I read a few years ago at Women & Children First, and I’m happy to say I’m going back to do a reading from She’s Not the Man I Married, since it became one of my favorite bookstores in the few hours I got to visit last time around. (They’re the women’s bookstore that has a shelf of “Men’s Books.” The idea still kills me.)
Being the cool & groovy bookstore they are, they even have a list of places you can eat dinner nearby beforehand.
The Chicago Be-All starts today, although I/we won’t be presenting until Saturday.
At 2PM Saturday, Betty will join me in talking about our experiences with transness & the media:
Then directly after, at 3:30 PM, I’ll be doing a reading from the new book:
While we’re in Chicago, I’ll also be doing a reading at the Women & Children First bookstore on Thursday night, May 31st (especially useful if trans events aren’t your bag).
According to the June Harper’s Index:
They don’t really indicate if they mean these books sold that many copies only in 2006 or if they sold that many up to & including 2006. That said, if these stats stay relatively stable from year to year, My Husband Betty and She’s Not the Man I Married are two of the 322,517 books which sold between 100 and 100k copies.
Personally, I’d like to know how many fall into the between 100 and say, 20k copies, instead.
I’m feeling a little frustrated today, & that’s after feeling a little frustrated last week, too. The thing is, criticism is always hard to take. What I’ve found has been happening is that people who like the book tend to tell me, or tell their friends – which I totally appreciate – but the people who, for whatever reason, were disappointed with the book(s), put up reviews on message boards and of course, on amazon.com.
Today someone named “Doctor Bob” in Texas decided to slam both books and gave both one star. And you know, if he hated them because the books sucked, I’d actually be okay with that. But his comments reveal that his expectations of the books had nothing whatsoever to do with what the books actually claim to be and are. For She’s Not the Man I Married, he writes, “This title should have been “All About Me” instead of her husband,” which just kind of kills me, since I figured the “MY LIFE with a transgender husband” in the subtitle might indicate that the book is about me, & my perspective on living with someone trans.
But it’s his review of My Husband Betty that really kills me:
“Boring attempt at being a therapist quoting real professionals and sharing exactly nothing about Betty other than very superficial descriptions. No pictures or real personal feelings from Betty, except a vapid paragraph at the end. “
So apparently the “MY husband Betty” also failed to explain to this careless reader that the book wasn’t supposed to have ‘real personal feelings from Betty.’ If that were the case, Betty would have written the book, say, and it would have a title something more like “My Life as Betty.”
Anyway. Criticism from smart folks can be hard to take; writers are famously insecure (and often simultaneously arrogant). But good criticism can help you learn something about writing, sometimes. But criticism from people who are too damned obnoxious to bother reading the title, the blurbs, & the book descriptions, and instead criticize it for not being the book it never claimed to be, is probably the most frustrating thing in the world. I wonder sometimes if they should, perhaps, read more slowly & carefully, & post comments on amazon.com a little less.
Well it seems like it took forever to get here, but finally: tonight is the launch party for She’s Not the Man I Married, at Marion’s Continental.
Please, if you’re planning on coming, do let me know.
Recently in our forums, Nettie jokingly made a reference to the “Class of 2007″ – meaning those who would be transitioning in 2007 – and in the context of our experience talking to people at IFGE, & in the light of a review of She’s Not the Man I Married someone sent me which criticized the book for not having an “ending,” I’ve been thinking recently that perhaps one of the most slippery aspects of the slippery slope is that transition provides an ending, and maybe even closure. The thing is: from what post-transition trans women tell me, that’s not necessarily true, but for anyone who’s been suffering all their lives with their trans feelings, it sure does seem like one hell of an attractive idea.
So while I very much tried to communicate in the new book that I may be waiting for the sound of a shoe that may never drop, folks don’t seem to understand that sometimes there isn’t so much of an “ending” as instead a “being finished.” But I also wonder if there’s anything that crossdressers or middle path types might do to accomplish more of a feeling of closure that transition brings trans women. I know CDI throws “debutante parties” – which seems like a great way to come out – which might work for plenty of CDs, especially since deb parties come with pretty party clothes. But what about middle path types? Do they send out a press release? Because no matter how many times we tell people that Betty is where she is, people persist in believing Betty will want to transition medically or legally or both. & You know, she might. She might in a year from now, & she might 10 years from now, or 20. But the whole idea of having other people tell you you’re not “done” until transition is a huge aggravation for us both.
