Winner of the 2019 Lambda Literary Award for Transgender Nonfiction
Finalist for the 2019 Big Other Book Award in Nonfiction
“A perceptive and compassionate narrative that beautifully breaks with the limits of genre and gender.”
—Publishers Weekly
"Fleischmann is not only staking out but literally inventing a territory of their own."
—The Los Angeles Time
“Watchful of its context and position, this book is able to pose increasingly interesting, urgent, and difficult questions. It holds us accountable to the world.”
—The Paris Review Daily
“Fleischmann excels at the integration of art and memoir . . . their theory of identity suffuses the book on every level, a framework that shows that the ability to exist in an uninscribed space is an exercise in resilience and progress.”
—The Nation
“In the tradition of the prose magicians W.G. Sebald or Ben Lerner (imagine if those two were somehow non-binary and joyfully slutty).”
—Torrey Peters
“Fleischmann’s path through self-expression, gender fluidity, and self-understanding is well worth our attention.”
—Literary Hub
“A meditation on relationships, place, proximity and distance, belonging, community, gender, politics, the body and, well, love, and all the things that can mean, braided with digressive, descriptive passages about the work of Cuban-born American artist Felix Gonzalez-Torres.”
—Frieze
“The story of the author's own exploration of queerness and identity, this is an all-too-important book at a time when LGBTQIA+ rights are at risk of regression.”
—Bustle
“Both provocatively and evocatively written, the book illuminates the process of becoming.”
—Kirkus
“Meditative, beautiful, and revolutionary.”
—Book Riot
“With this book-length essay, T Fleischmann has given us a truly unique work. . . . Poetic, powerful, and subversive.”
—Ms. Magazine
“Chicago-based writer T Fleischmann melds personal narrative and art criticism in a poetically titled, genre-defying work.”
—The Chicago Tribune
“Fleischmann combines serious engagement with warmth and clarity of prose, reveling in the experiences and pleasures of art and the body, identity and community.”
—The Rumpus
“The long, sprawling essay bends prose and language to seek both intimacy and the alive body.”
—The Brooklyn Rail
“Expansive. . . . Fleischmann's stories transcend the singular, giving the reader space to reflect on their own body, their own art.”
—The Columbia Journal
“Interspersing frank personal narrative with lyrical, line-broken passages from an unfinished meditation on Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Fleischmann offers up pearls, pills, candies, and miniature portraits of their friends and lovers in acts of generosity that are self-questioning but never self-doubting.”
—Barbara Browning
“By turns blunt, confrontational, eloquent, exciting, original, and somewhat indescribable.”
—The Gay & Lesbian Review
“T Fleischmann's new book explores art and relationships with a perceptive eye and beautiful prose.”
—The Star Tribune
“Fleischmann blends their own experiences with the art of Felix González-Torres to meditate on loss, violence, love and gender.”
—The Chicago Tribune
“‘The candy was very sweet, and it was melting.’ T Fleischmann has written a book like this, one that is ‘spilled and gestured’ between radical others of many kinds."
—Bhanu Kapil
