Another Advance Reader's Critique! A Really NICE One!
Another Advance Reader's Critique! A Really NICE one!
First, for the sake of juxtaposition, this comment from someone on a message board that I frequent, where I've mentioned my book:
> Can anyone make heads or tails of AHunter3's um, "memoirs"? So he's
> basically transgendered, except he's not, he's not gay, straight, bi,
> asexual, or anything. But he's like, a girl in gender, a man in sex,
> and attracted to women. But he's not trans, or straight. But he's not
> gay or bi, or cis. But uh, he's genderqueer. Because when he was
> growing up, he liked hanging out with girls. Ummm...
>
> Anyone else confused? I mean, whatever floats your boat dude, but uh,
> okay.
And now, without further ado, this message from a fellow writer who identifies as genderqueer and who responded to my request for beta readers:
------
Sorry for the delay in getting back to you. I'm chronically late, but I've finished your memoir at last, and I'm ready to share my thoughts. I didn't get pulled into the story immediately, but I was hooked after the first few pages. After that, I only stopped reading when I absolutely had to, and mostly finished it in two sittings. If I'd had a paperback or Kindle copy, I probably would have carried it around with me and finished much earlier.
I'm going to start at the beginning of the book and share my overall impressions later. While I didn't relate very well to most of your childhood (maybe because I grew up in a different time, maybe because I wasn't raised as a boy), I still found your experiences readable and more compelling than most novels or memoirs that cover the main character's childhood. I don't think you specifically mentioned the year until later on, but it was easy to figure out a general time period from the context and evocative descriptions. What I did relate to from the beginning was your relationship with your family. I think you pinned down how it feels to have family members who want to support you, but don't really know how.
I noticed that you included and named lots and lots of characters early on, and I expected to have trouble remembering who was who, but I never actually ended up confused. Your writing is particularly clear and easy to read in the first half of the book. To be honest, I especially enjoyed the way your writing style changes a bit while describing romantic or sexual experiences. Something about it managed to bring back the exact feeling of being a confused, curious adolescent. The one potential flaw I can identify is that you spent a very long time talking about growing up. Everything you included seems interesting and relevant, so I couldn't tell you what (if anything) to cut, but the early sections go on for quite a while compared to what comes later.
Whenever you included detailed descriptions of the scenery, I found myself really enjoying them, and I think you might benefit from adding a few more lines describing the setting to help ground readers during sections that are mostly focused on your thoughts and ideas. That brings me to the one real flaw in the second half of the story -- while the parts of your life that came after you first enrolled in college had me nodding, agreeing, and remembering having the same thought processes, the writing sometimes seems abstract and unfocused. If you can pin down a few more tangible details and add them in, I think it would help the whole story flow together more smoothly.
I truly did relate to so much of what you experienced after you first started trying to figure out what exactly was different about you. I loved one particular quote: "I had some colored construction paper and I'd made little homemade signs and taped them to the walls of my bedroom. One of them - taped to my ceiling instead of to one of the walls - captured a kind of court jester feeling, declaring that my role in life was to "freak you out" to never be what you defined me as, because the moment you think you know, you cease to look and see."
Those few lines made me feel understood in a way no work of literature ever has before. They summarized many of my favorite parts of your story, from the horrible, paranoid acid trip to the way others never really stopped trying to neatly identify you with labels they could understand, to the way people who did understand you suddenly started appearing in your life almost as soon as you began to get comfortable with yourself. My experience has not been the same as yours, but I think you did manage to capture the aspects of it that we all have in common. I'd be very surprised if anyone else who identifies as genderqueer were to disagree. There aren't enough genderqueer voices out there in memoir or fiction, and I think yours is well worth hearing. If I were a little younger, or had a little less time to devote to figuring myself out, I think I'd have learned a lot.
A few final notes -- I was impressed at how fair and unbiased your writing is in respect to all lifestyles and genders, and how accessible it is to people who don't necessarily share your experiences or opinions. I also liked your dry sense of humor, and I suspect you used it just enough to give the reader a sense of what it might be like to have a face-to-face conversation with you. While I can picture you being asked to play up the more dramatic aspects of your story, or clarify and define your gender identity earlier on (especially if you're aiming more to educate people rather than to support those who've had experiences like yours), I personally think that your memoir is ready to be sent off to an agent right now.
Let me know if you have any questions or requests, or if anything I've written is unclear, and thank you so much for giving me the opportunity to be a beta reader. I can't wait to see The Story of Q in print someday, which you and your story wholeheartedly deserve.
------------
I think that review is the kind of thing I'd dearly love to see printed about my book some day. It came in several days ago (although I just got permission to share it in public), and I still can't stop smiling about it!
