Books by the Lake

A voice from the borderlands of gender, from someone damaged by a society trying to force one-thing-or-the-other. This is an autobiographical novel. The main character found belonging for a little while in the world of butch-femme culture during the sixties, but that culture didn't last and once again there was no place for her sort of "different". There's no reason to miss the brutality that the inhabitants of that world were subjected to, but Feinberg remembers the caring and support that they provided each other and says that there must still be a way for that. And the search for an identity, a real me, still goes on.

I previously read the letter that opens this book, and still think it's a really good piece of writing. The first half of the book does a lot of expanding on that letter, and therefore is less striking. In the second half my interest was hooked again. That post-gay-liberation world is closer to my own (but not very close!) and besides being a gripping personal statement, the book raises troubling ongoing issues.