Unlike any other book

This book blew my mind – the entire time I was reading it I never stopped thinking about it, that’s how much I cared about the characters. I put it on my “Want to read” list more than a year ago, and I finally revisited that list when the cover caught my eye. Luckily, the main library had it, and a few days later I was done. I don’t normally finish books fast. Normally, I read about 30 pages a day, or there are a few days when I don’t read it. Not so with this one – the different points of you and the addictive storyline made me continue even when my eyes were tired.

Excerpt #77: Dana. (I’m making this detailed and not leaving anything out just so you can see/I can remember what a thorough job they did of showing her point of view – how they get in her head so well and make us realize exactly what it feels like. It’s not just an inherent feeling that knowing something is wrong, it’s literally not being able to stand the body you are in…very hard to deal with. Anyways, the book explains it far better than I do, so…)
There are two worlds of people around me.
There is a world in which everyone knows I was born a man, and there is a world in which no one has any clue whatsoever.
Sometimes, the two orbits will overlap, and a person will discover rather suddenly my history with gender. If that person is particularly brazen – or, it seems, a reporter – he (and yes, in my experience more times than not it has indeed been a he will ask one or both of two questions:
Does it work? (Translation: Do you have orgasms?)
Did I ever assume I was merely a homosexual? (Translation: Isn’t this just about penetration? About wanting to be penetrated?)
The first question is actually much easier to answer than I imagine it is to ask. Yes, I can answer honestly, it works just fine. (Translation: Touch me right and you’ll have to peel me off the ceiling.)
The second question is more complicated, and it seemed to me that some of the folks from NPR – one engineer in particular – were always coming back to it. It was clear they were trying to be tolerant and open-minded, but their inquiries implied they suspected that I’d been driven to my decision by an army of unbearable homophobes.
Always, of course, they were forgetting completely one teeny-tiny detail: I was gay! I just happened to be a gay woman.
Now, in all fairness, I had indeed toyed with the notion that I might be a gay male at different times in my life, but it was always a desperate, and increasingly pathetic, fantasy. After all, even in this world it’s a hell of a lot easier to be a gay male than a transsexual.
More important, that second question assumes that gender is all about sex, or that sexual preference is at the core of our gender. I can’t speak for other transsexuals, but there is no way on God’s green earth I would have become a born-again woman just so the sex would be hot. No orgasm in the world is worth all that electrolysis.
Truthfully, I became an external woman because I have always been an internal woman. That’s all there is to it. And I’ve known this most of my life. I think I had the first solid clue when my sister was born. I was five, and my parents put her in my arms on the couch in our living room, and I was absolutely enchanted. I told them I couldn’t wait to have a baby emerge from my tummy, too.
…
And while my parents took comfort in the notion that my tantrum was simple panic because I had lost a monopoly on their attention, I knew the awful truth. The things I wanted most in the world were going to be forever denied me.
Worse, when I started elementary school, I learned that even small manifestations of femininity would be out of the question, too, and that my desires were, apparently, perverse. Yes, I wanted someday to have a real baby and real breasts, but at six, I would have been pacified with a plastic doll that looked like a newborn, and a couple of pretend diapers.
I knew, however not to speak up.
I knew not to ask for dolls that were babies, and I knew not to ask for dolls that looked like Amazon models with eating disorders. I knew not to ask for dress-up clothes and little-girl makeup, I knew not to pretend I was a princess or a mermaid or a bride. I knew not to be a girl.
At least I knew not to in front of my family and friends.
Sometimes in my room, however, when I had shut my door for the night, I would go to the store. I placed my desk chair behind my toy chest and put my plastic cash register upon it. And then I would be the sales assistant one moment and Dana the customer the next, and I would pretend to buy a frilly dress with pink floral edging along the collar and sleeves. I would purchase a handbag, long shiny hair like my mother’s – a chesnut-colored apron my parents never used would suffice – ad I would leave the emporium shaped like an hourglass Barbie. Then I would crawl back into bed and press my little penis and my little balls deep behind the fat on my six- and seven-year-old thighs, and finally I would fall asleep.
Some nights, I’d be crying. Some nights, not.
Sometimes I would take off my pajama bottoms and sleep in only my pajama top, pretending the loose shirt was actually a little girl’s nightgown. (44-46)

Excerpt #78: Allison, who is in love with Dana, and doesn’t know he is a transsexual.
Once, when I’d had a few glasses of wine, I found myself examining his face in the candlelight – first with my eyes, and then with the tips of my fingers – and I believe I almost asked him something. Why are you so beautiful? perhaps. Why are you so smooth? What is it about your face that I love?
But I didn’t. A big part of the allure was the mystery: A magic trick loses its luster once you know the secret. (64)

