#daniel lavery

Something That May Shock and Discredit You by Daniel M. Lavery

Endorsement from submitter: "This book repeatedly kicked me in the face emotionally. It is a sharp, relatable reflection on learning how to want anything while trans, the experience of realizing you are a person and have a body, and emerging from an evangelical Christian upbringing. The marketing copy for this book overplays the "pop culture/humor" aspects for more mass-market appeal, but the real audience is those of us who will Understand the soul-deep truths that razor-wit is incisively slicing into. This book made me feel simultaneously seen and called out. "Unwanted Coming Out Disorder" and "The Stages of Not Being on T" succinctly dragged the ever-living-shit out of my baby trans self (but from a place of "been there too" and deep knowing)."

Daniel M. Lavery is known for blending genres, forms, and sources to develop fascinating new hybrids—from lyric rants to horror recipes to pornographic scripture. In his most personal work to date, he turns his attention to the essay, offering vigorous and laugh-out-loud funny accounts of both popular and highbrow culture while mixing in meditations on gender transition, family dynamics, and the many meanings of faith.

From a thoughtful analysis of the beauty of William Shatner to a sinister reimagining of HGTV’s House Hunters , and featuring figures as varied as Anne of Green Gables, Columbo, Nora Ephron, Apollo, and the cast of Mean Girls , Something That May Shock and Discredit You is a hilarious and emotionally exhilarating compendium that combines personal history with cultural history to make you see yourself and those around you entirely anew. It further establishes Lavery as one of the most innovative and engaging voices of his generation—and it may just change the way you think about Lord Byron forever.

Nonfiction, memoir, essay collection

Growing Up Queer in Australia, edited by Benjamin Law

‘No amount of YouTube videos and queer think pieces prepared me for this moment.’ ‘The mantle of “queer migrant” compelled me to keep going – to go further.’ ‘I never “came out” to my parents. I felt I owed them no explanation.’ ‘All I heard from the pulpit were grim hints.’ ‘I became acutely aware of the parts of myself that were unpalatable to queers who grew up in the city.’ ‘My queerness was born in a hot dry land that was never ceded.’ ‘Even now, I sometimes think that I don’t know my own desire.’ Compiled by celebrated author and journalist Benjamin Law, Growing Up Queer in Australia assembles voices from across the spectrum of LGBTIQA+ identity. Spanning diverse places, eras, ethnicities and experiences, these are the stories of growing up queer in Australia.

‘For better or worse, sooner or later, life conspires to reveal you to yourself, and this is growing up.’

With contributions from David Marr, Fiona Wright, Nayuka Gorrie, Steve Dow, Holly Throsby, Sally Rugg, Tony Ayres, Nic Holas, Rebecca Shaw and many more.

"We all know the unicorn and Molly Grue are transgender," I said flippantly to @literarymagpie yesterday, and it turns out maybe we do not all know this, so now it's finally time I write the essays I've been drafting in my head for five years about The Last Unicorn and the things Peter S. Beagle didn't know he knew.

My secondary source for this theme is Daniel Lavery, who, in his 2017 essay on gc2b binders, described the first stages of his transition as follows:

I knew nothing of the subject. I became aware of the subject. I immediately, and carefully avoiding too much direct thought about the matter, sought consummation with it. Since that day, the subject has rarely been far from my conscious thoughts. It has felt, alternately and sometimes simultaneously, thrilling, calming to the point of near-stupor, destabilizing, reassuring, necessary, mundane, intrusive, overwhelming, compulsory, and desirable.

Beagle's last unicorn lives in a lilac wood, and she lives all alone, oblivious and content for over a century. Upon overhearing that there may be no other unicorns left, she considers her identity and questions her place in the world for the first time. Here she is on pp. 6-7, quite certain at first that she belongs in her familiar forest:

"Oh, I could never leave this, I never could, not even if I really were the only unicorn in the world. I know how to live here, I know how everything smells, and tastes, and is."

[...]But suppose they are hiding together, somewhere far away? What if they are hiding and waiting for me?

From that first moment of doubt, there was no peace for her; from the time she first imagined leaving her forest, she could not stand in one place without wanting to be somewhere else. She trotted up and down beside her pool, restless and unhappy. Unicorns are not meant to make choices. She said no, and yes, and no again, day and night, and for the first time she began to feel the minutes crawling over her like worms.

