Gender: Profound and Mundane

Excerpt from Tomboy by Liz Prince

What I most often encourage students to write about, especially when it comes to memoir, is what is most mundane to them: daily details, describing how we even brush our teeth or wash our hair. Why? Because even if we don't wind up including that in a final memoir, the process of exploring - with curiosity - how we actually do daily mundane things can reveal more about ourselves than re-telling the most profound-seeming powerful bang-em-out dramatic trauma stories.

Structure as Liberation: Unmastered

I finally read Katherine Angel's memoir Unmastered: A Book on Desire (Most Difficult to Tell). It had a strangely warm welcoming in 2012 in England - I say strange because it is a pretty direct and robust memoir about sexuality, and because England doesn't have the same memoir trend happening as in the States.

At a surface level, for me, this book is by a vanilla, heterosexual, cis-gendered academic woman exploring the edges of BDSM. Normally I wouldn't touch a book like that - I am much more interested in queer experience, as it is closer to my own, and playing with much more explicit depth around gender and power.

However, just like the apparent content and identity, the structure - complex but often showing just a few words a page - belies the complexity and depth of this book.