Excerpt #79, Allison:
In return, all Dana wanted for me was to be a woman. To be womanly. He would watch me shave my legs and my underarms, he would stare as I pulled on panty hose or a bra. He would want to see how I sat when I talked on the phone with Carly, and to listen in when I chatted at night with Nancy or Molly or my mother in Philadelphia.
“How would you butter your toast?” he would ask, and he would be completely sincere. The fact is, women do butter their bread very differently from men.
“Let me watch you climb into your car,” he would say, and I would show him.
“Brush your hair again, please.”
“Would you flip through a newspaper?”
“How do you pick up a pen?”
It was never annoying: I felt, simultaneously, like a cherished possession anda goddess. A woman loved on a variety of levels. A woman loved for all the right reasons, and for ones to small to matter in any other relationship I could have. The way I held a book when I read on the couch. The fact that I would sleep on my side five or six days before my period, because my breasts would be tender. The things I carried in my purse.
And so although I adore teaching – and although I had a particularly sweet and smart group of kids that year – there were some mornings when I could barely bring myself to put on my overcoat and leave the remarkable world I had in my house.

Excerpt #80, Allison:
“I mean, you have a daughter,” she said. “Carly, right? I know she’s away at school now. But I have to ask: What would you do if your Carly came home from college with a transsexual boyfriend or girlfriend?”
It was a great question, one that had certainly crossed my mind that winter. But it was also one that I’d been careful not to answer, always relegating it to a remote crevice in my brain. That won’t happen, I’d tell myself. It would be like getting daggered by lightning twice in a night. But the question clearly frightened me, because I knew on some level that regardless of whatever my final answer turned out to be, my initial reaction would be a shudder. No parent wants their child to fall in love with a transsexual. For the vast majority if the world, the only thing worse than having a transsexual for a son- or a daughter-in-law would be to have one for a child.
“If Carly came home one evening with a transsexual friend,” I answered, not exactly lying but certainly not telling the truth, “I would offer to make them both dinner. And then I’d put out clean towels in the bathroom.”
“I couldn’t do that,” Audrey’s mom said, and I thought her voice was going to break. “I’d be too busy crying. I’d be too busy crying for her and for me, and for her new friend.”
I curled my lips against my teeth, moved by her candor. I knew in my heart I’d cry, too. (204)

Excerpt #81 (Will, Allison’s ex-husband, divorced over a decade ago):
And I would allow to hug her as a friend. I would touch her the way I might have touched any of Allie’s or Patricia’s female pals, or the various women I knew who were married to my male friends. I would give her an embrace that was warm but not overtly sexual. I would shake her hand gently. I would not touch her legs or her hair, which for male friends are off-limits, but I would graze her arm with my fingers when it was appropriate.
But aren’t even those touches sexual?
That was the otherwise: For men, on some level, it’s all sexual. It might be that way for women, too, but I can’t speak for women. For men, however, it’s always about sex. We are what we are. Whenever I thought about touching Dana, I realized that I hadn’t ever touched a woman without understanding on some plane that we were different genders, and succumbing to the sexual charge – sometimes awkward, sometimes teasing, sometimes downright thrilling – that was as involuntary as it was inevitable. It was, in its own way, pro forma. Men don’t hug women without thinking of sex. It may be for the merest second, the flutter of a hummingbird’s wing. But it’s there and it’s real. After all, that’s a woman’s shoulder blade you are touching or patting or caressing for the briefest twinkling. Those are a woman’s breasts that are pressed against your chest when you squeeze her to you after a dinner party. That human being in your arms for an instant? Your bodies fit together, and the genome that limned you and the memes that control you…they understand this and crave her.
And so when I’d hug Dana or touch the inside of her palm with the inside of mine (a handshake, yet so suggestive) or my fingers would find their way to one of her arms, I would experience a sexual rippled and wonder why I had felt such a thing – why I had courted such a thing. And the answer would be because she was pretty and she was smart and she was feminine. The otherwise that was the euphemism in my mind for penis and balls and a chest with a rug would be subsumed by the scent of her perfume and the softness of her skin. The small of her back. The feel of her body forming itself next to mine for the split second that it takes to embrace as…friends.
Even the word transsexual had grown less disconcerting. Less foreign. It began to seem less like a scientific abomination – man into woman with the aid of hormones and scalpel – and more like a medicine. A woman healed.
One time when Dana was with Kevin, and Allie and I were alone, I asked her if she thought she was gay because she was attracted to Dana.
“No,” she said, and then she asked the question of me that only my Allie would ask. “Do you think you are?” (280-281)

