Pageboy: A Memoir: The Instant Sunday Times Bestseller

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As she walked off I did what I could to prevent tears from ruining the makeup." Trouble on the set of 'Flatliners' In a lighter way, I also love all the celebrity stuff. I love hearing about the cast of Whip It and going to parties at Drew Barrymore's house, and having Alia Shawkat trying to set him up with somebody, and all that sort of stuff is really fun to get a little peek inside of. You get that out of a celebrity memoir every time, and it's nice that we get both that and the heavy, big-capital-G gender stuff in this one.

The thought of confronting him, setting any boundary at all, made me feel like I was going to shit blood. pg. 155I'll prove to you all that I need nothing. The little voice would brag with a creak of a side smile. pg. 78 I think a lot more people need to listen to trans people, allow their voices to be heard and learn about their experiences more overall. There is too much hatred and vitriol out there in this world still. We can work together to help stamp it out, but as a society, we sadly still have a long way to go. For the most part, the prose is always at least competent, and ofttimes quite stirring; at other times, he reaches for something more poetic or flowery, and it lands with a clunk. But again, the story he wanted to tell is heartbreaking, and his anguish at coming to terms with his true self and owning that is both inspiring and admirable. I learned a lot about the trans experience I was not aware of, and if that's not worth 4 stars, I don't know what is... He does a good job describing his gender dysphonia over the years from a very young age until well into his adulthood. I was both surprised and not surprised about his feelings of confusion and his levels of awareness.

I experienced it a bit like when I made an X-Men movie when I was 18 and it premiered at Cannes. ... I remember just being in this very tight, gold dress and my publicist at the time, like the face just brightening up and people just going on and on about how you look, like you'd accomplished this feat, like I'd [been] given a reward for, like donning what felt like a costume for me, essentially. But it wasn't until Juno where that was just taken to a whole new level and intensely pressured to dress a certain way and act a certain way and not be seen with my girlfriend. I resent that we were cheated out of our love, that beautiful surge in the heart stolen from us. I am furious at the seeds planted without our consent, the voices and the actions that made our roads to the truth unnecessarily brutal. pg. 179

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This memoir was a bit of a mixed bag for me. I thought some of his writing on a sentence level was really great but the unchronological and disconnected vignette style got a little repetitive about half way through, and I think that's because a lot of the chapters are rehashing truly terrible homophobic shit that happened to them (tbh, that stuff was hard to read as a queer person!) but without any introspection or value added to what was otherwise a retelling of a horrible event. Because there (deliberately) isn't an overall narrative arc, I think the individual pieces needed something to elevate and add significance to them, and more often than not they didn't have that. Mel: Exactly, and it's not just me. That's the case for thousands of people. Elliot writes in the book about one of his queer possibility models, a family friend named Julia Sanderson, and the fact that I think he as a public figure and this book will serve as that for queer and trans kids and show them yeah, the book is heavy — it's got a lot of abuse and hardness in it — but it also has so much joy and so much trans possibility in it. And I think that that is just so exciting for people to be able to see, to read and to be able to connect with. There was a lot that was difficult here, I was surprised at how much. But I didn't find myself dwelling all that much on the traumas, I really enjoyed how unapologetically queer the book is and clung to that more than anything else.

Elamin: When you say "stream of consciousness," is there a narrative arc still to the book, or not so much? Playing a character that was partially starved to death allowed me to lean in to my desire to disappear, to punish myself. ... However, I've never felt like a male either, even in my tomboy days, so it's not something I relate to. For this reason I like to read about others' experiences who are transgender.If I was growing up today, I would probably say I'm non-binary. I was assigned female at birth and, though I like to dress "feminine", I have never felt like a woman and resent having to be a woman with breasts, periods, and the fact that I can get pregnant. The audiobook is a good one, though I do recommend speeding up the narration if you normally don't, as he speaks pretty slowly. I normally do audiobooks at between 1.1x and 1.25x speed, but I had this one higher.

As many have pointed out, the author eschews a linear retelling of his life, in favor of bouncing around in time and attempting to tie things together thematically, or just as it occurs to him. Had I not just finished Andrew Rannells' new book right beforehand, which uses a similar template, that probably would have irked me more. But it IS sometimes difficult to tell just where you are timewise, especially as the actor rarely pinpoints such tales with what he is working on at the time, which might have provided welcome signposts to where in his life/career we are. As he navigated criticism and abuse from some of the most powerful people in Hollywood, a past that snapped at his heels, and a society dead set on forcing him into a binary, Elliot often stayed silent, unsure of what to do. Until enough was enough. Elamin: Mel, I appreciate you reading the book. I appreciate you connecting with it, but also being here to share the ways that you connected with it. Thank you so much for your time. Kate Mara’s pseudo open relationship with that guy from the handmaid’s tale was NOT tea that I expected from this book.Searing, deeply moving, and incredibly poignant... This isn’t simply a book on what it means to be trans, it’s about what it means to be human." —Alok Vaid-Menon