Tiny Pieces of Skull
Dec. 13th, 2015 12:29 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
lokifan(Quick fyi: am at my dad’s in Geneva with my family this weekend, so I can’t reply to comments until Tuesday. But please do leave them! Apologies.)
A little while ago I finished Roz Kaveney’s Tiny Pieces of Skull. I feel like a bit of an idiot going all ~commentary about it but! am not at a con to have a long drunken discussion about it so this is basically that in Livejournal form. You should all read it and then come and talk to me about it :)
It’s basically a fictionalised memoir of Kaveney’s time in the trans scene in Chicago in the late 70s and it’s brilliant. The alternative title is “A Lesson In Manners” and it very much is a comedy of manners, piquant and hilarious. The contrasts between our English heroine Annabelle, coming from a high-minded activist milieu of educated feminists and literary types, and the different American “sisters” (other trans women) she’s surrounded by, are many and varied. It’s very episodic and gossipy, relating various stories - both Annabelle’s and those of the women around her. (I’ll come back to this later.) It’s almost impressionistic, which makes it feel very much like life to me; the little dramatic anecdotes shared among friends, the recurring characters.
This is a very different book from Kaveney’s epic fantasy quartet Rhapsody of Blood, but what carries over is the vivid characters and how completely they come across in brief sketches of dialogue and action. The comedy too, especially that very observant, dry comedy of human foibles. It’s compassionate though - well, not always. Various shithead men get mercilessly seen and mocked for what they are, but that’s fun :)
It’s utterly unsentimental, is the thing, and that funny, sharp tone - edging at times into brittle - is how it all holds together, the love and the social comedy and the social commentary and the danger and risk. It’s all dancing in the dark.
There’s a lot of fascinating commentary embedded in the descriptions of the sisters’ lives. The obsession with food and thinness, with make-up and clothes and beauty, with surgery and adaptations of the body, with male sexual and romantic attention which is necessary for survival - and all of it unselfconscious and automatic, except for Annabelle’s thoughts. I’m hardly the first person to note that trans women often seem to experience the most stark, bleak, extreme version of the expectations and pressures that women in general face. But there’s also the good stuff - sisterhood, the primacy of relationships among women, those bonds of shared experience. They go to bat for each other. And Annabelle is sooooo in love with Natasha, her beautiful, selfish flatmate. Not that she knows it.
Annabelle explicitly worries that competing with other women, especially for male sexual/romantic attention, can damage the feminist mission. And class is treated so intelligently, in various facets - education, sheer economic pressures, the sense of risk and fragility even if you manage to scrape your way out of desperation. I love that everyone goes on and on about Annabelle’s lovely English accent and the first few times she tries to explain that it’s not as good as all that, not as RP as she’d like :)
On the intersection of gender and class, and on pain - Annabelle does survival sex work for much of the book and so do most of the other characters, and there’s a rape scene. The threat of poverty, homelessness, recapture by family, overdose, arrest, sexual assault, other forms of violence - it all hangs over these characters. They work hard to improve things, and often they do. But not always. Annabelle’s ticket back to London is something that’s always in her mind; she feels she can’t run and her people back in London are not terribly accepting.(Ugh, Annabelle’s friend Magda is this London lesbian feminist who is transphobic and appears on like 2 pages and ANNOYS ME SO MUCH. Probably because I know like three of her.) But Annabelle has a rope-ladder out of the dark in a way her sisters usually don’t and that’s something they’re all aware of.
I’ll have to read it again relatively soon, I think. There’s a lot of complexity there, despite the fact that it’s a fast, funny and easy read, clocking in at under 200 pages.
It’s also occasionally very disorienting and rather upsetting to read. Many of the characters are trans women and sex workers in the late 70s in America, and when they occasionally talk about their futures and plans and whether they’ll be okay… well, it actually reminded me of An Inspector Calls, which is a play about an English family in 1912. Just the sense of doom hanging over these characters that they have no idea about. I went to a reading & talk about the book at Nine Worlds this summer, and Roz described the trans scene in the US as “a culture rebuilt after apocalypse”.
I mean, that’s something I’m bringing to it; there are only a very very few moments in the book where I find a slight sense of painful irony because AIDS is coming, because it’s so closely from Annabelle’s perspective and of course she has no idea. But the knowledge of AIDS coming definitely affected my experience of reading it, especially when Annabelle wonders, at the end of the book, what’s happening to one of the women she knew.
On that note, Roz said - I think at the Nine Worlds event too, though I might be wrong - that one of the reasons Annabelle spends a lot of time listening to other people’s stories in the book is that it’s one of the only ways these stories can survive, because so many of the people who told and retold them died in the epidemic. That definitely comes across, and the stories are BRILLIANT. Plus it tells you so much about this society - the small scene where everyone meets sooner or later, the gossip and anecdote that brings you social currency, the drama. There it very much reminded me of my own life and queer scene, especially in my relatively small university town.
And I love the ending to pieces. It's a lovely line and mission statement. "I thought part of the point of feminism was that there are no minor characters."
