Name: She Wants It
ISBN: 9781101904749

Jill Soloway

"From the creator of the Emmy and Golden Globe-winning series Transparent, a memoir of personal transformation set against the profound cultural upheaval and shifting power dynamics that continue to shape our society"--

Desire, Power, and Toppling the Patriarchy

She Wants It

Laura Mauler

I liked the book a lot, however there were two problems that I had with it: First, the skipping back and forth in time was sometimes confusing. I understand that that's often how life feels, that as you go through something you look back and say, "Oh, the seeds of this were actually planted years ago, how did I not notice them growing quietly into this thing?" All the same, it sometimes left me confused about when exactly these events took place, or how much time had elapsed between events (often, much more than I realized). More clarity on that front would have helped me.

Second, there was very little clarity about what was going on when the author moved from a hetero identity to a lesbian identity. We have the author living a cis female life in a hetero marriage, and then the author is at a lesbian bowling event and falling in love with a woman. I mean, why was the author there? Was there already self-recognition of their lesbianism, was this a hetero-married cis woman invading an LGBTQ space for shits and giggles, or was this somehow research for the series that the author was writing? It is not clear. After this section the author explains that since their parent came out as trans, their own problems with being femme and female had started to bubble up, but what does that mean? It's a toss-away, an interesting aside that I think is supposed to explain but fails. This issue of the author's move from identifying as straight to identifying as gay is simultaneously a small thing and a big thing. Small because the rest of the book still made sense and was good to read, but big because this is a beat change, a moment after which all becomes different, and it's not fully clear to the reader how we got here.

A final note: this book talks very little about the author's parent who is trans. To be fair this book is not her story, it's the author's story.

She Wants It Desire, Power, and Toppling the Patriarchy

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