We’re at the IFGE Transgender 2007 Conference in Philadelphia, and just so people know, I’ll be doing two workshops:
Otherwise, we’ll be around, so do say hello. A bunch of us who post on the mHB boards have been planning a get-together, too.
Good news: the launch party for She’s Not the Man I Married has been re-scheduled.
Date: Thursday, April 26th
Time: 6 – 10 PM
Where: Marion’s Continental Lounge.
Do let me know if you intend to come by emailing me.
Just to repeat, once more: the launch party for She’s Not the Man I Married is NOT happening tonight. It is currently being re-scheduled.
That said, tonight is Night of 1000 Gowns, with this year’s fundraising going to PFLAG.
I just wanted to let people know, if they didn’t yet, that the She’s Not the Man I Married launch party is NOT happening at Mo Pitkins this Saturday night. I don’t know when/if it will be rescheduled at this point, but I’ll let you know when I do.
Wow.
Donna sent me a link to an episode of “Real Housewives of Orange County” which is one of those shows that’s supposed to convince us that rich people have real problems, too. I’m really kind of astounded by it; as much as I wrote Chapter 2 of She’s Not the Man I Married with more of a theoretical shoe-buying bonding moment between women in mind, I didn’t expect to actually see something like this on TV, much less that the store these women go to happens to be a Jimmy Choos, since that’s one of the types of shoes I mentioned. (The other was Kenneth Cole.)
But, yeah. This kind of scene is enough to give me hives all over again, from all those years just trying to buy a pair of summer sandals that I didn’t hate. If this is “women” then I’m not of them.
The official launch party for She’s Not the Man I Married will be on Saturday, March 31st, from 6-8pm at Mo Pitkins.
I’ll be doing a reading and presentation of She’s Not the Man I Married tonight for the TransNYC group. Please do come, if you can.
For those of you who can’t come, apparently Access Hollywood is doing a clip about the AMC show.
I felt the need to publicly thank Betty for not only tolerating me but not mocking me while I watched PBS’ Great Performances of Sting’s Journeys & Labyrinths a few nights back. This one is by far the most pretentious of Sting’s projects, and despite the music being beautiful, the video was silly (& in parts kept reminding me of Monty Python). Sting and his lute-player, at one point, seem to be laughing to themselves over the silliness of watching two historians debate the finer points of religious politics of the 16th Century.
However, Sting is wearing a pair of boots in one scene that I swear must have been made from the skins of Calabrian shepherd boys and their pet goats. Of course Sting being Sting, he may be protesting his own boots in the near future.
The songs, though, are beautiful, and so is Sting’s voice even when it’s not best-suited to these songs. So yes, I still want to be Sting when I grow up. & Not just for the boots, but that he’s willing to be pretentious and experimental, & knows that doing this CD will get a ton of people – me included – to listen to music they might not otherwise listen to. Throw in the house, the organic farming, & the labyrinth garden, of course. But what I admire the most, to be honest, is his seeming surety, confidence, nearly arrogance: he knows he’s talented, he knows the world is his oyster, but also seems to take his power & privilege seriously, like some kind of Philosopher-Musician, or Musician-King, which only earns him more scorn from people who mock him.
& I keep meaning to write more about the whole idea of who aspires to be what as children; at the AMC wrap party, I had an interesting conversation with David Harrison about the idea, since he always wanted to be an actor (not an actress) receiving an Oscar as a child, despite being female-bodied. & It got me thinking about my own aspirations as a kid, the people who reflected what I wanted to be the most, how many of my role models were male & not female, & on top of all that, a friend noted, while reading SNTMIM, that she went into Religious Studies in order to be something like Indiana Jones, which reminded me this kind of cross-gender aspiring isn’t restricted to me, or to trans people, & may instead have something more to do with Jung’s animus idea, or the lack of women role models for certain ways of being.
