Suddenly, Transmisogyny: “Unclean Jobs for Women and Girls” by Alissa Nutting

I can't find the link now, but it was one of those lists of “the 10 best young writers you've never heard of” or some such. Because I often find literary fiction exhaustingly pretentious and dull, I had indeed never heard of any of them; because I am a sucker who keeps hoping to find the latest metaphor-ridden fiction by straight white cis people as mindblowing as the literary establishment tells me it is, I decided to try reading some of them.

My first choice was Unclean Jobs for Women and Girls by Alissa Nutting. I have mixed feelings about the short story as a genre. There seems to be a specific niche for collections of spec-fic-ish short stories that amount to little more than, “Say, look at this idea! Isn't it WACKY?!” For maybe two or three of the stories, it's striking enough to hold my attention, but somewhere along the way I start to feel like I'm listening to an Oingo Boingo album or teaching a class of six-year-olds: everything is trying a little too hard to get my attention, but doesn't actually have anything of substance to say to me, and I just want to go read long Russian novels and listen to Vivaldi for a while to recover.

I had hoped that Unclean Jobs would be an exception, based solely on the title. It sounded like it would have good feminist cred. It was a book of short stories about women, right? It would use skewed, magical-realist worlds to make trenchant, blistering commentary on our society's sexist hegemony, double-standards, and impossible expectations of female humans. It would be great.

And, if you were so inclined, I'm sure you could make an argument that it does that. Lots of people have. But me? I just couldn't fucking get over the penultimate story in the collection, which is called “She-Man.”

I just. Can I count the ways in which this is wrong?

• It's called “She-Man.”
• The narrator opens by telling us, “My boyfriend … doesn't know I'm really a man,” but the rest of the story makes it entirely fucking clear that she isn't “really a man.” She's a woman.
• The narrator refers to her birth-assigned sex as her “gender.” No, she is a woman. Her gender is female.
• The sentence: “The estrogen has done such a great number on my voice.” Estrogen doesn't work like that.
• The focus on make-up and painted nails and “look[ing] put together” (ewww) plays directly into gross transmisogynistic narratives of trans women's femininity being somehow artificial, lurid, or even grotesque.
• Okay, so the whole story is this: Narrator is an ex-prostitute trans woman living stealth. She gets outed and murdered. That's it. That's the whole story. I guess being sex workers and “tricking” cis men are the only two things trans women are allowed to do in fiction?
• I mean, fuck. All the other stories in this book are about grotesque bodies, and most of them involve supernatural or science-fiction goings-on. One story is about a woman whose skeleton houses an ant colony. One story is about a woman who watches her garden gnomes come to life every night and gets off on the sight of them fucking. One story is about a woman who is so consistently off her tits on literally every ingestible substance that she thinks her twit of a rock-star boyfriend knows the way to enlightenment. Apparently a trans woman getting outed and murdered belongs in the same ballpark as all of this.
• Trans women are not “she-men.” Trans women are not “really men.”
• Trans women are women.
• Trans women are women.
• Trans women are fucking women, Jesus Christ.

I do not in any way understand what Nutting was trying to do with this story. In a collection of stories that otherwise use improbable scenarios to lampoon societal expectations of female beauty, sexuality, and employment, this story doesn't accomplish anything except be fucking terrible.

After Prison: An Allegory

A part of him had always known that this was prison; but when you're born in a prison and have spent your whole life there, you'll go to extraordinary lengths to deny that you are, in fact, in prison.

It wasn't a bad prison, as prisons go. There was a comfortable bed, and decent food, and only occasional beatings from the other inmates. Most importantly, there was a television.

His whole life had revolved around that television. On television, there were other places, other lives, other things a person could be. He lived for that television. Every spare moment he had (and there are a lot of spare moments in prison), he turned his attention to the luminous box of wonder and the marvelous stories it told. He lost himself in those stories. At night, he fell asleep in front of them, and dreamed himself inside them. His dreams were the best times.

