Pageboy: A Memoir

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You can listen to the full discussion from today's show on CBC Listen or on our podcast, Commotion with Elamin Abdelmahmoud, available wherever you get your podcasts . Mel: Yeah, that quote comes from a section where it's a little bit before his coming out as gay in the mid-2010s and about how he's privately queer and living a very queer life, and then having to watch straight actors win awards for playing queer roles, and seeing how this industry has continued to repress his queerness, his gender, his expression, and the kind of double-sidedness of that and the hypocrisy of that. I think it's a really good way of summing up something that we talk a lot about — about queer and trans folks in entertainment, and how you watch people win an Oscar for playing gay while you yourself have to stay closeted. That's a really hard experience to go through. If you publish a book, even if it's your own personal journey and feelings and whatnot, I am going to judge it as any other book. If it's not written well, I'm going to say so. 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 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 I think this is a valuable book and hope that it will help people have empathy and more understanding for trans and queer people and maybe for themselves for whoever they are and whatever they’re going through. 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.

Probably the most surprising thing about this memoir is how well-written it is. I read a lot of memoirs, celebrity and otherwise, and many people have something to say. However, just because you have something to say does not mean you can write. 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. 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 she walked off I did what I could to prevent tears from ruining the makeup." Trouble on the set of 'Flatliners'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."