Please Miss
I'd like some more.
If you would like to read Please Miss as I read Please Miss, I would suggest a few things – a shopping list of sorts;
A few 8-hour compilations of ‘coffee shop jazz’ soundtracks
The following Britney Spears albums; Baby One More Time and Oops I Did It Again – also the individual song, ‘I’m Not A Girl, Not Yet A Woman’
Sitting inside on a rainy day whilst the occasional build up of rain drops heavily and staccato on the balcony outside
Lao Gan Ma Chilli Oil
MSG
Beer
Gin
Whiskey
Rum
A bacon, egg and sausage sandwich
Flasks of hot water (sometimes with squash)
Your undergraduate dissertation on ‘The Conceptualisation of Sin in the Works of Oscar Wilde’
Good sex
A best friend with a phobia of clowns
Before I started Chapter One of Please Miss, I’d already messaged the people close to me, to whomst I message most all of my thoughts, saying ‘I think I’m going to love this’ and when they asked why – more playing along as opposed to actually curious, because to question why I might think that I might love a book by a trans person with the subtitle ‘a heartbreaking work of staggering penis’ wouldn’t be a thing that a person close to me would do – I replied, ‘because one of the epigraphs is from the “Bad Lip Reading of High School Musical”’ and they all replied, with great enthusiasm, that they agreed – I’d probably love it.
Having said that, this isn’t a review. I don’t think you need a review from me, I think you should just buy the book, read it and make your own mind up about it.
I could play humble and say, ‘who am I to give a review when people like Carmen Maria Machado, Maggie Nelson, Melissa Febos, Torrey Peters, Michelle Tea, Jody Rosenberg and Seirole Davies have spoken about it,’ but my toxic trait is constantly convincing myself that I am actually important enough to have opinions on things, so let's not play that card.
In actuality, this newsletter is probably quite the opposite – the less humble route. The path where instead of talking about the writing of Grace Lavery – its humour, satirical tone, honesty; its sentimentality, its greatness; the way it scared me, confused me and drew me in – I’m going to jot down some fragmented thoughts around the questions it made me ask, around the memories it dredged up.
I just mean, expositions of trans life as it is lived is sort of the only genre that trans people have historically been allowed to work in.
When I was 19, in my second year of university, I wrote an essay comparing Norse mythology to the stories I grew up with, of deities from the Vedic scriptures. The lecturer I had told me that the Vedic sources I used couldn’t be treated as legitimate because he couldn’t find English translations of them. I retaliated by falling in love with Vedic scripture and the deities I found there, with Kali, Ardhanarishvara, Brahman, and more. I realised the fluidity of gender for those we worshipped. What started as an academic interest, in an area of study I’d not looked into before, turned into a reason to stay alive.
A penis is not a dick; a penis is definitively not a dick.
Dicks are paradigmatically hard and hot
A penis is a part of a body, a dick is a representative of a part of a body. Some people have penises, some people have dicks, some people have both, some people have neither.
She is not a real Girl, though there is no other word for her.
What is femininity in someone trans masc? And why did shaving half of my hair off, binding my chest and wearing shirts, make me feel so much more comfortable putting makeup on and being one of the girls? (On occasion, when I choose – let's not get carried away.)
What, exactly, is inside?
Iridescent pearls, hundreds of them clustered together in a wet pile, shiny and aching to burst at the slightest touch. Like a tube of bleached caviar, delicate and rich. I don’t ever really want to know if I want to eat it or just look at it, that is, until I taste it, and then I gorge myself. Every time.
Please Miss is a book that you shouldn’t just read once, it’s a book that you should read over and over. Trans people shouldn’t just write about being trans, of course they shouldn’t, but when they do, it can be magnificent, kind of miraculous.
It made me ask a lot of questions, and look for some answers.
Let me know what you think when you read it.