Tag: nonfiction

First Chapter Thoughts: In the Dream House

August 11th, 2020

My partner is actually the one who recommended this book to me (the wonderful Davey at @NotLisaDavis <3) and so far, I’m enthralled. In the Dream House by Carmen Maria Machado is a creative non-fiction memoir that combines elements of slipstream, magical realism and literary fiction to talk about an abusive relationship from her past, as well as wider themes of abuse, PTSD, queerness and trauma.

For the ‘First Chapter Thoughts’, I stopped after both the prologue and the first very short snippet. The prologue is particularly notable – it begins by talking about the ‘violence of the archive’, a topic close to my heart. What is left out of any collection of history? What is untold? As a librarian and archaeologist, this is a topic I am intimately familiar with. The holes in what we receive in both those disciplines tell just as much of the story as the artifacts and books themselves. Why don’t we have artifacts from, say, disabled people in the Greek Bronze Age? Or explicit depictions of queer love from Ancient Egypt? The answer is that often we did… and they didn’t survive, either through implicit or explicit violence or bad-faith interpretations.

For Machado, she discusses the hole left by the lack of depictions of queer abuse. Queer love has been so rarely discussed and depicted to begin with – queer abuse is an untold story that we have to reassemble from gaps in what we have. And so she does this through the metaphor of the house – the “master’s house”, arkaios, archive, the Dream House. The first chapter builds this Dream House, talks about it, and builds the metaphor that isn’t really, truly, completely a metaphor.

I’ve been warned, and really getting the feeling that it’s true, that this book is going to emotionally wreck me. Let’s go.
Behind the Curtain: Why Does Romance’s Happy Endings Rule Make Me Panic?

July 2nd, 2020

There are a few topics in the writing world that never really fall out of circulation. They’re contentious, sometimes for the most ridiculous reasons, sometimes for very good ones; the long-standing piracy debate is one of these, as well as the Venn Diagram topics of censorship, representation and sexuality.

One of the repeating topics that I have a particularly interesting relationship with, however, is from the romance side of writing; specifically, the debate over whether or not romances have to have a happy ending. Characterizing this as a debate isn’t quite right. Romance writers and readers – those who populate, purchase and shape the genre – are pretty much united in what they want from it. Romance novels ALWAYS have a happy ending, whether it’s a happily ever after or ‘happy for now’. I’m not here to challenge that, or to reignite the furious defensiveness around the concept, especially since plenty of the people fighting romance readers and writers on it are doing it out of sheer misogyny and/or contrarianism.

But…not everyone. And here’s the thing: the statement alone that ‘romance always has a happy ending’ is, on its own, uncontroversial. Yet a number of queer folks, me included, have a visceral, difficult-to-pin-down reaction to it. Every time the discussion raises its head, so does a deep horror in my chest – a panic I can’t place. It took me a while to identify it as a PTSD trigger. I want to fight it, say that it’s not necessary to have a happily ever after, because for whatever reason, I feel trapped. It’s a nonsense reaction and completely irrational, because I don’t even write romance! I have no interest in writing romance.

After sitting back and observing both the romance-writers field and the queer publishing field for a while, however, I came to a few conclusions.

1. Romance is still struggling with who and what a happy ending can include.

This one isn’t particularly news. Even within the debates I’ve seen, people theoretically on the same side and within the same genre end up at loggerheads over very different definitions of a ‘happy ending’. In queer romance, is it really a happy ending for a homophobic family to halfway come around, or is it happier to be completely done with them? In interracial romance, how convincing is a happy ending where the racists in a white love interest’s life are still around? Is an open-ended or ambiguous ending still a happy ending if the love interests aren’t explicitly back together? If they’re happy but not dating, is it still romance? Is a queerplatonic partnership a happy ending for romance?

These are the kinds of questions which plague the romance community internally, and from the outside, the loudest voices tend to be the ones insisting on ideals that already automatically exclude me. When “romance needs a happy ending” is so often treated as synonymous with “romance needs to end with a monogamous, usually heterosexual, Standard Relationship”, it’s hard not to feel twitchy around the concept.