Still, it's not like he was delusional. He knew that television was television and reality was reality. All those incredible stories and beautiful places and different lives – those were mere fictions. Reality was here, this place he had been born into. These were the cards he had been dealt, and he would just have to deal with it. That was the mature thing to do: accept that all of life existed inside prison, and spend it watching as much television as humanly possible.

Then, one day, a crack appeared on the wall above the television.

It was the tiniest of hairline cracks at first, so faint he couldn't be entirely sure it was there. But, as the weeks and months passed, it grew and deepened. It never widened much, but it delved deeper and deeper into the gray stone wall, as if somebody were oh so slowly driving an invisible nail into the wall.

One day, unmistakably, a pinpoint of light shone through the crack.

He began spending less and less time in the television's thrall. Now his hours were spent worrying at the little hole in the wall with the plastic spoon that was his only utensil. Each day, he never seemed to have made any visible progress, but it was undeniable: the hole in the wall was growing larger.

Finally, several years after the crack had first appeared, he mustered all of his courage, approached the hole, and pressed his eye to it.

What he saw astonished him. Not the bleak, impassable void he had assumed must (if anything must) surround his prison; but color and wonder and excitement, a bustling metropolis full of people and noise and smells, a veritable scene from the television lay all around.

Dazed, he reeled backward from the wall. His dreams, he realized, the television – it existed. Not all of it, of course. But some of it. The parts that mattered.

With new eyes, he looked around the cozy little prison that was all he had ever known. He began walking, past the television set, past the comfortable bed, to the door of his cell. He put his hand on the door. It swung open, as a part of him had always known it would.

The bright light dazzled him. Standing on the threshold, he shielded his eyes, and turned back to take a last glance at everything he knew. My God, he realized, I have been in prison my whole life.

Taking a deep breath, he stepped outside and entered his own life.

Bibliotherapy: "Parrotfish" and "I Am J"

The other day I read about this thing they're calling bibliotherapy. Apparently “[the] program matches individuals struggling in any aspect of their lives with a list of books hand-selected to help them through tough times. You get your reading list after an initial consultation with a bibliotherapist in which you discuss your life, your reading history, and your problems.”

I am very much in favor of using books in this way – I've done it all my life – but I think it's absurd to pay £80 for a service Google can perform for free. Hey, people who are paying for book recommendations: Google. GOOOOOOOGLE. Remember, it like owns our lives now? That thing.

I am a book-lover, so when life is tough I seek out books to help. Novels about the subject I am struggling with are perfect for me, because they combine the escape of fiction with real-world-applicable insights about the topic in question: therapy in a paperback.

“Art is the lie that tells the truth.” – Picasso, quoted repeatedly in I Am J

My most recent self-prescribed bibliotherapy was a double dose of trans boy YA. When I visited the Amazon pages for Ellen Wittlinger's Parrotfish and Cris Beam's I Am J, I was informed that these two books are frequently bought together. It's my opinion that they should always be bought together. They make great companion pieces that between them present a decent variety of trans experience.

A couple of caveats (because I can never be nice about anything without criticizing it):

Both books are written by cis women, which is a fact I do not love. Both protagonists bind using Ace bandages, which, like, your very first Google search on binding will tell you is not a great idea. Parrotfish exoticizes and fetishizes the love interest character in that discomfiting white-guilt overcompensation OMG people of color are so much more ~beautiful~ way, and fat-shames the little brother character.

Having said all that, I did very much enjoy both books, and I really would recommend reading both as a reminder that there is no trans metanarrative, that trans narratives are as many and varied as trans people themselves.. My favorite thing about the books was really the differences between them.

Grady, the protagonist and viewpoint character of Parrotfish, is the more relatable character for me personally. Like me, he's white and middle-class, and can rely on parental support. He doesn't pathologize his own body overmuch; he's nerdy and uninterested in bulking up; he locates himself “in the middle of the football field,” which is the image he uses for the gender spectrum.

This one has been going around Facebook lately. I improved on it:

A 9-dimensional hypercube almost begins to express a tiny fraction of the complexity of gender identity as I experience it.