Someone remind me to flesh that idea out, please.
Today is the official publication date of She’s Not the Man I Married.
It seems like forever since I wrote it, but I’m glad it’s finally seeing the light of day. I’d love to hear what people think of it when they do read it, of course.
For those in & around the NYC area, please put aside Friday, March 16th: I’ll be having the launch party for She’s Not the Man I Married at KGB Bar, from 7-9PM.
(It’s not absolutely confirmed yet, but looking definite.)
As those of you who are reading/have read She’s Not the Man I Married know, Valentine’s Day has always been some kind of locus of confusion for me & Betty. We’re in much better shape now than we once were, though when we’re planning dinner, or just having the “So what do you want to do for Valentine’s Day?” conversation, there’s still this silent thing that hangs in the air.
That silent thing is what gender Betty is going to be, which she’ll be perceived as, & how exactly I’m supposed to interact with that gender.
Mostly now I try to go into Valentine’s Day assuming that the person I’m with will be seen as female, which pretty much wrecks the PDAs that I prefer. Sometimes the reality that I really miss having a male partner lands squarely in my lap on Valentine’s Day, too, so I have to wrestle with the guilt and fear I still fear in having a trans partner. The thing is, I still don’t know how to be romantic with her if I’m not feeling masculine-ascendant myself; I don’t know how to be female with a female partner. & This year, maybe because I’m feeling vulnerable because the new book is out there, or because we’re going to have “the big talk” about Betty’s transness with some important people in our lives, I’m feeling a bit – intrepid.
Sometimes I just think Valentine’s Day should be tossed altogether. I mean all it does is make single people miserable and puts a lot of pressure on couples that are newly together – well, on all couples, I think. I mean how many of us are the types in the jewelry ads, having dinner & being presented with the new diamond solitaire? No one I know is like that, but kudos to anyone who is. But for me, this year, despite a planned dinner at our favorite Italian restaurant, my feeling is:
Down with Cupid!
Well, we’re almost there, folks: the official pub date is just two weeks away, and I know many of you are already reading or have already read She’s Not the Man, but for those who aren’t, this is the last preview I’ll be putting up. It’s from my Preface:
This book is a sequel to My Husband Betty, at least in that our story and my reasons for thinking about gender take up where it left off. Mostly it is a love story, our love story, which, like any other, is not typical. It is the story of how a tomboy fell in love with a sissy, how a butch found her femme, how a boyish girl met a girlish boy. Who is who is not always clear and doesn’t always matter. In some ways, that’s the heart of this book: the idea that a relationship is a place where people can and do and maybe even ought to become as ungendered as they can. It comes from my very specific dislike of Martian men and Venusian women and the adversarial ideas about relationships that permeate our culture. While I am not interested in a genderless world, I am curious about the ways that gender can be manipulated in a romance, the ways it can be controlled instead of controlling our roles.
When I started writing She’s Not the Man I Married, I was thinking of Joan Didion’s The Year of Magical Thinking, which made me think about driving up a mountain road in order to see something a ways off, & the way the road curls around the mountain, so that every time you go around a bend you get a slightly different perspective of the thing you’re trying to see.
I think that’s what this book does. I hope so, anyway. That very same aspect of it also makes choosing excerpts to read aloud kind of difficult, as right in the middle of a narrative about one thing I tend to go off on a huge tangent about shoe-buying or faghags or something. It’s thickly layered, in a sense, so that it’s hard to just pull a piece out that doesn’t loose something in the excerpting.
So now that the first review has come up, and the word “repetitive” appeared in it, I can’t say I’m surprised, but I’d argue it wasn’t unnecessary. Ineffective, maybe, but I was doing it for a reason. “Humorous” and “self-deprecating” are much more accurate.
We leave for First Event today, and are really looking forward to experiencing this legendary trans conference. Just so you know – and because I probably won’t be answering emails for a bit – this is what I’ll be doing at First Event:
on Friday:
on Saturday:
Betty will be with me, and we’ll otherwise be around, so do say hello if you see us.
