Google, huh, what is it good for? Absolutely nothin Say it again

Appreciation first because its brief:

I really enjoyed the backstory on Rosie and Platt or Pitt or whatever the dad’s name was. I loved hearing how they met and fell in love. I thought their early days as a writer and emergency medical resident added a lot of context for their characters later in the book as spouses and parents. Truly, the best part of this book was the bit about the Dad in the MFA program in this glorious passage:

It seemed like getting a degree in creative writing would mostly involve writing, but it didn’t. It mostly involved reading and not reading what he wanted to read and not reading what he wanted to write. 

I snapped while reading this on the bus. Interestingly enough, even though I loved this articulation, that is how I would end up feeling about spending a week out of my semester reading this book. 

Ok, so I have this theory and it upsets people who write novels and long-form work. I think all books should be zines. And it’s not that the long book should not exist—but I am of the thought that, written well, the same tension, emotional investment, revelation and attachment to characters can be accomplished in short-form. In this way, the filler has been trashed and the story made accessible to an audience with a wider span of attention, age, education, access to information, income etc. 

And then I started reading this story and thought perhaps, this was an exception to my rule. Dealing with such a nuanced and sensitive subject matter would maybe require long-form to get the story right. To capture the state of each character accurately. To articulate what the author has learned after hours and hours of research on the topic, reading theory and work written by trans folks about their own lives. What words to use and when. What not to say. What is and isn’t someone else’s story to tell. (And make no mistake, an abundance of this writing exists. Scholarly and non-academic. Google is a good thing, y'all). But this pay-off never happened.  

Was the story written by an author with excellent voice? Absolutely. Was this story—the story that required so much research and care—done well? Not at all. We run into this familiar trouble as writers where we see a story and think because we’ve witnessed it, even from afar, that it’s ours to tell. We destroy its integrity, we don’t ask the right questions, we don’t ask permission. We take and don’t give anything in return. But the problem here is that this book was Poppy’s story and was told through the parent’s perspective—and not well at all. 

So I started to think about trans tropes in writing and how not to fuck up your work by falling into them. There’s a long list but for starters, when you’re writing about the past, don’t refer to someone as their dead name. “Back when she was Claude,” is problematic because one—was she ever Claude? And two—it’s unnecessary to provide the former names of trans people who’ve changed their names. In fact, it’s dangerous and degrading. There’s a reason they don’t use that name so, why are you? Don’t dead name trans people. One more time: Don’t Dead Name Trans People. We have studies linking this behavior to suicide and it’s a generally shitty practice on and off the page. Someone’s old name is irrelevant. Stop saying it. It doesn’t help your story. It just makes readers not trust you. 

And when Frankel sat down to write this book, she knew this character would be a trans girl named Poppy. Yet we’re fed hundreds of pages of the wrong name and he/him pronouns—long after she came out in the story. This story could have drastically cut its exploitative-factor by introducing Poppy as herself, stating something about when she was born the parents and doctors thought she was a boy and they were wrong. How hard is that? Apparently really difficult because everyone wants a shot at their own cheap M. Night Shyamalan trans twist. The only reason I can think she didn’t introduce the character in this way was because she needed the twist—the grand surprise that a normal-ass nuclear family was in fact, worthy of a sensationalized novel. Yes, introducing Poppy as a trans girl at the beginning of the book would have changed the rate of revelation (thank you, Elmaz), but it would have also preserved any kind of trust I had in the author to handle a story on this topic at all.   

When I finally closed the book because I couldn’t bear to waste any more of my week on stories written about vulnerable, targeted communities written by careless authors who exist outside of them, I realized something. This book should be a zine. A zine about what not to do when writing about trans characters. 

Also, it was Penn. The dad’s name was Penn.