There's some emphasis placed on the idea that Grady is uniquely positioned to understand both girls and boys, and to facilitate communication between them. This was borderline irritating, and I probably would have found it full-on obnoxious had it not been for the juxtaposition of J, who complains about not understanding girls even more than I did when I was a preteen.

One of the blurbs on my copy of I Am J hails J as a “tranny Holden Caulfield,” which nearly put me off right from the start; but actually I liked the fact that J is kind of an asshole. It's a refreshing counterpoint to the idea – somewhat present in Parrotfish, and absolutely all over the small amounts of Christian trans-acceptance stuff I've come across – that trans people's experiences make them uniquely and preciously empathetic. J is a self-absorbed seventeen-year-old trying to find his place in the world; being trans makes it harder, but it doesn't grant him superpowers.

“Being trans wasn't special, and yet it was. It was just good and bad and interesting and fucked-up and very human, like anything else.” – I Am J

J is a Jewto Rican whose parents are poorer than Grady's (and much less supportive of him). The struggles he faces in coming out are tougher than Grady's, but in some ways his gender identity seems a little more straightforward. He's just a guy. He's always know he was a guy. He's desperate for T, which I'm not sure Grady even mentions by name. Grady's journey is more cerebral, more like my own: lesbian identity as “a pit stop on the queer and confused highway,” then reading a lot of books and websites that bring him to the realization of his transness.

“I guess I'd just been thinking about it for so long that I forgot changing your gender was not even a question for most people. They just took for granted being a boy or a girl. I couldn't imagine what it would be like to be so sure of yourself.” – Parrotfish

The power of bibliotherapy is that it can make you feel less alone. Reading multiple books about something you're struggling with is a crucial reminder that you are not doing this wrong. These two books in succession (even if they are both written by cis people) seemed to give me concrete evidence that it's okay to be trans* in whatever way you are trans*. (And also concrete evidence that I really need to get on with writing my great trans SF novel.)

Fictioneering: The Turbulent Term Of Tyke Tiler

[Fictioneering is a very occasionally occasional series in which I say pretentious things about the novels that were monumentally influential on my developing psyche. In other words, blame these books.]

N.B. I'm going to spoil the crap out of this book, because nothing I'm about to say will make any sense unless you know the twist at the end. If you care about remaining unspoiled for a 35-year-old children's book, find a copy somewhere and read it stat; otherwise, consider yourself fairly warned.

I loved this book. At age ten or eleven, I checked it out of the school library (because, in the course of five largely friendless years at a school with a fairly small library, I read most things in the school library), and I loved it so very, very much that I needed a copy of my own. However, I didn't dare ask my parents to buy it for me, for fear that they might ask me just why I loved it so. Inspired by my also-beloved copy of Chinese Cinderella, I ended up copying the entirety of Tyke Tiler by hand into an exercise book with a magenta cover.

Of course, my situation was in no way similar to Adeline's in Chinese Cinderella. Abused and neglected by her stepmother, Adeline finds hope in a friend's copy of A Little Princess. She copies it out by hand of necessity, because she knows her stepmother would never buy her anything that might give her pleasure. My parents, on the other hand, encouraged my obsessive love of reading and kept me well supplied with novels. In retrospect, there is absolutely no reason why they wouldn't have bought me a copy of Tyke Tiler if I'd selected it next time we went to the bookstore: it's a Carnegie medal-winner, and, even if they'd never heard of it, they knew that my taste in literature has (unlike my taste in film) never run to the trashy. They had seen how dog-eared with rereading my copies of The Hobbit and Anne of Green Gables and Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry became. They knew of my disdain for Goosebumps and Sweet Valley. A few years later, they would witness my first feeble attempt at teenage rebellion sputter and die when I discovered, much to my disappointment, that the reason they disapproved of my reading Interview with the Vampire was not because it was eye-openingly salacious and grown-up, but because it was not very good literature.

