Grace Lavery - Please Miss

This is the queer memoir youve 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 dont worryLavery is an avalanche youll be glad to be buried under.

Carmen Maria Machado, author of In the Dream House and Her Body and Other Parties

In the way that excellent style always blurs the question of genre, Grace Lavery shows how excellent style can blur gender with equal verve. This book reframes the question of transition from the familiar journey from A to B and replaces that journey with a cant-look-away performance of wit, language, irreverence, and delight so compelling that a reader forgets about destinations all together.

Torrey Peters, author of Infect Your Friends and Loved Ones and Detransition, Baby

Grace Laverys Please Miss is a polychromatic, wild, and joyous gambol through a world which is like ours but blessedly twisted. Come for the laugh out loud miniature windsock on page one, stay for the fascinating analysis of a discarded pig part in Jude the Obscure , end up profoundly moved and profoundly grateful for this supremely intelligent, innovative, and important tale which is, as Lavery brilliantly puts it, like all the rest, different from all the rest.

Maggie Nelson, author of The Argonauts

Grace Laverys memoirif thats what it is?is a daring, perverse, mind blowing, intellectual, hilarious, outrageous, inspired work of art that somehow is touchingly sincere while giving no fucks whatsoever. I read this laughing out loud, clutching my pearls, my mind exploding in wonder. This meditation on trans bodies, queer sex, pop culture, academia, and fantasy rips open bold and badly needed new terrain in literature.

Michelle Tea, author of Against Memoir and Black Wave

Hot, sick, painfully vivid.

Sophie Lewis, author of Full Surrogacy Now

Please Miss is a wickedly smart and filthily funny mosaic of criticism, memoir, and autofiction that is refreshingly avant-garde, profoundly erotic, and as enthralling as an intimate all-night conversation with the brainy high femme BFF you wish you had. I wish it upon everyone.

Melissa Febos, author of Whip Smart and Abandon Me

An unclassifiable pastiche of genuine beauty, a meta-memoir that takes its humor as seriously as its philosophy. Lush, louche, and utterly virtuosic, Please Miss takes a puff off a cigarette, and blooms an astonishing constellation of linked vignettes, an argument given in undercurrent, in root systems, in smoke. Please Miss gives us what we came for and then the much more for which we did not know we could come.

Jordy Rosenberg, author of Confessions of the Fox

I met Grace when she was still an egg (trans talk for folx who dont know yet that theyre trans) and think hers is perhaps the most spectacular, fully formed hatching since Minerva sprang from the head of Zeus.

Susan Stryker, author of Transgender History: The Roots of Todays Revolution , founding editor of Transgender Studies Quarterly , Emmy Awardwinning director of Screaming Queens: The Riot at Comptons Cafeteria

Grace Lavery has somehow managed to blend a rich overview of trans philosophy and theory with a languid, playful sexuality and humor that radiates from every page. Its a work of great seriousness that doesnt take itself seriously at all, and as long as I live I will never figure out how she did it.

Nicole Cliffe, author, columnist, editor of The Toast

Please Miss will awe you with its swung prose, its hairpin generic turns, and its bouts of gleeful self-scrutiny. These formal extroversions are part of the books argument and a deep insurrectionist pleasure in themselves. One chapter through and youre ready to draw with Lavery, stand with her, hold with her.

Paul Saint-Amour, Walter H. & Leonore C. Annenberg Professor in the Humanities, University of Pennsylvania

Always smart, frequently funny, and sometimesalways tastefully, I assure yougut-wrenchingly moving, Grace Laverys Please Miss is brilliant from start to finish. Its a howling tale of trans life, addiction, sex, love, loss, and this maddening and delightful meat out of which we are made. Packed as it is with delicious fabulation and sticky detail, the book makes a profound statement about not only what it means to be trans, but also what it means to be meaty, enfleshed, sexed, throbbing with desire, reeling from loss, ragged, loved and pleasured, carved and sutured, and, above all, struggling to find words for any and all of it. What a book! And have I mentioned its an absolute delight to read?

Gabriel Rosenberg, associate professor of gender, sexuality, and feminist studies at Duke University

Kaleidoscopic, magnetic, erudite, fierce, a raw nerve in a reverie, amped-up on desire & doubt, making trouble as if dared, dazzling like flames.

Jeremy Atherton Lin, author of Gay Bar

Please Miss cheerfully explodes the trans memoir as political and rhetorical apparatus, refusing norms of uplift or disclosure or cis reader reassurance in favor of the messy magic of a joyfully plural existence. You will annoy loved ones because youre going to read big chunks of this out loud to them and their jaws will drop at the chutzpah of Grace abounding.

Drew Daniel, of the band Matmos, associate professor of English at Johns Hopkins University

In On Truth and Lies in an Extra-Moral Sense, Nietzsche defines truth as a sum of human relations which have been poetically and rhetorically intensified, transferred, and embellished. Accordingly readers should not expect any act of writing to depict the nonfictional world with anything like unmediated accuracy, and certainly not one authored by someone pretentious enough to remind them of the fact on the copyright page . What I mean is: certain names and identifying details have been changed.

Copyright 2022 by Grace Lavery

Cover design by Ann Kirchner

Cover images Zave Smith Photography via Getty Images; Jan H Andersen / Shutterstock.com; VadimZosimov / Shutterstock.com

Cover copyright 2022 Hachette Book Group, Inc.

Hachette Book Group supports the right to free expression and the value of copyright. The purpose of copyright is to encourage writers and artists to produce the creative works that enrich our culture.

The scanning, uploading, and distribution of this book without permission is a theft of the authors intellectual property. If you would like permission to use material from the book (other than for review purposes), please contact permissions@hbgusa.com. Thank you for your support of the authors rights.

Seal Press

Hachette Book Group

1290 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10104

www.sealpress.com

@sealpress

First Edition: February 2022

Published by Seal Press, an imprint of Perseus Books, LLC, a subsidiary of Hachette Book Group, Inc. The Seal Press name and logo is a trademark of the Hachette Book Group.

The Hachette Speakers Bureau provides a wide range of authors for speaking events. To find out more, go to www.hachettespeakersbureau.com or call (866) 376-6591.

The publisher is not responsible for websites (or their content) that are not owned by the publisher.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Lavery, Grace E., author.

Title: Please miss: a heartbreaking work of staggering penis / Grace Lavery.

Description: First edition. | New York: Seal Press, 2022. | Includes bibliographical references and index. |