Wrath Goddess Sing, and books in general now

I finished reading Maya Deane’s Wrath Goddess Sing and it’s a heck of book, loved it, can’t recommend it enough.

I think this is the first novel I’ve read in a long time. I’ve got shelves full of the usual fantasy and sci-fi novels I read in the late eighties and early nineties. Looking through them now, quite a few written by women, for some reason (some reason) I guess their books appealed to me back then.

I didn’t get to talk to people a lot earlier in life. It was hard to pretend to be a boy, and I wasn’t very good at it. (I had no idea how bad at it I was until now looking back!) I suppose I always sort of assumed the novel thing where everyone is always talking to the protagonist, telling them stuff, was just a writing trope. Gives the reader something to read. It’s how you write a story. But really the part of the fantasy novel where the protagonist is talking to other people was similar to the part with the dragons or the time travel gates or whatever, depending on the story.

Now, as a woman, I actually talk with people. All the time. It’s weirdly easy. People at work keep me informed, tell me stuff, seek out my input, credit me for my contributions, and just hang out and chat with me sometimes. Women just…say things to me these days, since I’m a woman too. And I can just…respond, it’s weirdly easy now that I can just relax and ‘be myself’ and somehow as a girl being myself goes over well.

So, that part of the story feels so much more realistic now! Like maybe that talking to each other thing wasn’t really meant to be part of the “fantasy” part of the fantasy novel!

Also, I have emotions now, on estrogen. Like, yeah, I always had emotions, to a degree, sometimes. I could sure as hell feel anger and people made goddamn sure I felt fear sometimes. But I wasn’t reading a novel, or looking at a painting at the art museum, and feeling strong emotions. If I was feeling strong emotions it was because something fucking bad was happening to me. It is such a different experience. I had all these feelings reading this book. And now curious, I found my old, very yellowing copy of C. J. Cherryh’s Gate of Ivrel and now forty-odd pages into rereading it I’m pretty sure it did not fucking feel like this reading it the first time decades ago. Did cis people feel emotions reading novels when they were teens?

The general concept of Wrath Goddess Sing is it is a story set in the world of the Iliad, the Trojan War. Our protagonist, Achilles, is a trans woman in this story. For me, as a trans woman, this is an extremely interesting story, and Maya Deane is a trans woman, this was written by one of us. And wow does it show.

And so Odysseus tracks her down and finds out she’s a girl now, and drags her off to war as in the older story. Honestly the reactions people have to her being a girl now in the book feel so much like the reactions I get, people vary, but, mostly, people have heard of this, oh, one of those people.

She meets a ton of people in the run-up to the war, and, again, now that I talk to people, feels pretty realistic. And, yes, the thing where she’s trans and meets so many people who knew her in the old days, I am old and have a long history full of people who knew me in my old days, and her meetings feel not just possible but entirely realistic, relatable, even familiar. There’s the people who were terrible to her. A lot of us, we were bad a pretending to be boys, and there were guys around us who were downright eager to volunteer to take on the task of making sure we knew, good and hard, that we were not doing it right. And others who were not terrible. Maybe you wish they could have actually defended you, but at least they didn’t join in on calling you slurs, better than the rest anyway. People who didn’t know her. People who didn’t know her back in the old days and honestly she’s not sure if anyone at some point mentioned her past to them or not. That’s an interesting situation, when you don’t know if someone you are getting to know better knows. Should you mention it? Is it better not to? It’s not at all clear what the best choice is sometimes. There’s the guy who fucking wants to talk about genitals. I’m going to remember her response to that, I might use it someday. Make them regret bringing it up! Somewhere in there was a scene in which someone said, I don’t remember exactly what it was, ’that thing,’ to her, I’ve been there, someone said exactly that thing to me, I too had to decide what to say in response, and now the demigoddess Achilles also has to pick from the range of possible responses! The fun knowing jokes with real friends, about how you somehow happen to know certain things, or your abilities as a shape-shifter. (Back at one time I was not much of a shape-shifter at all, and then, somehow, I suddenly became a very good one, I have no idea how to express how weird and amazing that is. Achilles had a goddess help her out in the story, I mostly had my electrologist, it’s not the same magic but it’s magic all the same.)

This novel is very fantasy, very supernatural. It is not at all a sort of lightly fictionalized memoir of growing up in Joliet, Illinois in the late nineteen-eighties. And yet, for all the gods and goddesses showing up in this story, it’s the first one I’ve ever read where I’ve been thinking, oh, I’ve been there! I know what that fucking feels like! I’ve had to come up with a response to that, what response is our protagonist going to have! It’s genuinely weird for such a very fantasy story to be by far the most specifically familiar, relatable one I’ve ever read in my life.