Paul Takes the Form of a Mortal Girl

by Andrea Lawlor

This book is shockingly good, and also not for the faint of heart. It’s sex, drugs, queerness, rough trade, postpunk, university town politics, womyn’s festivals, and magical realism, all mashed together and set in 1993. How could I resist? It’s like they wrote it just for me.

Paul is an artsy, opinionated, and super-louche queer boy. He tends bar at the only gay bar in a college town and lives perpetually on the bleeding edge of poverty and the AIDS epidemic. He trades on his good looks and alluring hauteur for sex, coffee, and whatever else he can get his greedy little hands on. He’s Desire personified, and he’s got a secret: he can change sex at will.

Literally: we’re not only talking gender here, we’re talking everything. His face, skin, build, primary and secondary sexual characteristics, everything. Think of Virginia Woolf’s Orlando. (Yes, I’m using “he/him” pronouns; that’s what Paul uses throughout the book, even when he’s Polly.) In his resting state, he defaults to male. But whenever he feels like it (and whenever it feels safe) he can physically transform as much or as little as he likes, from vaguely femme right up through being a fully-fleshed-out female.

It takes some effort to stay that way, but it’s worth it. His constant, restless appetite—for food, drugs, sex, experiences of all kinds—takes him everywhere, and his ability to shapeshift means “everywhere” can include women’s spaces and straight boys’ beds. And lesbians’ beds, too: and then he falls in love with one, which means suddenly he needs to maintain his female form all the time. Except he can’t.

Hijinks ensue, taking him across the country and finally landing him in San Francisco. Along the way he goes through just about every sort of struggle and every height of pleasure available to a beautiful, impossible-to-categorize young queer in the 1990s. The writing is gorgeous, Paul is irresistible, and you’ll develop your next playlist as you read. Read this book.

Life by Keith Richards and James Fox

read by Joe Hurley, Keith Richards, and Johnny Depp

If you’re above a certain age, it may surprise you to learn that Keith Richards and Mick Jagger aren’t baby boomers. They’re members of the Silent Generation, by two or three years. But the band they formed, along with Brian Jones, Bill Wyman, Charlie Watts, and Ian Stewart is such an intrinsic part of the baby boom generation that I think we’ve got to give them honorary membership. To this day, if you want a lively debate among Boomers (not to mention a significant portion of Genexers), all you’ve got to say is three words: “Beatles or Stones?”

And Keith Richards’ autobiography is necessarily a biography of the Rolling Stones—from his point of view, of course. And it turns out that he is disarmingly charming. James Fox captured his voice, first over hundreds of hours of interviews, then in writing—and he did a fantastic job. If you listen to the audiobook, Johnny Depp does some of the narration (mostly in the first few chapters and then again for a bit near the end) but Keith does quite a lot of it himself, and it’s wonderful to hear his stories.

For me the most fascinating part was how the band got together, and then their early days—both before they became famous and then after they really caught on. There was a certain early-to-mid-career part, where the sex and drugs were very present but not yet all-consuming, where Keith was fascinated with learning and perfecting his five-string open tuning, and when the relationship with Anita Pallenberg was first occurring and then was at its best, that feels to me like a golden age—if not in Keith’s life, then in the course of the book. 

But his recounting of how heroin took over his life, and heroin and paranoia took over Anita’s, and all the difficulties with parenting and with the deterioration of the friendship between Keith and Mick, is also deeply interesting. All of that went into making Keith the person he is at the end of the book, too—that, and the various deaths in his circle of family and friends and co-famous-people, and new relationships we don’t get to hear so much about anymore.

It’s not possible for me to listen to the Rolling Stones with new ears. I’m too familiar with their canon up to about Tattoo You, and I don’t care enough about anything they produced after that. But after listening to this book, and stopping frequently to listen to the song being discussed, I can say I have listened to their work with, at least, new appreciation. For the history of each track, of course, but also for the artistry that went into so much deceptive simplicity. And there was definitely artistry—technique and concept both. Keith geeks out about all this in several places, and I found it oddly charming.

In the end I can say that Keith Richards is a man of depth and complexity who follows all of his passions well beyond the dictates of common sense—which is the reason for his genius as well as numerous brushes with the law and with death. In short, he lives up to his reputation. 

Which is not to say that all of the rumors are true; according to him, at least, some are and some aren’t. And the truth behind at least one major one will remain forever a mystery if he has his say. No, I won’t tell you which is which. Read the book! Go on, I dare you.

How to Be Famous by Caitlin Moran

read by Louise Brealey

Such a good book. I couldn’t get over how good this book was the whole time I was reading it—and that was after thoroughly enjoying How to Build a Girl. I laughed out loud so many times, I had to think twice about reading it in public. There was one, comparing a man’s parts to a turnstile, that was so good that I had to call my partner and repeat it to him and laugh all over again.

First off: no, you don’t have to have read How to Build a Girl to enjoy this book… but it would probably help. If you haven’t already, I recommend it. It’s a terrific book in itself and I’ve already reviewed it on this blog.

Second: if swearing, casual drug use, excessive drinking, and frank discussions of sex that don’t mince words aren’t your bag, this is not the book for you.

Now that’s out of the way, let me tell you a bit more about this fabulous book. It’s about Johanna Morrigan (AKA Dolly Wilde) again, but now it’s 1994. She’s 19, living in London, and a successful writer. She’s still desperately in love with John Kite, and he still doesn’t return her affections, but never mind: she has a plan. She’s going to write him into being in love with her.

Along the way, she’ll have to somehow get her marijuana-addled dad to move out of her flat, teach John to value his teen girl fans, and—and this is the whopper—decide what to do about being very publicly slut-shamed by the entire London music scene after a disastrous encounter with a Famous.

This is How to Build a Girl for the #metoo era. Tremendous fun. Read it!