Handsome

Starred review from September 15, 2020
A collection of humorous and heartfelt stories about gender, sex, childhood, shame, and self-acceptance. "When I was four years old," Lorka states on the first page of her debut, "my friend Mikey told me that when he went downhill fast, like in a car, it made his pee-pee feel funny." Thus begins her collection of autobiographical essays that focus on nearly five decades of awkwardness, sexual awakenings, breakups, gender dysphoria, upended career expectations, and nighttime visitations by the ghost of singer George Michael. Lorka's charming, irreverent voice leaps off every page as she casually unspools the details of her life, touching on major events only briefly--such as when she dumped her male fiance and embraced her attraction to women, or her difficult relationship with her late mother--only to saunter back to them later with winking familiarity. Lorka's ability to balance life's harshness alongside its ridiculousness and to poke fun at herself make for a read that's never disingenuous or boring. An account of a pit bull attack is, at different points, harrowing and hilarious, and a story of a high school crush on a coach walks a tightrope between longing and obsession. Various digressions about her career as an intensive care nurse manage to, by turns, bemoan the sexualization of nursing and recount the tragic death of a new mother. Most arresting, though, are Lorka's candid discussions of her lifelong struggles with her body and sexuality as a gender-nonconforming lesbian. With self-deprecating humor, the author lays out her internalized shame, her discomfort, and her hunger to be someone different; only after having thoroughly entrenched the reader in this mindset does Lorka then guide them through an account of her agonizing but glorious process of learning to love herself. The results are cathartic, joyful, encouraging, and often very funny. A delightful remembrance that's brimming with honesty and wit.

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