My parents trusted my taste in books. They would have bought me a paperback of Tyke Tiler if I had only asked for one.

The Turbulent Term of Tyke Tiler is a very British school story, chronicling the fairly episodic adventures of Tyke and BFF Danny as they get themselves into and out of various scrapes. As such, though it's entertainingly written and the child's-perspective narration is pretty convincing, there is nothing too remarkable about it – until the very end.

Throughout the book, there is a running gag that Tyke's real name is unbelievably terrible. Tyke runs around with Danny, climbing all over school buildings, fighting bullies, pestering older siblings, and refusing to disclose the dreaded real name. Then, right at the end of the book, Tyke is climbing on the school roof, about to ring the old school bell, when hated teacher Mrs Somers shouts: “Get down at once, Theodora Tiler, you naughty, disobedient girl!”

I loved that. I loved that. The revelation that Tyke, headstrong and physical and with male best friends, was actually a girl, was really, really important to me, and I had no way of articulating why. Of course, it overturns the reader's assumption that a character nicknamed Tyke, especially one who acted in this way, would be a boy; and it's a sadly rare instance of a gender-non-conforming girl who doesn't have an in-text femme counterpart.

Those are things I could, even at the age of eleven, probably have at least attempted to articulate. But there was something else going on – something I instinctively knew must be kept secret from my parents, my peers, and even to some extent from myself. And, since I've already been kicked out of feminism for violation of Internet Feminism Bylaw #5712, “everyone is cis unless explicitly noted,” I might as well just say it, and yarbles to the haters: the text does support a reading of Tyke as trans*.

(You don't have to agree, a cis reading is just as valid, blah blah covering my ass trying to appease the unappeasable.)

And no, I don't think that every character who ever acts in conventionally masculine ways must be a guy (and believe me, if I ever find a reason why I think I might be one other than “I just kind of do” I will surely let you know); but the framing of the narrative sets up the gender revelation as an unexpected twist, and at the very least that should invite some Deep Thoughts about the nature of gender (for those of you who haven't been having Deep Thoughts about gender every single waking moment for the last twelve or eighteen months). (And, while Tyke's appearance is never described in the book, have a gander at the androgynous moppet who stars in the rather charming mini-series.)

One of the weird things about trans*liness is how you find yourself recalibrating what you believe about gender to align with what you need. A website that default genders you as male doesn't anger you quite the way you know it should, because you spend so much of your time trying to get gendered male. You suddenly find that you have a use for some of the traditional gender roles you've so long rejected, because they're a societal shorthand for your embryonic masculinity. And you infuriate the Internet Feminist Hivemind by reading gender-non-conforming characters as trans*, because you need the fictional worlds you so dearly love to reflect and affirm you, and unless you project that onto them they just don't.

But I think I've always read Tyke Tiler as a trans*man, years before I had the words or the processes or the self-confidence or the independence to know what I was doing. I think that's why I loved this book so profoundly, and I think it's why I had to keep it a secret.

I believe that magenta exercise book is still in a drawer in my old bedroom in my parents' house. Through all the years, the transcontinental moves, the periodic Throwing Away Of Old Notebooks, the later-regretted donations of Childhood Novels I Am Too Grown-Up For, I hung onto my handwritten copy of The Turbulent Term of Tyke Tiler, keeping it safely squirreled away in a messy drawer. Now, finally, at the age of twenty-three, I am opening it.

Muggle Jesus

[A Potterverse/Jesus crossover fic. JKR owns the Potterverse. Nobody owns Jesus.]

Prologue

“Jesus! Jesus!” Breathless and starry-eyed, the tousle-haired boy raced toward his cousin. “Look!” He thrust the parchment at the other boy and grinned expectantly.

“You know I can't read that,” said Jesus, not putting down his hammer. He did stop pounding, though, and scrutinized John's face. Written characters may have been chicken-scratchings to Jesus' eyes, but human faces and bodies sang to him more clearly than the temple cantor. He knew John's next words even before John had drawn breath to say:

“I got in! It's my acceptance letter.”

