A riotous read

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This article was published 07/03/2020 (2027 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

We all know not to judge a book by its cover, but the front of Daniel Lavery’s exhilarating, confounding new book, Something That May Shock and Discredit You, conveys a lot of important information about the contents.

First, there’s the author’s name, which he changed earlier this year. Lavery was going by Daniel Mallory Ortberg when he wrote the book, which is what appears on the cover. This is likely to help readers connect him to work he wrote under the name Mallory Ortberg (Texts from Jane Eyre, The Merry Spinster) before transitioning, and to let them know he’s the person who founded the late, lamented website The Toast, and the person who writes the Dear Prudence advice column on Slate.com.

It also serves to signal that Something… will likely deal, at least in part, with the author’s transition, and indeed, an early chapter is called Chapter Titles from the On-the-Nose, Po-Faced Transmasculine Memoir I Am Trying not to Write.

Then there’s the combination of the book’s title — a quote from The Simpsons’ inept lawyer Lionel Hutz — and the cover illustration, a baroque-style painting of a man who looks as if he is pondering whether it is time to mount his horse and gallop wildly across the moors, à la Heathcliff.

The juxtaposition is an excellent encapsulation of what awaits the reader, as Lavery is equally at home with pop-culture touchstones — Star Trek, Pretty in Pink, The Addams Family — as with the Bible, Greek and Arthurian myths, Rilke and medieval literature, and delights, in fact, in combining them to hilarious and often bizarrely moving effect.

In one section (the table of contents refers to them as either chapters or interludes, but they read as self-contained essays, with the interludes mostly being shorter and more experimental in form), Lavery compares his decision to transition with his decision to quit drinking — both choices, he says, that were more like surrendering than fighting, like “resigning from the unpaid, unpleasant job of crisis management.”

He works in the 46th Psalm and the final, heartbreaking episode of Golden Girls (in which Dorothy, played by Bea Arthur, breaks the women’s pact to take care of each other to marry Leslie Nielsen’s character) to explain how tough it is to let go of the way you thought things would always be, but how acceptance is the only way to heal.

A typical interlude finds him channelling Lord Byron (in the petulant parlance of a modern millennial) on the occasion of his birthday — “Are there even ages you can turn after 40? Or do you just turn into a tree?” — while one chapter sees him referring to the biblical story of Jacob and Esau to explain why he felt he owed his mother an apology when he transitioned.

The author was raised in an evangelical household; his father, John Ortberg, is a pastor at Menlo Church, a megachurch in California. (Lavery recently adopted his wife’s last name after distancing himself from his family; he had learned that his father had encouraged a congregant, who admitted to being sexually attracted to children, to deal with this issue by volunteering with minors.)

He uses Bible passages and stories frequently to frame his explorations of and feelings about the process of transitioning, which at first seems paradoxical, or at least unusual, considering the church’s tenuous support of the LGBTTQ+ community. But in a way, Lavery’s in-depth readings of his chosen verses show how comfort can be found in a religion’s words, even when its practitioners may offer no succor.

Lavery’s quicksilver mind and breadth of reference can be tough to follow; it’s not every reader who has a working knowledge of both Oedipus and TV reality show House Hunters (guess which one this reviewer is more conversant with). However, even if the source material isn’t always familiar, Lavery’s oblique approach may reveal more about the experience of transitioning than many of those “on-the-nose” memoirs.

Even a short interlude like the one titled How I Intend to Comport Myself When I Have Abs Someday is a deft combination of self-deprecating humour and a look at the body issues that plague us all, a sly lament that none of us ever gets exactly the shape we want.

His obsession with William Shatner’s Star Trek character is explored in the chapter Captain James T. Kirk Is a Beautiful Lesbian and I’m Not Sure Exactly How to Explain That (”He was always being framed in gauzy close-ups, which was exactly how I wanted to look to the sort of man who compelled me…”).

Lavery’s brainy, often breathless prose swings from academic-style analysis to, like, totally whatever colloquial speech (often ironically used in first-person by historic or fictional characters), and sometimes he will leave readers dazed in the dust, but when you’re along for the ride, it’s thrilling.

“I had been well-daughtered,” he writes of trying to tell his parents about his transition, “and had no idea how to ask to be a son to them, how to be handled, how to be touched, how to be called, how to be seen, how to be addressed, how to be remembered, how to be incorporated not just as myself-as-a-man but theirs-as-a-man, a man who had attended at least one daddy-daughter dance in 1994, and not as a daddy.”

Something… is the laugh-out-loud, head-scratcher, soul-searcher of a transmasculine memoir you didn’t know you needed.

Jill Wilson is a Free Press copy editor who owns all seven seasons of The Golden Girls on DVD.