‘Still Life’ captures the messiness of writing trans autofiction

Close to the beginning of Katherine Packert Burke’s novel Still Life , its protagonist, Edith McAllister, a twenty-nine-year-old trans writer, is asked by friends about her novel-in-progress. She refuses to tell them about it. “It’s not autofiction, is it?” one of them asks. “No,” Edith responds with a snort. She’s lying: she’s writing a barely fictionalized account of her relationship with her friend Valerie, another trans woman who shepherded Edith through the earliest stages of her transition, became an on-again-off-again lover and died suddenly in a car crash. Valerie’s death punched a hole in Edith’s life that she’s still trying to work through, unsuccessfully, by writing, for nearly a year—the kind of stalled-out work that has three working titles and a meandering, fragmentary draft. At the beginning of Still Life ,Edith has started to think of her project, and by extension herself, as a failure, even as the book swallows more and more of her life. She describes it as a “Borgesian map the same size as the territory,” and it starts to implicate not only Valerie but her cis ex-girlfriend Tessa—the two women who understood her best, who both ended up leaving her, one way or another. Writing fiction is certainly one of the least efficient ways to process emotions, and it might even be counterproductive. Art has its own demands: the kind of work that goes into creating a compelling, coherent piece of writing can be at cross purposes with the kind of work that makes you feel more or less at ease with your own life. There are, of course, particular problems with writing about one’s own life as a trans woman—not only because so much of trans life is disappointing and frustrating, but because reconciling with one’s own pre-transition past is an impossible task, an unbridgeable gap. Burke’s novel—her debut—is a portrait of the struggles and frustrations of becoming a trans writer in the face of these difficulties, as well as the things that make it worth it. As Edith puts it, “There wasn’t another way to the other side of this hurt.” Edith spends […]

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