It can be difficult to pinpoint exactly what makes Something that May Shock and Discredit You hang together so spectacularly. The razor wit? The self-effacing candor? The oddball moments of cultural redux? The truth is that Daniel Mallory Ortberg (now known as Danny Lavery), author of The Merry Spinster and Texts from Jane Eyre, has a discerning and oracular ability to illuminate personal experience through media touchstones--not least of which is the Bible.
"It's easy enough to sell out an evangelical Christian childhood," he writes in the opening essay of a book that falls somewhere between collected works and wholesale memoir. In this first essay, he is in the early stages of his gender transition and, while wrestling with such a challenging existential question, reaches for the image of a demon whispering the possibility of manhood into his ear. "One of the many advantages of a religious childhood is the variety of metaphors made available to describe untranslatable inner experiences," he says, and readers, regardless of spiritual discipline, will be glad such variety is at Ortberg's disposal. But rest assured, he has plenty of originals to dispense as well, like when he writes of the Rapture as "being swept up by the Raisin Bran scoop of heaven."
All this within the first four pages, because Ortberg is just warming up before delving openly into his transmasculine experience with unrivaled panache. "Captain James T. Kirk Is a Beautiful Lesbian, and I'm Not Sure Exactly How to Explain That," admits one chapter title, although Ortberg shows a valiant, hilarious effort at doing just that. And later, "Sir Gawain Just Wants to Leave Castle Make-Out" envisions "a sort of Benny Hill-style montage of hot-potato sexual tension" in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight as a lens for experiencing romantic advances in the midst of bodily dissociation. Ortberg gracefully slips between the memoirist's lucid personal narrative and the essayist's more topical ruminations.
Passage after passage sees him refining a riveting intertextual portrait of his life and transness fit for the pages of an illuminated manuscript. Biblical stories of transformation, transfiguration and renaming become equal to the T4T energy ("couples, usually fictional, mostly heterosexual, that somehow manage to emblematize a particular trans-on-trans dynamic") between Gomez and Morticia Addams. The New Year's resolutions of a humblebragging Marcus Aurelius files in right next to an earnest meditation on the act of communion prompted by a rather unappetizing meal at Evelyn Waugh's house after World War II. Discarding any distinction between high and low cultures, Ortberg's Something that May Shock and Discredit You most certainly astonishes and amazes--it may even be transformative. --Dave Wheeler, associate editor, Shelf Awareness
Shelf Talker: Sidesplitting essays on the transmasculine experience try on numerous lenses from pop culture and Christian stories of transformation, transfiguration and renaming.