The year 1993 was incredibly important for me personally as I was just becoming a teenager at that point and awkwardly figuring out my own identity. This is the year in which Andrea Lawlor’s wickedly funny and absorbing novel is set. Its story bears all the marks of that era with references to zines, mix tapes and an increasingly assertive queer population that enthusiastically formed tight-knit communities outside of mainstream heterosexual culture. So I felt a strong affinity toward Paul, the novel’s 23 year-old hero who is more interested in hooking up with a wide variety of people than completing his college degree. We follow his journey navigating urban life between seedy gay hotspots, lesbian communes and leather bars while having lots of sex with men and women along the way. It’s quickly revealed that Paul has a special ability to morph like a mythological figure and physically transform into a woman. This allows Paul to change his body and genitals to suit the desires of any man or woman whether they are gay or straight. In this way he gains intimate access to the bedrooms and communities of a whole spectrum of people in his quest to understand where he belongs. It’s an inventive way of memorializing the many-varied and radical subcultures of this time period as well as questioning the meaning of gender identity.
There’s a great tradition of queer literature which Lawlor’s book references including many poets and novelists who’ve dealt with LGBT and gender issues, especially Woolf’s “Orlando” – though Paul self-consciously defines how he differs from this figure. Some other excellent recent novels that include protagonists who criss-cross or blur the line between male and female are “The Night Brother” and “The Lauras”. Lawlor’s novel gives another refreshing perspective on how gender is a social construct. However, it’s not didactic in the way it deals with this subject matter as Paul is portrayed as an extremely flawed and oftentimes superficial individual. In his relentless quest to transform himself to fit in with whatever subset of people he’s trying to ingratiate himself with Paul discovers that every community has different guidelines in how its members are expected to dress and act in order to be admitted. For instance, he hilariously becomes painfully self-conscious about the way he chops vegetables while in a kitchen full of lesbians or gets treated with contempt for not being suitably attired in a bar full of leather men until he reveals at the piss trough what a sizeable member he possesses. I admired the way this novel shows the superficial reasons by which people judge whether an individual can be allowed into a community or alienated from it.
Paul is highly cognizant of how to transform himself because he too quickly casts judgements about everyone he meets based on their manner and attire. When he reveals his true nature to someone at one point he gets his heart broken, but he’s also prone to breaking hearts by discarding people soon after having sex with them. I felt his complicated nature made him very sympathetic as well as the real-world economic struggles of a young adult living from pay check to pay check. The novel records in detail Paul’s ever dwindling bank balance and his frequent struggles with money. Lawlor also interjects several self-contained fables into the narrative in a way which brilliantly reconfigures the moral conundrums of Paul’s story. All these aspects made me fall in love with this book which encapsulates the way we function as social and sexual organisms. It’s bold how frankly Lawlor presents bodies in a wide variety of combinations and how these individuals constantly yearn to both satiate their desires and be desired themselves.