Excerpt #82, Allison:
I found it interesting that when I was most angry with Dana that spring, I would inadvertently revert to male pronouns and a male image – to Dana Stevens before her reassignment. He used me, I’d think, and the image in m mind would be the man I’d once known who wore his hair in a ponytail.
But then I would think to myself, How? How had he used me? Yes, I’d wound up as his model woman – her model woman – but I was the one who had called Dana back in September after she revealed to me her intention on a cliff high in Lincoln. I was the one who had proposed that she move into my house. I was the one who had suggested she would need company in Colorado, and offered to go with her.
And, in return, I had received a very great deal. I’m not sure other people would see it that way, I’m not even sure Dana would. But I did, and I don’t mean simply the company or the conversation or the way my house seemed to smell of freshly baked bread all the time. Nor am I referring to the sex, which, though it often confused me, always left me deeply satisfied. More than any of that, first he – and then she – had given me the faith, however brief, that I might not wander unescorted through the rest of my life. We had been in love, and for months and months I had had hope – one of the greatest gifts you can give someone on the far side of forty.
When I would realize that, my anger would dissipate. I would no longer be mad. I would even feel a twinge of what might have been guilt. Or, at least, disappointment in myself. What did it say about me, I would wonder, that I could only love Dana as a man? Was I really that intractable, that emotionally obstinate? Or was sexual preference so profoundly ingrained in my gray matter and soul that even the desperate attraction I had felt for Dana the preceding September – a desire that in the days before our hike to the cliff may have bordered on rapture – couldn’t budge it?
The irony there was inescapable. It was the man who had made me angry, but it was also the man whom I seemed to love. (313)

-Trans-Sister Radio, Chris Bohjalian

So it goes.

This author has been in my head for a long time. My first read by him was so good that it took me way too long to read. I know that doesn’t make sense, but it was open on page 80 until I was on public transportation where a computer wasn’t available to distract me – I started devouring it then. This book is sensitive, it makes me cringe, it’s very uniquely written – there are no extraneous words, each one enhances the scene or emotion or description. That fascinates me. Here is a taste. (As a sidenote: the main character of this book, Billy Pilgrim, has no sense of time.) Well, this was written after I typed up all the excerpts. I realize I gave you all more than a taste…I gave you a meal. It’s a good one though, please try it. I bolded my favorite parts if you’re not hungry enough for all of these words. Or, you know, you could just go check out the book and read the entire thing.

Excerpt #70:
From there he traveled in time to 1965. He was forty-one years old, and he was visiting his decrepit mother at Pine Knoll, an old people’s home he had put her in only a month before. She had caught pneumonia, and wasn’t expected to live. She did live, though, for years after that.
Her voice was nearly gone, so, in order to hear her, Billy had to put his ear right next to her papery lips. She evidently had something very important to say.
“How…?” she began, and she stopped. She was too tired. She hoped that she wouldn’t have to say the rest of the sentence, that Billy would finish it for her.
But Billy had no idea what was on her mind. “How what, Mother?” he prompted.
She swallowed hard, shed some tears. Then she gathered energy from all over her ruined body, even from her toes and fingertips. At least she had accumulated enough to whisper this complete sentence:
“How did I get so old?” (44)

Excerpt #71:
Billy Pilgrim, there in the creekbed, thought he, Billy Pilgrim, was turning to steam painlessly. If everybody would leave him alone for just a little while, he thought, he wouldn’t cause anybody any more trouble. He would turn to steam and float up among the treetops.
Somewhere the big dog barked again. With the help of fear and echoes and winter silences, that dog had a voice like a big bronze gong.
Roland Weary, eighteen years old, insinuated himself between the scouts, draped a heavy arm around the shoulder of each. “So what do the Three Musketeers do now?” he said.
Billy Pilgrim was having a delightful hallucination. He was wearing dry, warm, white sweatsocks, and he was skating on a ballroom floor. Thousands cheered. This wasn’t time-travel. It had never happened, never would happen. It was the craziness of a dying young man with his shoes full of snow. (49)

Excerpt #72:
Even though Billy’s train wasn’t moving, its boxcars were kept locked tight. Nobody was to get off until the final destination. To the guards who walked up and down outside, each car became a single organism which ate and drank and excreted through its ventilators. It talked or sometimes yelled through its ventilators, too. In went water and loaves of black bread and sausage and cheese, and out came shit and piss and language.
Human beings in there were excreting into steel helmets which were passed to the people at the ventilators, who dumped them. Billy was a dumper. The human beings also passed canteens, which guards would fill with water. When food came in, the human beings were quiet and trusting and beautiful. They shared. (70)