Jesus positioned the nail with painstaking precision, and struck it one sharp blow with the hammer. Only then was he able to look up again, a warm smile of genuine pleasure beaming forth from his face, and say, “That's great, John. I'm really happy for you.”

John beamed back, and for a moment the two boys dwelt on the shared understanding. Then the grin faded from John's face, and gravity entered his eyes. Jesus hastily turned back to his work, pounding nails into the smoothly sanded wood.

“You, uh...?” John asked awkwardly, over the pounding. Jesus shook his head without looking up. He had had a long time to get used to the idea that this day would come eventually. His mother was a muggle, and he could hardly have been unaware of the cloud of rumors that had been swirling around his patrilineal parentage since his conception. As his childhood progressed, and he had witnessed the little outbursts of uncontrolled magic from his cousin, while himself consistently failing to produce anything at all unusual, he gradually came to reconcile himself to the self-evident facts.

John was a wizard. Jesus was a muggle. That was just the way it was.

He had known that, rationally, for many years now; and yet a part of him, he now realized, had never stopped hoping deep down that perhaps the letter from Jerusalem would arrive after all, that perhaps he was a late bloomer, that perhaps he and his best friend wouldn't have to be separated, even before the age of manhood, by miles and ability and social standing. Today that fragile hope was entirely quenched.

He drove the nails into the wood, trying to quell the tightness in his chest. “You'll be a great wizard, John,” he said firmly. “The greatest.”

Twenty Years Later

The Chief Wizard gazed down on the rooftops of Jerusalem. “The trouble began,” he murmured, “with John, and I had hoped it might end with him.”

The members of the Wizards' Council exchanged glances, but no one dared speak.

“You have all, I think, heard the rumors. A muggle who can do magic – a plebe, a Galilean – stealing magic from pureblood wizards and giving it to lepers. Running around the country with his merry band of muggles, squibs, and fisherfolk, walking on water and curing blindness, and filling their simple minds with all manner of seditious mendacity. The Kingdom of God is at hand. Fishermen are better than priests. Muggles are better than wizards.”

The Chief Wizard whirled around to face the Council, fury contorting his features.

“Filthy lies! The man couldn't cast a Wand-Lighting Charm if his life depended on it. He's nothing more than a cheap trickster, preying on the weak-minded with his pathetic illusions and his disgusting lies. Demagoguery, sleight of hand, and a credulous populace are his only magic.”

He glared around at the Council, as if daring them to contradict him; but still nobody spoke. Presently the Chief Wizard continued, in a more level tone:

“In isolation, he would perhaps be no more than a mild nuisance. However, in the wake of that unfortunate nonsense with John, I am forced to conclude that the Galilean is a threat to the very fabric of society. Those who were fool enough to believe that a sane man would willingly and knowingly reject his magical heritage, in order to voluntarily live the pitiful half-life of a squib – the followers of one dangerous lunatic have simply pledged their allegiance to another. The muggle leaders report talk of revolution. This man is a danger not only to the general order of society, but to the delicate coexistence of the wizarding and muggle worlds.”

At last the oldest member of the Council, wizened, white-haired, and sunken-faced, cleared his throat. “You wish to have him dealt with.”

“No,” said the Chief Wizard. “Not in the usual fashion. That would accomplish nothing, except to create a void for the next silver-tongued malcontent to fill in turn. The Galilean must be made an example of. Publicly.”

“Ah,” said the old man. “I see. Discourage imitation. And if he is a wizard, he will save himself, no harm done.”

“He won't,” the Chief Wizard said coldly. “He's not a wizard. He's the biggest muggle I ever saw.”

Trans*masculinity And The Pop-Culture Gender Binary

It may shock you to learn that I have been thinking a lot lately about trans*masculinity. (Holla at Genderfork, who recently ran a terrible photo I sent them probably a year ago! I look a lot more androgynous now, but my webcam is still just as terrible!)

It's occurred to me that there's an interesting pop-culture trope around trans*masculinity: it's okay to have a tomboyish/trans*masculine character, provided there's also a really femme-y girl to balance things out.

