![]() ![]() I hate being a trans person when a book like this comes out, not because I feel unsettled in my identity, but because I hate being treated like I’m too fragile to understand the stakes of fiction by critics who aren’t assessing it as such.Īnticipating the backlash that was to follow Honeybee’s release, Liam Pieper wrote ‘a novel is a static document and to lament art for imperfect politics is lazy criticism.’ I’ve been thinking about this phrase ‘lazy criticism’ and how it applies to incidents such as this, authors writing outside of their experience. No one considered it worthy of literary criticism, seemingly on the basis of its relationship to transness. I watched the book come out, I watched it sell well, and I watched as not one reviewer engaged with it as a literary critic. Offensive because it is a cis man writing a trans teenager with all the predictable tropes: a troubled home life, suicide attempts, ambiguous language that evades gender until a big ‘reveal’. Honeybee, a story about a troubled trans teenager, Sam, and their unlikely friendship with the older widower Vic was considered, on publication, to be fairly offensive by many trans readers, myself included. Last year, Craig Silvey’s third novel was published, his first since the hugely popular Jasper Jones in 2009. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |