Please Miss

A memoir of gender transition and recovery from addiction, a dance across genres, a ripping-up of the rulebook, Please Miss is unlike anything you've ever read before. Grace Lavery is a reformed druggie, an unreformed omnisexual chaos Muppet, and a 100 per cent, all-natural, synthetic female hormone monster. How could her story be straightforward when she is anything but? The telling of her tale is kaleidoscopic, wild and audacious: Grace performs in a David Lynch remake of Sunset Boulevard and is reprogrammed as a 1960s femmebot; she is targeted with anonymous letters from a mysterious cabal of clowns; she writes a socialist manifesto disguised as a porn parody of QI (or is it vice versa?). As Grace fumbles toward a new trans identity, she tries on dozens of different voices, creating a coat of many colours. The result is dazzling, unique and unforgettable. Startlingly funny and ruthlessly smart, Please Miss gives us what we came for, then slaps us in the face and orders us to come again.

Grace Lavery teaches at UC Berkeley, where she specialises in Victorian literature, trans feminism, and cultural studies. She has written for LARB, Autostraddle, Foreign Policy, the New Inquiry, Them, the Guardian and Slate, among other publications. She lives in New York.