tries on dozens of different voices, creating a coat of many colours. The result is dazzling, unique and unforgettable. Startlingly funny and ruthlessly smart, Please Miss gives us what we came for, then slaps us in the face and orders us to come again.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Essayist and UC Berkeley professor Lavery debuts with a surreal speculative memoir that's by turns engrossing and impenetrable. As indicated by the book's subtitle, Lavery aims to rub out the dividing line between the intellectual and the bawdy to subvert the typical transgender memoir (or, as one friend interprets the genre: "expositions of trans life as it is lived"). Recounting how she solved her "penis problem" and began taking synthetic estrogen, Lavery explores transcendental erotic self-realization, her history of drug and alcohol use, and the paradigmatic concept of the penis ("an organ defined, at least in the Lacanian tradition, by its failure to be a phallus") through absurdist tall tales. She receives a series of bizarre letters from a group of clowns; relishes a sexually charged FAQ for finger limes (a podlike type of citrus) from "Hole Foods"; and ruminates on a parodic column about Little Shop of Horrors from Trump biographer (and former media mogul turned convicted faudster) Conrad Black. It's not the blurring of distinctions between fantasy and reality that clouds the book's clarity, however, but Lavery's deeply academic discourse; without a comprehensive knowledge of Dickens and Lacan, many readers will too often be left in the dark trying to decipher what it is Lavery is attempting to say. LGBTQ literati will find much to explore, but others may have more homework to do first.