But ultimately, that’s for the romance community to sort out. If I’m not a romance writer or reader, I have no investment in the genre, right? And it’s probably a little concerning that I’m even writing this, except –

2. Queer writers are placed in the romance box, whether we want it or not.

As a queer writer who writes queer characters, and who does not write romances, I run into this on a horrifyingly frequent basis. If a piece of media is identified as LGBTQ+, queer or gay, it is immediately assumed to be romantic. Even if, say, it’s a horror novel, or urban fantasy. The most striking example of this for me, personally – with a massive side of fetishization – was when I initially pitched Ghosts in Quicksilver to a friend of mine at the time, about three or four years ago. When I said it wasn’t really romance-focused/shipping-focused, she said she probably wouldn’t read it, because “there weren’t any cute boys to ship together”. What? Nor is this an isolated incident – I’ve had a lot of people fixate on the supposed romance in GIQ, and while I’ll tease about it, if that’s what people are taking from my work, there’s issues at hand I can’t solve.

Recently, The Half Of It on Netflix came under fire for ‘queerbaiting’, and it’s proof of more of the same; an explicitly queer movie wasn’t “queer enough” because it didn’t have a happy, romantic ending. Queer movies and books are judged by the standards of romances, even when they are making a point that they are not romances.

The effect of this is that discussions in the romance genre community involve queer people, whether they intend to or not – because the standards set in place by the romance community end up being applied to queer writers universally. It’s not like only straight (allocishet) people do this, either – we do it to each other just as much if not more. So when queer writers react badly to the idea that ‘romance has to have a happy ending’, it’s just as frequently an attempt to reclaim our own work, even if it’s taken as an attack on romance; and responses that ‘well it’s just not romance then, that’s not so bad’ don’t quite grasp that we aren’t given the choice to opt out of the genre.

3. Rape Culture, Allonormativity and Amatonormative Coercion

While most of us probably have at least a vague idea of what ‘rape culture’ means, the other two words here are a little less well understood. There’s a frequent tendency even in otherwise progressive circles to mock “weird Tumblr terms”, but especially here, they’re indispensible.

What is allonormativity and amatonormativity? Allonormativity – broken down into ‘allo’ and ‘normative’ – refers to the supposed universality of a human experience, specifically that humans Want Sex. This functions separately from heteronormativity (all humans are straight), and cisnormativity (all humans identify with the gender they were assigned with at birth, a.k.a are not trans) but interacts with them in a lot of different ways. Sounds complicated? Let me word it differently – allonormativity is the force that makes movies like The 40-Year-Old Virgin comedies and not just slice-of-life movies about some dude living his life. Allosexuality isn’t specifically about ‘wanting sex’ – more articulately, it’s about experiencing sexual attraction to specific people in a Socially Approved Way – but in mainstream culture, that and ‘wanting sex’ are pretty much conflated. (Now you see why ace discourse is so complicated! We distinguish things that most people think of as exactly the same.)

Amatonormativity is a similar idea but one that strikes even more precisely at the heart of romance as a genre. Amatonormativity presupposes that feeling romantic love is what makes us human. If you don’t feel romantic love, you must therefore be ‘broken’ or ‘immature’ – romance is some sort of Completing Factor or Missing Piece. Once you identify this, you start seeing it everywhere. Disney movies, romcoms, dating shows, embarrassing calls from your mother about why you aren’t married yet… Both allonormativity and amatonormativity shape the romance genre, but more importantly, impact our lives in ways that are hard to put into words. It’s still hard to talk about coercive hetero- and cisnormativity, and ace and aro discussions are newer than even those.

The expectation to have sex and fall in love isn’t just omnipresent – for aromantic and asexual people in particular, it’s frequently traumatic. Paired with rape culture and consent issues in wider culture, it suddenly becomes less of a surprise that “you’re going to write/read a happy ending with a monogamous relationship OR ELSE” can be such a triggering statement. I know I’ve been in various non-consensual relationships that I was coerced or pressured into, through both external and internal forces amounting to “pretend to be normal or you’re going to die alone”. And if it weren’t for the second point I mentioned, where queer writers are already pigeonholed into the romance genre, it wouldn’t feel so much like that kind of pressure.

