Please Miss

Green shoots, green leaves, California green vesicles beneath the California green-brown mud. A hormonal transition is a new start, but it is not a new start like a shoot emerges from the mud: it is a fresh start constructed from the green plastics one has to hand.

A speculative memoir of gender transition and recovery from addiction, refracted through pop culture, queer theory, film, TV, literature, and (what feels like) stand-up comedy - like The Argonauts caught in a hall of mirrors, with a lot more sex and humour.

'This is the queer memoir you've been waiting for; a dizzying mix of theory and pastiche, metafiction and memory. Please Miss is Terry Castle meets Lauren Slater meets Michelle Tea; hilarious and sexy and terrifying in its brilliance. But don't worry - Lavery is an avalanche you'll be glad to be buried under.' - Carmen Maria Machado, author of In the Dream House

'This book reframes the question of transition from the familiar journey from A to B, and replaces that journey with a can't-look-away performance of wit, language, irreverence, and delight so compelling that a reader forgets about destinations all together.' - Torrey Peters, author of Detransition, Baby

About the Author

Grace Lavery is a writer, editor, and academic living in Brooklyn, NY. As an Associate Professor of English, Critical Theory, and Gender & Women's Studies at the University of California, Berkeley, her research explores the history and theory of aesthetics and interpretation, with particular interests in psychoanalysis, literary realism, and queer and trans cultures. Her first book, Quaint, Exquisite: Victorian Aesthetics and the Idea of Japan, was published by Princeton University Press in 2019, and her scholarly essays have been published in Critical Inquiry, Differences, Social Text Online, Transgender Studies Quarterly and more.