Tactile satisfaction
I’ve always been a book person. I love the feeling of a page in my hand, woven pages versus pressed pages, cloth versus paper, glossy versus matte. There is a satisfaction I get in watching a page get scuffed, gain grease marks and ash between the binding.
The heft of a book is important as well. I rarely go out without a book and/or a journal, these simple things occupy my thinking. Since I was a child. I may be a TV hound, but books are where my heart lies. When I go to a club, I’ll make sure I can fit a book in my back pocket. So paperbacks are scattered throughout my room. I have pocketsized volumes, ones suited for jackets, ones for vests, ones for my pants. I have books that can only be carried in my bags. I have textbooks I refuse to get rid of. I have hardbacks that will only travel with me on trains, buses and planes.
My books are thrift store finds, garbage bin salvage and shoplifted pulp. They are each a piece of my mind, a container for the lessons I’ve learned. For most I can tell you exactly when and how I received the book. Some have fuzzier hazy stories.
But all that is to say this: I am almost done with Coming and Crying and I feel like I’ve had my heart ripped out and then delicately replaced. The mark of a small printer is all over this book, occasional typos, pages that are not perfectly smooth—some are wrinkled—and look as if there are strands of hair locked between the pages. I feel as if I’ve been reading this with someone, or having it read to me. I can see us being distracted by some of the more triumphant stories and sharing our own, I can see us recovering over some of the more forlorn moments. The point is, this book, like all books, is magic. The difference here being that this is a magic on a scale I have not reacted to in ages. There is a visceral pull to this book that I don’t think I’ve felt since I read Stone Butch Blues as a wee new-trans kid in high school. I have teared up, I have felt enraged, I have felt vindicated. More than anything, though, I have felt inspired.
The thing about personal essays is that it is incredibly hard to write them well. It is easy to make the story resonate, but it is hard to have the stories—especially within an anthology—uniformly reach into you and stir you. In the end, an essayist is writing for strangers. They are reaching out and sharing with people they never know and, in stories about sex, lust, loving, or the absence of those things, they are often literally baring something of themselves. Now, I can’t speak to how much of themselves these authors have shared, though I would suspect it is a kernel of something that not every stranger gets to enjoy. I feel incredibly privileged having read this book and I can only hope that everyone I share it with feels the same.