Plenty of aro/ace-spectrum people are readers and writers of romance! That’s what makes this conversation so difficult. Just like the rest of the queer community, the aro/ace community is incredibly diverse. Everybody is affected by allo- and amatonormativity to a different degree. But I find that there is not a tremendous amount of patience for those who are less successful at blending in with the status quo.

The romance genre is allowed to uphold its own rules and standards, and this article isn’t intended to combat that in any way! However, I think it’s important when these discussions come up to recognize that while Romance:tm: as a genre is a singular concept, romance is still a pervasive cultural concept with baggage of its own. Not everybody reacting badly to a perceived prescription is attacking a genre; sometimes, we’re defending ourselves from the perceptions of a wider world.

I panic when this rule comes up, because whether I want it to, it ends up applying to me. I opt out immediately once I’m permitted to – so stop filing queer books under romance automatically, and understand that forced relationships are a genuine thing many of us have had to live through, and while this topic is never quite going to go away, I think we’ll be able to see eye to eye quite comfortably.
The Gremlin’s Library: My Invented Country by Isabel Allende

January 14th, 2020

It’s been a while since I reviewed a non-fiction book, and I don’t think I’ve ever reviewed a memoir on here before. I read Isabel Allende’s My Invented Country for Latinx Heritage Month (back in October) and as somebody who knew very little about Chile beforehand, it was a great read.

First of all, Allende is hilarious. She has a wry, quiet sense of humour that got me cackling several times in a row, especially with some of her commentaries on Chilean culture and sexism. I much prefer memoirs with a sense of humour, and so despite the dark subject matter, this was a really, really pleasant read. I need to read House of the Spirits at some point, especially since Allende spends some time talking about the similarities between the book and her life. (I’ve been struggling through Love in the Time of Cholera and Marquez might not be for me.)

My Invented Country follows both the path of Allende’s life and the path of Chilean history; her uncle, Salvador Allende, was the first democratically-elected Marxist leader. It was for this reason that Allende had to flee the country after Pinochet’s dictatorship took hold, and she eventually ended up in the U.S. where her second husband is from. Latin American history is not taught at all in Canada, so almost everything in this book was new to me. It also wasn’t hard to follow, which is something I struggle with in memoirs sometimes.

My Invented Country is available at Harper Collins and Book Depository.
Review: David Bowie Made Me Gay

August 13th, 2019

Despite the surge in interest in the last decade, LGBT/queer history is still understudied – and what is studied is often consigned to theses, academic journals or half-deserted blogs, shouting out into a void. It’s hard to change the conception of queerness as a rare and recent thing. That’s why I was thrilled to run across the book David Bowie Made Me Gay: 100 Years of LGBT Music by Darryl W. Bullock. It’s a nonfiction record of queer performers, singers and musicians from the early 1900s to the present day, and to my knowledge it is the first of its kind – certainly the most commercially available.

First, the good. Even aside from it existing at all, David Bowie Made Me Gay is amazingly comprehensive. Some of the performers chronicled in the first chapter no longer have existing music recordings, and others throughout the book were one hit wonders, still with an impact but devilishly hard to research. (Jobriath is an excellent example – I don’t know anybody who had heard of him prior to this book, and yet he’s included.) Bullock even makes the executive decision to largely gloss over LGBT giants David Bowie, Elton John and Freddie Mercury – they have autobiographies and studies of their own, after all, whereas acts like Coil, Jobriath and Klaus Nomi likely never will.

In addition to acts I’d never heard of, however, Bullock shakes the retrospective assumptions off of several bands that I had previously heard of, listened to, or otherwise enjoyed without an inkling that they were queer. The B-52s, Soft Cell, and R.E.M are 80s examples of this – but it’s all throughout the book. Many of them were immensely obvious to those at the time (ex. Frankie Goes To Hollywood, ) whereas new and younger listeners didn’t have the historical context to pick up on what could only be implied.