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First, for the sake of juxtaposition, this comment from someone on a message board that I frequent, where I've mentioned my book:
> Can anyone make heads or tails of AHunter3's um, "memoirs"? So he's
> basically transgendered, except he's not, he's not gay, straight, bi,
> asexual, or anything. But he's like, a girl in gender, a man in sex,
> and attracted to women. But he's not trans, or straight. But he's not
> gay or bi, or cis. But uh, he's genderqueer. Because when he was
> growing up, he liked hanging out with girls. Ummm...
>
> Anyone else confused? I mean, whatever floats your boat dude, but uh,
> okay.
And now, without further ado, this message from a fellow writer who identifies as genderqueer and who responded to my request for beta readers:
------
Sorry for the delay in getting back to you. I'm chronically late, but I've finished your memoir at last, and I'm ready to share my thoughts. I didn't get pulled into the story immediately, but I was hooked after the first few pages. After that, I only stopped reading when I absolutely had to, and mostly finished it in two sittings. If I'd had a paperback or Kindle copy, I probably would have carried it around with me and finished much earlier.
I'm going to start at the beginning of the book and share my overall impressions later. While I didn't relate very well to most of your childhood (maybe because I grew up in a different time, maybe because I wasn't raised as a boy), I still found your experiences readable and more compelling than most novels or memoirs that cover the main character's childhood. I don't think you specifically mentioned the year until later on, but it was easy to figure out a general time period from the context and evocative descriptions. What I did relate to from the beginning was your relationship with your family. I think you pinned down how it feels to have family members who want to support you, but don't really know how.
I noticed that you included and named lots and lots of characters early on, and I expected to have trouble remembering who was who, but I never actually ended up confused. Your writing is particularly clear and easy to read in the first half of the book. To be honest, I especially enjoyed the way your writing style changes a bit while describing romantic or sexual experiences. Something about it managed to bring back the exact feeling of being a confused, curious adolescent. The one potential flaw I can identify is that you spent a very long time talking about growing up. Everything you included seems interesting and relevant, so I couldn't tell you what (if anything) to cut, but the early sections go on for quite a while compared to what comes later.
Whenever you included detailed descriptions of the scenery, I found myself really enjoying them, and I think you might benefit from adding a few more lines describing the setting to help ground readers during sections that are mostly focused on your thoughts and ideas. That brings me to the one real flaw in the second half of the story -- while the parts of your life that came after you first enrolled in college had me nodding, agreeing, and remembering having the same thought processes, the writing sometimes seems abstract and unfocused. If you can pin down a few more tangible details and add them in, I think it would help the whole story flow together more smoothly.
I truly did relate to so much of what you experienced after you first started trying to figure out what exactly was different about you. I loved one particular quote: "I had some colored construction paper and I'd made little homemade signs and taped them to the walls of my bedroom. One of them - taped to my ceiling instead of to one of the walls - captured a kind of court jester feeling, declaring that my role in life was to "freak you out" to never be what you defined me as, because the moment you think you know, you cease to look and see."
Those few lines made me feel understood in a way no work of literature ever has before. They summarized many of my favorite parts of your story, from the horrible, paranoid acid trip to the way others never really stopped trying to neatly identify you with labels they could understand, to the way people who did understand you suddenly started appearing in your life almost as soon as you began to get comfortable with yourself. My experience has not been the same as yours, but I think you did manage to capture the aspects of it that we all have in common. I'd be very surprised if anyone else who identifies as genderqueer were to disagree. There aren't enough genderqueer voices out there in memoir or fiction, and I think yours is well worth hearing. If I were a little younger, or had a little less time to devote to figuring myself out, I think I'd have learned a lot.
A few final notes -- I was impressed at how fair and unbiased your writing is in respect to all lifestyles and genders, and how accessible it is to people who don't necessarily share your experiences or opinions. I also liked your dry sense of humor, and I suspect you used it just enough to give the reader a sense of what it might be like to have a face-to-face conversation with you. While I can picture you being asked to play up the more dramatic aspects of your story, or clarify and define your gender identity earlier on (especially if you're aiming more to educate people rather than to support those who've had experiences like yours), I personally think that your memoir is ready to be sent off to an agent right now.
Let me know if you have any questions or requests, or if anything I've written is unclear, and thank you so much for giving me the opportunity to be a beta reader. I can't wait to see The Story of Q in print someday, which you and your story wholeheartedly deserve.
------------
I think that review is the kind of thing I'd dearly love to see printed about my book some day. It came in several days ago (although I just got permission to share it in public), and I still can't stop smiling about it!
--------
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