It’s excellent and you guys should read it then share your thoughts. Especially the trans people on my flist, especially especially the trans women.
A little while ago I finished Roz Kaveney’s Tiny Pieces of Skull. I feel like a bit of an idiot going all ~commentary about it but! am not at a con to have a long drunken discussion about it so this is basically that in Livejournal form. You should all read it and then come and talk to me about it :)
It’s basically a fictionalised memoir of Kaveney’s time in the trans scene in Chicago in the late 70s and it’s brilliant. The alternative title is “A Lesson In Manners” and it very much is a comedy of manners, piquant and hilarious. The contrasts between our English heroine Annabelle, coming from a high-minded activist milieu of educated feminists and literary types, and the different American “sisters” (other trans women) she’s surrounded by, are many and varied. It’s very episodic and gossipy, relating various stories - both Annabelle’s and those of the women around her. (I’ll come back to this later.) It’s almost impressionistic, which makes it feel very much like life to me; the little dramatic anecdotes shared among friends, the recurring characters.
This is a very different book from Kaveney’s epic fantasy quartet Rhapsody of Blood, but what carries over is the vivid characters and how completely they come across in brief sketches of dialogue and action. The comedy too, especially that very observant, dry comedy of human foibles. It’s compassionate though - well, not always. Various shithead men get mercilessly seen and mocked for what they are, but that’s fun :)
It’s utterly unsentimental, is the thing, and that funny, sharp tone - edging at times into brittle - is how it all holds together, the love and the social comedy and the social commentary and the danger and risk. It’s all dancing in the dark.
There’s a lot of fascinating commentary embedded in the descriptions of the sisters’ lives. The obsession with food and thinness, with make-up and clothes and beauty, with surgery and adaptations of the body, with male sexual and romantic attention which is necessary for survival - and all of it unselfconscious and automatic, except for Annabelle’s thoughts. I’m hardly the first person to note that trans women often seem to experience the most stark, bleak, extreme version of the expectations and pressures that women in general face. But there’s also the good stuff - sisterhood, the primacy of relationships among women, those bonds of shared experience. They go to bat for each other. And Annabelle is sooooo in love with Natasha, her beautiful, selfish flatmate. Not that she knows it.
Annabelle explicitly worries that competing with other women, especially for male sexual/romantic attention, can damage the feminist mission. And class is treated so intelligently, in various facets - education, sheer economic pressures, the sense of risk and fragility even if you manage to scrape your way out of desperation. I love that everyone goes on and on about Annabelle’s lovely English accent and the first few times she tries to explain that it’s not as good as all that, not as RP as she’d like :)
On the intersection of gender and class, and on pain - Annabelle does survival sex work for much of the book and so do most of the other characters, and there’s a rape scene. The threat of poverty, homelessness, recapture by family, overdose, arrest, sexual assault, other forms of violence - it all hangs over these characters. They work hard to improve things, and often they do. But not always. Annabelle’s ticket back to London is something that’s always in her mind; she feels she can’t run and her people back in London are not terribly accepting.(Ugh, Annabelle’s friend Magda is this London lesbian feminist who is transphobic and appears on like 2 pages and ANNOYS ME SO MUCH. Probably because I know like three of her.) But Annabelle has a rope-ladder out of the dark in a way her sisters usually don’t and that’s something they’re all aware of.
I’ll have to read it again relatively soon, I think. There’s a lot of complexity there, despite the fact that it’s a fast, funny and easy read, clocking in at under 200 pages.
It’s also occasionally very disorienting and rather upsetting to read. Many of the characters are trans women and sex workers in the late 70s in America, and when they occasionally talk about their futures and plans and whether they’ll be okay… well, it actually reminded me of An Inspector Calls, which is a play about an English family in 1912. Just the sense of doom hanging over these characters that they have no idea about. I went to a reading & talk about the book at Nine Worlds this summer, and Roz described the trans scene in the US as “a culture rebuilt after apocalypse”.
I mean, that’s something I’m bringing to it; there are only a very very few moments in the book where I find a slight sense of painful irony because AIDS is coming, because it’s so closely from Annabelle’s perspective and of course she has no idea. But the knowledge of AIDS coming definitely affected my experience of reading it, especially when Annabelle wonders, at the end of the book, what’s happening to one of the women she knew.
On that note, Roz said - I think at the Nine Worlds event too, though I might be wrong - that one of the reasons Annabelle spends a lot of time listening to other people’s stories in the book is that it’s one of the only ways these stories can survive, because so many of the people who told and retold them died in the epidemic. That definitely comes across, and the stories are BRILLIANT. Plus it tells you so much about this society - the small scene where everyone meets sooner or later, the gossip and anecdote that brings you social currency, the drama. There it very much reminded me of my own life and queer scene, especially in my relatively small university town.
And I love the ending to pieces. It's a lovely line and mission statement. "I thought part of the point of feminism was that there are no minor characters."
It’s excellent and you guys should read it then share your thoughts. Especially the trans people on my flist, especially especially the trans women.
no subject
Date: 2015-12-14 03:16 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2015-12-20 06:42 pm (UTC)