Charlotte's Blog
Rediscovering a Love for Reading Fiction
At some point in my teens or twenties, I lost my love for reading fiction. I continued to read all sorts of non-fiction - especially histories and sometimes politics - but it was a rare day that I would pick up anything like a novel.
On one hand, I was getting pleasing storytelling from other sources, like television and video games. On the other hand, I found English literature classes vexing, with the point seeming to be solving riddles about the meaning, and enjoyment of the text did not seem to be one of the ingredients.
I found taking English credits in universityIn hindsight, it was quite silly that I took English credits in university, but I was trying to prove to myself (and family) - whose image of university included sitting in rooms and being smart about interpreting great literature - that I could too. Suffice to say, on Carleton's phone system, when the robotic voice read out "Twenty-four . One zero zero Section...", the grade was invariably disappointing. even more challenging: the really good students were able to identify all sorts of meanings that were hidden away in symbols, imagery, and subtext, when I was at best able to offer up a plain text understanding of it, hardly straying from the content of the lectures.
It might have been 2004 when I set fiction and literature aside, silently declaring that it was not for me.
For one reason or another, it was coming out in 2022 that sparked something in me. I think it might have been that the most interesting-sounding trans-related writing was happening in fiction, literature, and poetry. Not so much in non-fiction. Excitement around the re-release of NevadaIt seemed to allow some trans commentators to preen a little with an "oh, Nevada was great! I lost it in a move, but I had an original copy...", but it did sort of help to kickstart a little more awareness. provided all the motivation I need to enthusiastically purchased a copy. Once I began reading, however, I found that I didn't really enjoy the experience and put it down about half way through and retreated back into an urban history instead.Admittedly, while I knew it was a bit of a shoulders-of-giants novel, I didn't find it resonant or to my taste and forcing myself to continue reading it just felt like replicating English courses.
Still, I felt that I just needed to find the "right" book for me and that it would open things back up for me. The challenge with Nevada - and so. much. transfem. fiction in general - is that so much of it appears to surround fairly particular experiences of twenty-something trans women in Brooklyn or Portland or [much cooler city than Ottawa] in the 2000s and 2010s and seemingly little else. Did such a new and growing genre already have a template?I can't speak definitively, or with the language of a critic, but I had noticed that many of the transfem writers seem to have liked to distinguish themselves from the squeaky-clean-tradwife transition memoirs of the 1970s and 1980s as a sort of useful foil. This is frequently how Nevada was positioned when it was re-released in 2022, with a tone of "we can write about our messy lives too!"
While I completely understand (even for the privileged, trans life isn't strawberries and cream), I couldn't help but be reminded a little of Scott Davies' "The Paradox of Progressive Education: A Frame Analysis" (2002), which outlines the successive educational reforms in Ontario always distinguishing themselves progressive vis-a-vis an education approach (the one-room school house) that was no longer practiced.
While a major point of reading widely is to inhabit widely, I was really really really craving something that I could see more of myself in. Where were the novels or short story collections about trans women in their 40s? Those who had been out for a long time? Those who worked somewhere other than a book store or were a student?
In the end, I found my on-ramp in Woodworking, by Emily St. James.