Like – okay, don't judge me too harshly for this, but between the ages of seven and maybe nine I was super into The Famous Five, and my favorite character was (of course) George. George had short hair, a rough-and-tumble attitude, and enormous pleasure at being gendered male. “I won't be a girl; I'm a boy!” I can remember her shouting at some point in the endless book series. George also had a cousin named Anne, who was timid, pretty, and conventionally feminine. (Anne was the one who was always, “Please let this be a normal field trip...”)

Or look at A Song Of Ice And Fire. Aggressively gender-non-conforming Arya wants to fight, hates sewing, and presents as male for a while. Meanwhile big sister Sansa is about as conventionally feminine as you can get. (I actually love what the series does with these tropes – it presents both of these choices, as well as those of other women like Cersei and Danaerys, as part of a range of possible options for AFAB people trying to stay alive and reclaim a little agency in a ferociously misogynistic society.)

Last year's lovely French film Tomboy also uses this trope, and it even crops up among portrayals of girls who are strictly on the cis end of the tomboy spectrum: Jo March has her sister Amy, Buttercup has her sister Bubbles, Petrova Fossil has her sister Posy.

I understand why it's a trope. I get that it's an easy source of conflict, a stark way to characterize two people as different, and an attempt to avoid accusations of either stereotyped femininity or femme erasure. But all too often I think it ends up reinforcing the masculine/feminine binary, even in instances where it might have been intended to disrupt it, because this constant pop-culture pairing of GNC girl and femme sister implies that the (conventionally) masculine and the (conventionally) feminine have some kind of yin-yang relationship that needs to be held in delicate balance. Plus, the hierarchized nature of the binary opposition means that all too often the femme gets denigrated (see: half of fandom on Sansa – including, admittedly, yours truly in the first book).

Then again, maybe there's also a grain of truth in this trope. I know I personally would have felt able to embrace androgyny a lot earlier in life if I hadn't been beset with the (probably instinctive, certainly not malicious) gender policing of parents toward their longed-for and only daughter. Maybe I am setting too much store by a pop-culture trope; maybe I am just making excuses because I am afraid; but every time I try to imagine having a conversation about gender identity with my parents, I think:

This would be a lot easier if I had a sister.

Back To Green Gables

These days I don't reread; there are too many books and not enough time. When I was a child, though, it seemed to be the other way around, and my favorite books got revisited as often as my favorite albums and my favorite movies. Books that are in tatters on my shelf are engraved in my memory, as deeply and comprehensively as the events of my own life: His Dark Materials and the first three Harry Potters and The Turbulent Term of Tyke Tiler and Anastasia Krupnik and Matilda and The Phantom Tollbooth...

What makes rereading interesting is that you change. The words on the page might stay the same, but each rereading is a different textual encounter – you've changed, and so the text you read has changed too. This was abundantly clear to me in my devoted twice-yearly rereading of His Dark Materials throughout my teens (oh, what did you expect, “geek” is right there in the blog name), when each read-through was granted new depth by something that had happened to me in the preceding six months: some allusion brought to my awareness by my other reading, or some emotional resonance heightened by a personal experience. Every single rereading gave me a better understanding of both the book and myself, and I marveled at the apparent infinitude of meaning I could mine from the text.

In the same way, I marvel at the freshness of my most recent encounter with a beloved childhood book. I just finished rereading Anne of Green Gables, on a whim, for approximately the eight billionth time, and it was a remarkably new experience. I read this book literally dozens of times as a child, but I have never read it like this before.

The first thing I noticed is how completely female-dominated the story is. From the opening paragraph, focalized through the formidable Rachel Lynde, to the whole farcical setup of cohabiting siblings Marilla and Matthew Cuthbert accidentally adopting Anne instead of the boy they wanted, it's made quite clear that this a story of women.

