Please Miss: A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Penis

Lavery (English, Univ. of California, Berkeley; Quaint, Exquisite) brings her writing talents to this collection of personal essays musing on everything from literary criticism to popular culture to feminism. Lavery tells her story as a story of bodies: messy, overlapping, intersecting, and intersectional bodies, each of which belongs to yet evades the language written on, around, and about them. Never shy at finding the humor in even the most mundane of situations, the author hilariously recounts her life a trans woman in the public eye. Her relationship with fellow writer Danny Lavery comes into focus with her trademark wit and occasional self-deprecation. The construction and artificiality, the boundaries, the beauty—it’s all here, in Lavery’s body and the bodies of lovers and friends. Chapters are at once meandering and conversational, like a long chat with a friend who’s telling a story you have to hear.