Volume 4, No. 11: Letters as Portals

Honoring Cecilia Gentili

Greetings, book and treat people! The Trans Rights Readathon starts on Friday and I am so excited. I have officially checked out Too Many Books (ask me how many times I’ve maxed out my holds limit in the past two weeks). I’m also deep in a reading slump. I’ve read less so far in March than I have in any month since 2016. It’s quite possible I’ll only read a tiny fraction of the books I’ve checked out. But who cares? I’m energized! I’m ready! I have eight books of poetry and eight graphic novels and a big stack of picture books and I’m going to shelve everything else to celebrate trans authors and trans lit.

I’ll be donating to the Trans Asylum Seeker Support Network (TASSN), a radical mutual aid collective based here in Western MA that supports trans asylum seekers in all sorts of ways. I’ll share more information next week about how you can contribute. I have a very exciting newsletter in the works!

Today I have a review of one of the best books I’ve read so far this year: Faltas by Cecilia Gentili. I read it in early January. About a month later, on February 6th, Gentili died at age 52. She was a beloved trans activist, author, performer, sex worker, and community legend. I encourage you to read her words, and to seek out the words of the many people who loved and admired her. I don’t know what else to say about it—the heartbreak and the anger, the endless ongoing grief. One thing and then another and then another. I do know that this book—this sharp, funny, hurting, gossipy, forgiving book—moved and delighted me. Honoring her work is one (small) way I can honor her life.

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The Book

Faltas: Letters to Everyone in My Hometown Who Isn’t My Rapist by Cecilia Gentili (Memoir, 2023)

This slim book is a collection of letters to (as the subtitle declares) everyone in Gentili’s hometown in Argentina except her rapist. Mostly, she writes to women: her grandmother, her mom, a rival who hated her, an older friend whom she loved but who wronged her. She never writes to the man who repeatedly raped her directly, but his ghost, and the afterlife of the abuse she survived, is everywhere. It’s a brutal book, but it’s also extremely funny. It’s gossipy and campy and brash. She goes on long tangents about fashion. She makes biting jokes that cut down to the truth of what it takes to survive. She treats her past self with a mix of curiosity, tenderness, gentle reproach, and wildly open honesty. This is how she treats the recipients of her letters, too: she doesn’t let anyone off easy; she looks at them. I survived this, she says, over and over again, so I’m going to tell this story my way, and you’re going to shut up and listen. She makes truth-telling into a gift, an offering. It’s some of the most poignant memoir-storytelling I’ve ever read.

One of Gentili’s many gifts as a writer is her ability to name and make visible the mess of contradictions that define most of our lives. Yes, this is a book about sexual violence. Yes, this is a book about child abuse. Yes, this is a book about the utter glory of queer friendship. Yes, this is a book about pleasure. We—readers, I mean—have a tendency, I think, to focus on what is most horrifying, most painful in a story. To take whatever that thing is and make it the book’s heart. Gentili doesn’t allow that, though. These letters are a mixed-up collection of celebration and rage.

She writes to her grandmother, who let her wear dresses as a kid, who loved her fiercely and with abandon, who gave her refuge and comfort, even before Gentili had the words to make her experiences legible. She writes to a woman she looked up to like an older sister, who did not give her help when she needed it, who could have protected her and didn’t. In letter after letter, she describes all the ways that her family and wider community did not protect her. She writes about their scorn, their homophobia and transphobia, the ways they let the abuse go on and on. And—during those same years, during that same time—she writes about the deep and profound happiness she experienced with her grandmother. In a letter to her best friend, a gay man, she writes about their sisterhood, a relationship that saved her life. She refuses to look away from any of it. She refuses to reduce herself down to any one thing.

She also refuses to simplify her relationships, especially her relationships with other women. So many women gave her something she needed or wanted, helped or supported her for a period of time, conditionally invited her into their sisterhood. These same women used her, mistreated her, and cast her out. In some cases, she did the same thing, using relationships to soothe herself, to survive, to try out an idea or identity, to get through something. All of this is complicated by the fact that not all these women saw her girlhood, and also by the ways that women are socialized to seek approval from men.

Gentili isn’t seeking forgiveness from these complicated women from her past, although she sometimes offers it. She’s not making declarations—this person ruined my life, this person saved it, this person hated me, this person loved me unconditionally. It’s more like she’s puncturing a wound, breaking a silence, saying: I want to tell you what it was like, what it felt like between us, two hurt and hurting people.

This is the second trans memoir-in-letters I’ve read recently (I also loved Love and Money, Sex and Death by McKenzie Wark). I’ve been thinking about what kind of queer and trans magic letters might hold, what kind of specific queer and trans power might live in this form of address, this reaching back to older versions of self in the service of story. There’s something about a letter that feels like a spell, and spells, to me, feel distinctly queer. In letters, relationships can be muddled over, remade, transformed. Faltas is deeply relational—Gentili is seeking to understand herself by speaking to other people. She’s talking to herself by talking to the people who made her. So I’m wondering what it is that lives inside letters, how they can change a narrative, if there’s something in their structure that invites queerness.

Perhaps part of it is that so many trans people have been forced to hold stories inside themselves for so long. Gentili was forced to hold so much inside herself as a girl. So much was taken from her. Perhaps letters are a way to send the lost stories back, to not only retell or reclaim them, but to reshape and return them. The act of writing a letter is an act of power, a way to take up space. It’s also an act of opening. Letters—even unsent letters—are portals. Anyone who’s ever poured their heart into a letter and then burned it, or buried it, or given it to a trusted friend (and not its intended recipient) to read, knows this.

And if queer and trans folk know anything, it’s how to make a portal.

All that pain made me strong, of course, but who wants to be strong? I wanted to be happy! And you wanted me to be happy, too. How remarkable to want another person to be happy. This is what I feel when I get one of these girls started on hormones. Who is ever happier than a transsexual starting on hormones? They all call me Mom, but maybe I should ask them to call me Grandma.

And Beauty

• This is a gorgeous review of Faltas and a moving interview with Cecilia Gentili by Agnes Borinsky.

• Local folks, I’m going to be in town for the second Libations & Liberation meetup. Maybe I’ll see you there?

• This is a short and absolutely vital piece on the fallacy of the “reading creates empathy” attitude by Safia Elhillo.

As always, a little bit of beauty to send you on your way: I went to the spring bulb show at Smith last weekend, or, as I like to call it, my annual flower bath.

Catch you next week, bookish friends.