There are maybe three male characters of any significance in the entire book, and they're all striking for what they are not. There's the schoolmaster, whom Anne hates and whose role is completely overshadowed by his replacement, Anne's passionately beloved teacher Miss Stacy. There's Matthew, whose quietness and passivity contrast strikingly with the active and opinionated women around him – Rachel Lynde, Marilla, Anne, Josephine Barry... Actually, it's possible to read Matthew as an explicit example of queer masculinity. Check out his response to Anne's asking him whether he ever went “courting”:

‘Well now, no, I dunno’s I ever did,’ said Matthew, who had certainly never thought of such a thing in his whole existence.

Queer as a fish. Welcome to the club, Matthew.

And then there is Gilbert Blythe. Ah, Gilbert Blythe. Can I just state for the record how hard I ship this particular OTP? I love that Gilbert doesn't get easily forgiven for being an asshole just by apologizing, but has to be ignored by Anne for a long time: he's the one at fault, so the reconciliation isn't on his terms. I love that Anne doesn't become friends with him after he saves her from the river, but (her own love of sappy romance stories notwithstanding) defies the “damsel in distress falls into her rescuer's arms” narrative. I love that she is at least his intellectual equal, if not his superior, and the first five years of their acquaintance are characterized by fierce academic competition.

What I'd forgotten, though, is the fact that the reconciliation takes place on the third-to-last page of book. The charming courtship and marriage I remember so fondly occurs entirely in later books. Throughout this book, Gilbert's presence is an absence. Anne refuses even to let his name pass her lips. She is far more concerned with her female friends, the “kindred spirits” – a phrase I'm still prone to using, much to the bafflement of people who never read this book growing up.

As a child, I naturally identified strongly with Anne. Although I certainly had none of her charm or popularity, I saw aspects of myself reflected in her prodigious imagination, her desire to be good but inability to control her temper or impulses, her constant getting into scrapes. Plus, you were supposed to identify with her. She was the protagonist, wasn't she? Her name was right there in the title.

Now, however, I'm struck by how much I relate to Marilla, the older single woman who takes it on herself to raise Anne right. (Matthew is told not to interfere, on the ridiculous premise that “Perhaps an old maid doesn’t know much about bringing up a child, but I guess she knows more than an old bachelor.”) Marilla is opinionated and judgmental; she doesn't know what to do with her emotions, and expresses affection by being kind of an asshole. All of this I can personally identify with, but I don't think it's just me. I think this is intended to be Marilla's story just as much as Anne's: the story of the transformation of her life brought about by Anne's presence in it.

After all, many of the mistakes Anne makes can ultimately be traced back to Marilla's own errors (the liniment cake, getting Diana drunk, the incident of the amethyst brooch), and by the book's end Marilla has grown and changed at least as much as Anne has. She has learned how to be – not a parent, that is made very clear, but – a person guiding and taking responsibility for another person, and growing in self-knowledge as she does so. Toward the beginning of the book, Marilla scolds Anne for her unconventional prayers and her deeply personal (“positively irreverent”) exegesis of a picture of 'Christ Blessing Little Children'. Toward the end, on Anne's departure for further education, she “wept for her girl in a passion of sobs that appalled her when she grew calm enough to reflect how very wicked it must be to take on so about a sinful fellow creature.” Her professed theology hasn't changed, but her lived theology – how she relates to other people – couldn't be more different. She is the same person, and yet she is changed beyond recognition: much like the adult reader returning to a beloved childhood book.

Jesus Beat Me Up

(A short story of the fictional variety. Please note that I do not share my narrator's conception of "virginity".)

I lost the unthinking faith of my childhood when I got old enough to start thinking critically; not in the sudden, momentous way one loses a wallet or one's virginity, but in the gradual, trickling fashion one loses the memories of a long-dead grandparent, which fade each day they're left unthought of until nothing remains but a vague sense of past warmth, so distant and dim it might have happened to a character in a book you once read. That's how it was with me and Jesus.

