Redefining Realness by Janet Mock

I heard about this book when I was at a conference recently - it is written by Janet Mock, an openly trans woman.  It is one of the first books of its kind in that it is the first memoir written by a trans woman. This offers a public glimpse of Janet's private life and how she seemed to surpass all odds to become the person that she is today and how she is a happy and fullfilled and successful woman.

What makes Ms. Mock's memoir that much better is that I felt compelled to question what constituted freedom.  I had always respected a person's path to self realization. We get to where we need to get through a variety of different ways and the journey to self realization has always utterly fascinated me. In applying this to her own life as a trans woman of color in America, however, Ms. Mock challenges us to see how marginalized a person that walks in her shoes is. Becoming a woman ensured that Ms. Mock had the freedom to be who she was in spite of whee and how she was born. She showed grit and determination and honesty in moving her life forward. This is not an easy story but I still enjoyed reading it.  Ms. Mock intersperses her personal stories with statistics and mini essays in an attempt to show the broader picture of what it is to mean to be trans in America today.

There were things that might not resonate with everyone.  She occasionally uses phrases like "born as a boy" and "born in a boys' body" and part of her journey is finding heterosexual love.  This is not, by far the majority of the book though and it is a very important telling of a journey that is not readily available currently.

My Education by Susan Choi

I admit it: I have a thing about academic novels.  And by that, I  mean novels that occur on campuses and are about characters that are entrenched in academia (think Donna Tartt's The Secret History or I Am Charlotte Simmons by Tom Wolfe). Combine this proclivity with my penchant for getting book recommendations from NPR and I'm in.  That's how I got to this book.

This isn't Susan Choi's first book - it's the most recent release by her but the first that I've read - and it's kind of typical in some ways. At the beginning of the novel, we are introduced to the young protagonist, a first year graduate student, who is taking literature classes at an East Coast University- I assumed it was the Northeast but that could totally have been my own experiences and biases coming into play. She's taking classes with Nicholas Brodeur, a celebrated academic, and Choi seems to set up a relationship between Brodeur and our main character, until a scene at a dinner party where Brodeur's wife, Martha, eclipses him by swooping in and hooking up with our main character!

This book details, in a painfully intimate fashion, the unfolding of this relationship between our main character (Regina) and Martha - Regina's almost teenage exuberance and expectations of it (she is only 21 or 22) and Martha's guilty ambivalence (married, thirties maybe and with a new child). This book is, thematically, most of all, about how different people navigate different relationships at different points in their lives.  This is driven home most poignantly by the book ending with Regina, fifteen years later, trying to navigate a wide variety of things from her marriage, to her career and other obligations that have given her a new perspective on what occurred when Regina was a mere 21.

What was also particularly interesting is how Choi takes on the sexual interests and love of two women who identified as straight.  In some ways, it's really interesting - she takes it seriously and tries to provide some literature about people who are bisexual (is it REALLY so that literature has been about straight or lesbian/gay couples but not about bisexual attractions? Maybe that's a loaded question for another time). Regina says, interestingly, that the sex of her lover wasn't an issue and was very nonchalant about it.  I got the opposite feeling from Martha. So in that sense, I respect this - this is LOVE BETWEEN TWO PEOPLE, not two women or two men or a man and a woman.  Their life stages - one married with the children and the other a 21 year old grad student - is what is problematic for them, not that they are in a same sex relationship.

That being said, I simply loved reading this novel.  Choi writes beautifully, elegantly and breathtakingly about this and I want to read her previous novels simply because of the grace and beauty of her writing.