Duncan Eliot

An evocative debut novel of trans-masculinity, addiction, and the pain and joy of becoming. In the first of three acts, Ponyboy's titular narrator--a pill-popping, speed-snorting trans-masculine lightning bolt--unravels in his Paris apartment. Ponyboy is caught in a messy love triangle with Baby, a lesbian painter who can't see herself being with someone trans, and Toni, a childhood friend who can actually see Ponyboy for who he is. Strung out, Ponyboy follows Baby to Berlin in act two, where he sinks deeper into drugs and falls for Hart, a fellow writer, all the while pursued by a megalomaniacal photographer hungry for the next hot thing. As Ponyboy's relationships crumble, he overdoses and find himself alone in his childhood home in Nebraska. The novel's final act follows Ponyboy to rehab, exploring the ways in which trans identity, addiction, and recovery reforge the bond between mother and child. Eliot Duncan reveals, in precise atmospheric prose reminiscent of Anne Carson and Allen Ginsberg, the innate splendor, joy, and ache of becoming oneself.

A Novel

Ponyboy

Lindsay

how could anyone understand the throes of gender and not want to toss it off. Burn it. To disassociate from the assignment. All my philo profs gesture at this thing called choice. What fucking choice do any of us have? The way cells form in utero become imperatives for living. Everyone can fuck off with the whole two sides of a coin, binary shit.

if our minds can construct a fiction like absolute time in the universe manifest as small hands ticking, then we must build structures which are far less definite. One of these structures is the polarity of gender. Its scaffolding of hormones, body parts, gestures and clothes seems to support two entire, separate universes. The whole of gender is this: subjects socialized to behave, to identify, to believe in an ontological separation based on anatomy. But look, like time, it doesn’t hold in all frames of reference. Gender is an ambition. It’s a human fallacy, really. To white knuckle one measurement, building two antithetical ways of being when there are multi- fold, simultaneous dimensions of being within gender, within time.

I don’t hate people, I hate the politically allocated fictions that suffocate.

See, everyone thinks they are the worst person that’s ever lived. He chews. That’s just as bad as thinking you’re the best.

Kierce

When I was a boy I knew what I would be. Just something big. Something where you stand tall and smile and think and run and sweat. But then the world got smaller. Details got bigger. Hems and eyelashes and shoes. What happened was they all said I was girl. I tried to believe them. 

I stop looking at myself before I notice how unlike myself I look. 

Our faces got really close as he whispered, You’re really such a gay boy, aren’t you? Thank you for noticing, I smirked, ecstatic. 

He explains shyly that he might like to be seen as a woman sometimes. I can see that, I say, meeting his eyes and seeing her. 

The hot photographer’s version of masculinity is likely an unexamined, compulsory affect. I fight for mine. 

Ponyboy quotes

Join the club