If there is a God, he/she/they/it must surely curse puberty as its greatest enemy. How many of us, after a decade or so of trusting now-I-lay-mes, abandon the cold comfort of prayer for the more tangible nighttime consolations (and much more immediate gratification) of masturbation? How many of us, in the earth-shattering self-absorption of our changing bodies and developing minds, put away thoughts of the divine along with all our other childish things? How many of us, with the new-found cynicism of the morbid young teenager, declare religion a false hope for children and the feeble-minded, and commit to a far more sophisticated preoccupation with existentialism, Bauhaus, and still more masturbation?

I'm extrapolating, of course. If puberty was for everyone the Christ-killer it was for me, this world would have no priests, no street-corner God-botherers, no thoughtful theologians; and I no longer subscribe to the adolescent arrogance that once convinced me all priests and God-botherers and theologians were stunted creatures arrested in a childhood state of denial. Truth be told, these days I envy the God-botherers their faith. I admire the strength of will it takes to believe in anything other than the abyss. When I hear them speak of experiencing God's love, of “just knowing” something is out there, of having a personal relationship with Jesus Christ, I no longer snort in derision; instead, I find myself wishing I knew how to convince myself that any of this was true. I wonder if a large segment of humanity really does have access to a plane of existence that is closed to me. And then I wonder if I had my shot at finding it, and I blew it.

It happened at about 3:07am on Wednesday, July 11^th, 2007, a few hundred feet shy of the rim of Mt Kilimanjaro. I was climbing with a group of friends from university. This was the final day of our ascent, and we had risen shortly after midnight to tackle the steep scree slope that was to take us to Gillman's Point by sunrise, and from there along the crater rim to the highest point in Africa. I never made it as far as the rim.

At 16,000 feet, the air was thin and bitterly cold. Every breath seemed to empty me of more oxygen than it took in, and each step up the treacherous slope was punishing to my lungs and body. “Do Your Ears Hang Low” was looping incessantly and infuriatingly in my head. On top of all that, altitude sickness had been targeting me with a vengeance since Horombo.

For the third time within half an hour, I stumbled to my knees behind a rock to vomit up what little was left in my stomach. Even through the thermal layers, I could feel the sharp icy scree digging into my legs as a fresh paroxysm convulsed me forward onto my gloved hands. For a moment I rested there on my hands and knees, sucking the last little chunks of vomit from between my teeth and spitting them into the shameful little patch of dark brown bile. Gasping in lungfuls of thin, piercing air, I wiped the involuntary tears from my eyes onto my shoulder, and that was when Jesus appeared to me.

He was barefoot in jeans and a Penn State T-shirt, and even in my miserable state I knew that was impossible, but I barely had a second to register that thought before he kicked me in the face.

More in surprise than pain, I reeled backward. Jesus stepped calmly forward and kicked me again, this time in the stomach. Through all my layers, it barely hurt, but I was so weakened by altitude and exhaustion that the force of the kick sent me sprawling.

His face inscrutable, Jesus leaned over and grabbed me by the throat. My gloved hands scrabbled uselessly at his bare one, as with steely grip he hauled me up and slammed me against the big rock. Everything swam as I fought for even the too-thin air surrounding me, and then Jesus' fist smashed into my nose.

My whole head rang with shrapnel from the explosion of pain. The stupid song was still repeating, amped up to a screaming volume in my ears, as Jesus punched me in the face, again and again; weirdly, exactly in time with “Do Your Ears Hang Low”.

When I felt pummeled to the limit of my endurance, sure that one more punch would tear through my skull like tissue paper, Jesus suddenly let go. Dazed, plummeting toward unconsciousness, I slid back to the ground. From my pulverized face, I looked up at the figure – who did not seem to have exerted himself at all – with one thought filling my mind: What the fuck?

Jesus smiled mildly, delivered one final kick to my crotch, and sauntered away down the mountainside.

A moment later, the guide found me, curled up and bleeding, too tired and hurt even to weep. He and my friend Terry between them got me back down to Kibo Hut, and nobody ever mentioned the bruises that discolored my face for weeks afterward. At times I wondered if anyone else could even see them.