At times, Bullock gets too caught up in facts and figures, and the precise accounting of record sales, rights, and label administration. This information is definitely interesting in small doses, but it’s more geared towards full-on music history nerds. (…Like me, honestly. But not the point.) The real sadness for me is how he tries but ultimately fails in being inclusive. Most of the artists listed are gay or lesbian, with a little too much time dedicated to talking about how gay/lesbian performers were pressured into identifying as bisexual to be “less queer”. Bisexual performers definitely have their moments, but biphobia as a concept doesn’t really come up, when it really really should. Trans inclusiveness is very similar, with Bullock changing somebody’s pronouns mid-paragraph or mid-sentence instead of maintaining them throughout. I can see the historical importance of printing deadnames of pop-culture figures, especially when they were prominent celebrities both before and after, but there’s no reason to misgender artists who have been out as trans for decades. Ace and aro stuff, par for the course, doesn’t come up at all. Likely performers who identified as what we would now call asexual or aromantic called themselves something else, which makes research in that area hard – however, some acknowledgement of the identities would have gone a long way. I appreciate Bullock’s attempts at inclusivity, and in many places he does an excellent job, but a trans and/or bisexual sensitivity reader would have accomplished a lot.

Overall, I highly recommend this book for people interested in LGBT/queer music, and it’s a great gateway into a world that many of us never get to hear about. I hope that it inspires more research into the people featured in it, and hopefully some more trans-positive work as well. And as far as macro-level works on LGBT history go – this is a pretty good one.
Review: Sister Mine by Nalo Hopkinson

August 8th, 2018

I intended to do another first-chapter review for this one, and then my internet was out and I couldn’t put it down!!

Sister Mine by Nalo Hopkinson is urban mythic fantasy, very much in the same genre as Charles de Lint’s Newford series and Neil Gaiman’s American Gods but still wildly different. Instead of the standard Irish, Greek and Germanic faeries and gods that tend to stroll the streets, Hopkinson’s book follows the celestial mischief and family bickering of a pantheon reimagined from the Orishas of Southwest Africa. The book follows Makeda and Abby, conjoined twins born from the coupling of a mortal woman and divine man. The surgery that separated them left Abby with a permanent limp, Makeda on anti-rejection meds, and Makeda without any mojo – the magic that marks the celestials from the claypicken.

As a (mostly) white and Western reader, the Orisha (Orishas? unsure of the pluralization) are completely new to me. However, the care taken in their portrayal and the richness of their mythology shows through in Hopkinson’s writing, and it doesn’t take long to settle into the world and accept it as it comes. I’m unsure how much of the terminology is Hopkinson’s creation and how much is Caribbean patois I’m just unfamiliar with; ‘claypicken’ to mean ‘mortal’, for example, was one that took me a few pages.

As a story, and a mythical one at that, Sister Mine, is fantastic. Makeda is rightfully angry, if a little bit petty, balancing on the edge between the mystic and the mundane. The prose does the same, dancing effortlessly between musings on why her father is entertained by tentacle porn and mindbreaking passages of pure synesthesia. However, as a novel, Sister Mine leaves a lot of loose ends, and balances possibly too many plotlines at once. I would have loved to see the novel be perhaps 50-100 pages longer, to give all of the characters a little more room to breathe. Some stories do well at breakneck speeds; Sister Mine is a story that should take its time in the telling. Additionally, some of the plot twists in the last third of the book come a little out of the blue, taking an already-strange book into the realm of disbelief. (Of course, magical realism and urban fantasy always tread that line to begin with.)

Favourite character: Makeda is a standout, but I have to say, the living embodiment of Jimi Hendrix’s guitar is a favourite. Not just because of who he is, but because he’s so damn nice.

Overall, I’m giving Sister Mine a 3.5/5!

Tag: nonfiction

First Chapter Thoughts: In the Dream House

Behind the Curtain: Why Does Romance’s Happy Endings Rule Make Me Panic?

The Gremlin’s Library: My Invented Country by Isabel Allende

Review: David Bowie Made Me Gay

Review: Sister Mine by Nalo Hopkinson