Excerpt #73:
Now he was indoors, next to an iron cookstove that was glowing cherry red. Dozens of teapots were boiling there. Some of them had whistles. And there was a witches’ cauldron full of golden soup. The soup was thick. Primeval bubbles surfaced it with lethargical majesty as Billy Pilgrim stared. (95)

There was silence now, as the Englishmen looked in astonishment at the frowsy creatures they had so lustily waltzed inside. One of the Englishmen saw that Billy was on fire. “You’re on fire, lad!” he said, and he got Billy away from the stove and beat out the sparks with his hands.
When Billy made no comment on this, the Englishman asked him, “Can you talk? Can you hear?”
Billy nodded.
The Englishman touched him exploratorily here and there, filled with pity. “My God – what have they done to you, lad? This isn’t a man. It’s a broken kite.” (97)

Excerpt #74:
Derby described the incredible artificial weather that Earthlings sometimes create for other Earthlings when they don’t want those other Earthlings to inhabit earth any more. Shells were bursting in the treetops with terrific bangs, he said, showering down knives and needles and razorblades. Little lumps of lead in copper jackets were crisscrossing the woods under the shellbursts, zipping along much faster than sound.
A lot of people were being wounded or killed. So it goes.
Then the shelling stopped, and a hidden German with a loudspeaker told the Americans to put their weapons down and come out of the woods with their hands on top of their heads, or the shelling would start again. It wouldn’t stop until everybody in there was dead.
So the Americans put their weapons down, and they came out of the woods with their hands on top of their heads, because they wanted to go on living, if they possibly could. (106-107)

Excerpt #75:
“Dresden was destroyed on the night of February 13, 1945,” Billy Pilgrim began. “We came out of our shelter the next day.” He told Montana about the four guards who, in their astonishment and grief, resembled a barbershop quartet. He told her about the stockyards with all the fenceposts gone, with roofs and windows gone – told her about seeing little logs lying around. There were people who had been caught in the fire storm. So it goes.
Billy told her what had happened to the buildings that used to form cliffs around the stockyards. They had collapsed. Their wood had been consumed, and their stones had crashed down, had tumbled against one another until they locked at last in low and graceful curves.
“It was like the moon,” said Billy Pilgrim.

The guards told the Americans to form in ranks of four, which they did. Then they had them march back to the hog barn which had een their home. Its walls still stood, but its windows and roof were gone, and there was nothing inside but ashes and dollops of melted glass. It was realized then that there was no food or water, and that the survivors, if they were going to continue to survive, were going to have to climb over curve after curve on the face of the moon.
Which they did.

The curves were smooth only when seen from a distance. The people climbed them learned that they were treacherous, jagged things – hot to the touch, often unstable – eager, should certain important rocks be disturbed, to tumble some more, to form lower, more solid curves.
Nobody talked much as the expedition crossed the moon. There was nothing appropriate to say. One thing was clear: Absolutely everybody in the city was supposed to be dead, regardless of what they were, and that anybody that moved in it represented a flaw in the design. There were to be no moon men at all. (179-180)

Excerpt #76:
(Billy has fallen asleep in the wagon while the rest have gone to search for souvenirs on what they called home before the fire-bombing on Dresden.)
Billy Opened his eyes. A middle-aged man and wife were crooning to the horses. They were noticing what the Americans had not noticed – that the horses mouths were bleeding, gashed by the bits, that the horses’ hooves were broken, so that every step meant agony, that the horses were insane with thirst. The Americans had treated their form of transportation as thought it were no more sensitive than a six-cylinder Chevrolet.

These two horse pitiers moved back along the wagon to where they could gaze in patronizing reproach at Billy – at Billy Pilgrim, who was so long and weak, so ridiculous in his azure toga and silver shoes. They weren’t afraid of him. They weren’t afraid of anything. They were doctors, both obstetricians. They had been delivering babies until the hospitals were all burned down. Now they were picnicking near where their apartment used to be.
The woman was softly beautiful, translucent from having eaten potatoes for so long. The man wore a business suit, necktie and all. Potatoes had made him gaunt. He was as tall s Billy, wore steel-rimmed trifocals. This couple, so involved with babies, had never reproduced themselves, thought they could have. This was an interesting comment on the whole idea of reproduction.
They had nine languages between them. They tried Polish on Billy Pilgrim first, since he was dressed so clownlishly, since the wretched Poles were the involuntary clowns of the Second World War.
Billy asked them in English what it was they wanted, and they at once scolded him in English for the condition of the horses. They made Billy get out of the wagon and come look at the horses. When Billy saw the condition of his means of transportation, he burst into tears. He hadn’t cried about anything else in the war. (196-197)

-Slaughter-house Five by Kurt Vonnegut