I am so far from the target audience of Trans Girl Suicide Museum that I hesitate to comment on it.
But, I did read it, and I do have thoughts … so …
Trans Girl Suicide Museum (2019) is hannah baer‘s memoir of their transition. It is obsessed with a few themes: how to exist in transition, ketamine, trans identity itself, ketamine, and, more loosely, the relationship between the self and contemporary, digital, meme-driven art.
baer is an excellent and self-aware writer, has a skillful tragicomic touch, and the narrative is quick, compelling, and, yes, highly ketamine fueled as it moves through New York City in the 2010s. There is a political dimension to baer’s writing that sits alongside a (for me) only partially examined level of class privilege, and these two threads sitting so close to each other was sometimes jarring.
But the real substance of TGSM is about identity and art, and quite specifically, identity and art in the early decades of the 21st century. It is a book that is inescapably tethered to its historical moment and, as such, its interest may already be drifting towards the archival (the sophistication of discourse around trans identity continues to grow and grow–partially because of thinkers like baer, of course–and while ketamine use continues in NYC, the rise of fentanyl has certainly added some caution, if not restraint, to those scenes).
Like I said, though: I’m not the target audience here, and baer’s basic request of CIS-presenting old folks is to just shower money on young trans people they meet–which, honestly, is not the worst advice in those situations. So my thoughts on the book seem both unasked for and unimportant.