I'm not even sure I want hormones. I'm pretty sure I don't want them, because I think about going on hormones all the time, and those thoughts always end in some variation of "I can't, not ever," and if I really wanted to try hormones obviously I wouldn't keep thinking about how I can't try them. I think about them all the time and have to constantly stop myself, so I must not really want them. You know how when you're profoundly curious and sick with longing about something, it usually passes pretty quickly.

—Lavery again, from Something That May Shock and Discredit You, "The Stages of Not Going on T" (p. 60).

Speaking of T and not going on it, Beagle's next introduced main character is Schmendrick. Schmendrick is a wizard living in an insecure, stagnant, uncomfortable state that is explicitly symbolized by the fact that he can’t grow a beard and would like to. I don’t even need to make a case here. (I will anyway, though, in another installment.)

Our other main ally is Molly Grue, "a thin thorn of a woman" who stands out as the steel spine of Captain Cully's otherwise all-male, ridiculous crew. She's tough, smart, grizzled, kicked around by life. Her relationship with Cully is ambiguous; her feelings are clearly not warm. When Schmendrick scatters the merry men with a chaotic summoning, Molly's the only one to land on her feet and follow him into the wood.

Then she saw the unicorn. She neither moved nor spoke, but her tawny eyes were suddenly big with tears. [...] "Where have you been?" she cried. "Damn you, where have you been?" She took a few steps toward Schmendrick, but she was looking beyond him, at the unicorn. [...] "Where have you been?" Before the whiteness and the shining horn, Molly shrank to a shrilling beetle, but this time it was the unicorn's old dark eyes that looked down. "I am here now," she said at last. Molly laughed with her lips flat. "And what good is it to me that you're here now? Where were you twenty years ago, ten years ago? How dare you, how dare you come to me now, when I am this?" With a flap of her hand she summed herself up: barren face, desert eyes, and yellowing heart. "I wish you had never come, why do you come now?" The tears began to slide down the side of her nose. The unicorn made no reply, and Schmendrick said, "She is the last. She is the last unicorn in the world." "She would be," Molly sniffed. "She would be the last unicorn in the world to come to Molly Grue." She reached up then to lay her hand upon the unicorn's cheek; but both of them flinched a little, and the touch came to rest on the swift, shivering place under the jaw. Molly said, "It's all right. I forgive you." "Unicorns are not to be forgiven." The magician felt himself growing giddy with jealousy, not only of the touch but of something like a secret that was moving between Molly and the unicorn. "Unicorns are for beginnings," he said, "for innocence and purity, for newness. Unicorns are for young girls." Molly was stroking the unicorn's throat as timidly as though she were blind. She dried her grimy tears on the white mane. "You don't know much about unicorns," she said.

(pp. 96-98)

It leaps out to me that the crux of Schmendrick's jealousy is not the wish that he could touch a unicorn. More emphasis is placed on his envy of Molly's emotional experience—the recognition, the sobbing relief. Schmendrick needs this magnitude of affirmation too, but won't get it until the end of the book, and from a different front. More on his weird gender stuff in the second and probably third installments of this that I have to write next.

I'm not the only one to note this scene's transgender resonance. I first got it, once again, from Lavery, who borrowed Molly's despairing cry for a monologue in Something That May Shock and Discredit You. "Do You Know Athena Used to Be a Tomboy?" spoofs transphobic responses to trans men coming out, Greek drama style: the listener is "encouraged" to remain a woman by the goddess Athena (I didn't want to be a girl either, but then I learned to love myself, and to become the tutelary of Athens. Have you tried being the tutelary of Athens?); a Chorus: ("Well, of course we'd all be trans now, wouldn't we? Anyone born nowadays, that's just a given, they just—someone tells you at school, or something—everyone's trans now."); and a Deuteragonist, whose concern-trollish speeches gradually reveal more and more intense personal gender anxieties. From the final meltdown (pp. 188-189):

I mean, if I were thirty years younger—if I were twenty-five years younger—if I were eighteen years younger—God, if I were just ten years younger—if I were a year and a day younger—if you'd asked me just five minutes ago, four and a half even, if I'd picked up on the first ring instead of the third, I'd transition. Hell, I'd transition. Oh my God, I wish I could transition. Ask me again, but sooner. Come back yesterday. Come back a week ago. What good are you to me now, when I am—this? Where were you when there was still summer in my heart? Come back a month ago, a decade, but come back to me before I had to forgive you. Just come back and ask again; I'll wait if it takes forever this time.

I don't have much to add to that, really.