Some Strange Music Draws Me In

October 1, 2023

In small-town 1984 Massachusetts, Melanie (better known as Mel) meets the vibrant trans woman Sylvia and starts thinking about life's possibilities. Decades later, Mel has become Max and is on probation from the school where he teaches, ironically for defying speech codes regarding the trans community. A timely plunge into gender and class issues from Lambda Literary Award finalist Hansbury. Prepub Alert.

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January 15, 2024
A trans man reckons with a younger generation’s attitudes toward gender while reflecting on his difficult childhood as a girl in the incisive latest from Hansbury, a psychoanalyst and blogger best known for Vanishing New York under the pseudonym Jeremiah Moss. Massachusetts private school teacher Max Pulaski is on probationary leave after one of his wealthy cisgender students complained he was insensitive to gender differences (“When did fragility become desirable?” he narrates). A series of flashbacks portray Max at 13 in 1984, when, as a girl named Mel, she becomes fixated on Sylvia, a trans woman who ran away to New York City when she was about the same age and now faces bigotry upon her return to their small Massachusetts town. As Mel latches onto Sylvia, whose indeterminate age is somewhere in the “big-sister zone,” she wrestles with her gender identity. The 1984 plot builds to an explosive climax involving a violent attack on Sylvia, and Hansbury details its lingering impact on Max in sharp, perceptive prose (“In one body or the other, girl or man, I am getting it wrong. But I’m not supposed to let my anger show”). There are no easy answers in Hansbury’s bracing narrative.

Starred review from February 15, 2024
Noted poet, essayist, and psychoanalyst Hansbury's latest work of fiction is a dual narrative, alternating between 1984 and 2019. In 2019, Max's mother has just died, and he is tasked, along with his intransigent, Fox News-addicted older sister, who is reluctantly caring for a grandchild, with clearing out the family home in Swaffham, Massachusetts. Max is currently on probation from his teaching job, accused of using transphobic language, which is ironic, considering he is trans himself. He looks back on the summer of 1984, when Max, who at the time was Melanie, began to discover himself due to a friendship with Sylvia, a brash, fearless, transgender woman unafraid of what others think. As their working-class community struggles to react to even the suggestion and possibility of difference, the narrative tension builds to the breaking point. This complex, rewarding, and deeply thoughtful novel posits the vitality of queer communities and the lifeline such communities provide when violence is always simmering in the background. This is a touchstone LGBTQIA+ coming-of-age novel containing superbly drawn characters, a brilliant story, and knowing prose that constantly seeks to complicate simplistic narratives around gender, sexuality, and class.

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