“I wanted to be a boy. To slide with the ease into the world people like Dad,” Zoë Brossiere writes in their memoir “[Like] all the boys I knew seemed to inhabit without a second thought. But I couldn’t begin to say any of this out loud.
” After moving to Tucson with a short haircut and a name (Zoë) no one had ever heard of, Brossiere was able to pass, for some blissful months, as a maybe-boy, deftly dodged questions about it whenever they were asked by peers. The general terrors and vulnerabilities of growing up while trying to locate who you are is emotionally treacherous enough. Because of Brossiere’s queerness, growing up with markers of class difference, and in the outskirts of Tucson, this is all turned up to eleven.
The extreme desert landscape of Tucson is a broader metaphor for this experience. They write, “the sunlight was harsh had the threat of sunstroke all imminent. All the local wildlife could bite, or sting, or both.
Plants were sharp and stoic, not to be touched with bare hands.” Having grown up in central Arizona myself, I deeply connect with the memories that you are surrounded by a landscape that so clearly didn’t care if you croaked—and probably will do something to help move that along. You have to learn its dangers young to survive.
The terrifying truth is that society, too, can operate similarly. Through these pages, in simultaneously lyrical and biting prose, we see powerful descriptions of Brossiere’s youth, including their b.