“A vulnerable and vital memoir about the search for identity and belonging outside the restrictive masculine gender norms of 1950s America. Novelist Keith Maillard’s journey to locate himself as nonbinary in ‘a narrative of gender’ that had long excluded him is a valuable addition to literature about the lives and histories of trans and nonbinary people.”
— Rachel Giese, author of Boys: What It Means to Become a Man
“Through constellated fragments of memory, key moments in twentieth-century America, and the unfolding of an acclaimed literary life, The Bridge is the forthright, deeply moving memoir of a nonbinary writer coming of age and coming to self. Intimate and expansive in equal measure, this story speaks with particular generosity to all of us who’ve been deemed ‘too much’ or ‘too little’ in our gender expression, as much by those who loved us as by those who despised us. This is a book that will stay with you long after its final lines, in all the very best ways.”
— Daniel Heath Justice, author of Why Indigenous Literatures Matter
“Keith Maillard’s engaging memoir about gender and the writing life is a tender and moving portrait of a writer’s journey towards understanding themselves and their work.”
— Zoe Whittall, author of The Best Kind of People
Excerpt from The Bridge
I’ve always had the impulse to tell stories. It must have started with wanting to hear stories. When I was little, my mother put me to bed by telling me the adventures of Bucky the Bug, a tale that she made up on the spot. “You never minded going to bed,” my mother told me. “You always wanted to hear the next part of the story.” Those summer nights, as they settled down on me, felt as huge as continents. The light would be fading out at the windows; I’d be tucked into bed but not sleepy yet, and my mother would be telling me what was happening to Bucky the Bug right now. When my mother stopped telling me stories, I begin to tell them to myself. The first object I ever held in my hand was a pencil—that’s the family legend—and as soon as I could, I began to notate my stories with stick figures. I spent so much time drawing that I developed a thick callus on the middle finger of my right hand.
The lower halves of our bathroom walls were tiled. Each tile—cream-colored and blank—looked to me like the panel of a comic strip. I’d sit on the bathroom floor and draw on the tiles with a soft lead pencil, filling in each one with the drawing that went with the story I was telling myself, working my way around the bathroom walls until I had filled all the tiles as high as I could reach. Every evening my grandmother would scrub them clean with Ajax Cleanser so I could start over the next day and do it again. I felt no sense of loss when my comic strips were wiped away. I loved waking up in the morning knowing that I had all those shining blank tiles to fill.
When I got older, I moved from bathroom tiles to paper. I drew endless pictures of girls. If anybody had given me the “draw-a-person” test that psychologists sometimes use as an indicator of a child’s gender identity, I would have drawn a girl without a moment’s hesitation. I also clipped pictures of girls from the magazines lying around our apartment—The Ladies’ Home Journal or The Saturday Evening Post. In the brightly-colored cartoon advertising of the day little daughters often appeared with their moms to stare in delight and amazement at some gleaming new kitchen appliance, and those were the girls I wanted to look like.
It’s hard for me to re-create what I thought about boys and girls. Putting it into any words at all will automatically clear up at least some of the confusion I remember, but the confusion is what feels true to me. I didn’t see much difference between boys and girls except for the length of their hair and the clothes they wore. So if you cut off a girl’s hair and put her in pants, she would be a boy, or if you let my hair grow out and put me in a dress, I would be a girl. But, all the same, I could sense that there was something more to it than that, although I couldn’t imagine what it could be. The older I got, the more it bothered me.
Copyright © 2021 Keith Maillard