{"id":268116,"date":"2024-09-23T15:45:08","date_gmt":"2024-09-23T19:45:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/xtramagazine.com\/?p=268116"},"modified":"2024-09-23T15:45:14","modified_gmt":"2024-09-23T19:45:14","slug":"still-life-katherine-packert-burke-review","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/xtramagazine.com\/culture\/still-life-katherine-packert-burke-review-268116","title":{"rendered":"\u2018Still Life\u2019 captures the messiness of writing trans autofiction"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Katherine Packert Burke\u2019s novel explores how little one can really understand <\/em>about one\u2019s own life while in the middle of living it <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Close to the beginning of Katherine Packert Burke\u2019s novel Still Life<\/em>, <\/em>its protagonist, Edith McAllister, a twenty-nine-year-old trans writer, is asked by friends about her novel-in-progress. She refuses to tell them about it. \u201cIt\u2019s not autofiction, is it?\u201d one of them asks. \u201cNo,\u201d Edith responds with a snort. She\u2019s lying: she\u2019s writing a barely fictionalized account of her relationship with her friend Valerie, another trans woman who shepherded Edith through the earliest stages of her transition, became an on-again-off-again lover and died suddenly in a car crash. Valerie\u2019s death punched a hole in Edith\u2019s life that she\u2019s still trying to work through, unsuccessfully, by writing, for nearly a year\u2014the kind of stalled-out work that has three working titles and a meandering, fragmentary draft. At the beginning of Still Life<\/em>, <\/em>Edith has started to think of her project, and by extension herself, as a failure, even as the book swallows more and more of her life. She describes it as a \u201cBorgesian map the same size as the territory,\u201d and it starts to implicate not only Valerie but her cis ex-girlfriend Tessa\u2014the two women who understood her best, who both ended up leaving her, one way or another. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Writing fiction is certainly one of the least efficient ways to process emotions, and it might even be counterproductive. Art has its own demands: the kind of work that goes into creating a compelling, coherent piece of writing can be at cross purposes with the kind of work that makes you feel more or less at ease with your own life. There are, of course, particular problems with writing about one\u2019s own life as a trans woman\u2014not only because so much of trans life is disappointing and frustrating, but because reconciling with one\u2019s own pre-transition past is an impossible task, an unbridgeable gap. Burke\u2019s novel\u2014her debut\u2014is a portrait of the struggles and frustrations of becoming a trans writer in the face of these difficulties, as well as the things that make it worth it. As Edith puts it, \u201cThere wasn\u2019t another way to the other side of this hurt.\u201d Edith spends most of this meandering, lyrical novel trying, over and over, to break through to this \u201cother side.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

 The plot of Still Life <\/em>is organized around the ordinary turning points of early adulthood\u2014moving to new cities, going to graduate school, breaking up with long-term partners, reuniting with old friends\u2014with only a couple dramatic ruptures. We first see Edith visiting Boston from Texas after an absence of six years, to give a talk at her college friend Adam\u2019s writing workshop. While she\u2019s there, she meets up with Tessa, her ex-girlfriend and best friend from college, who she\u2019s had a chilly relationship with since they broke up, and finds out that Tessa is now engaged to a cis man, which feels to Edith like a betrayal. Disappointed and saddened by her failure to re-establish their friendship, Edith returns to Texas, where she needs to come to some kind of decision about the book she\u2019s writing, and what she\u2019s going to do with her life. Threaded through this narrative in the present are chapters that flash back to Edith\u2019s recent past, which show her friendships with Tessa and Valerie, her post-graduate failed relationship with Tessa in Boston and, later, her romantic relationship with Valerie, who persuaded her to transition and whose unpredictability and restlessness cemented Edith\u2019s loneliness, even before she died unexpectedly. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

The way Burke juxtaposes these two timelines suggests irresolution: the flashbacks are Edith\u2019s memories, still poignant and alive\u2014they are also a catalogue of regrets, paths untaken, lost happiness. In particular, Edith seems to wish that she could reclaim her college life, where she and Tessa and Valerie were as inseparable as sitcom characters, with the kind of mind-melding friendship that is maybe only possible when everyone involved is nineteen years old. The flashbacks of their college life together are told in a breathless montage of sepia-toned snapshots: we see the trio comforting each other after breakups, teasing each other, going to parties together, crashing on each other\u2019s floors and making each other breakfast. The mismatch between their sexual and gender identities\u2014Tessa is a cis lesbian, Valerie is a bisexual trans woman and Edith, at that time, is still cis and straight (Burke only ever uses Edith\u2019s present-day name and pronouns for the flashbacks)\u2014doesn\u2019t seem to matter at all. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

We see, in the present-day timeline, how distant that world has become for Edith. Her relationship with Tessa moved over time from a place of easy mutual understanding to a suffocating closeness that ended in a prolonged breakup\u2014and Valerie\u2019s death further breaks something in their friendship. In Boston, when Edith meets with an inevitably more grown-up Tessa, she\u2019s confronted with a strange sense of d\u00e9j\u00e0 vu<\/em>, \u201clike being thrust into the second act of a play,\u201d Edith thinks ruefully. \u201cNow the boy is played by a girl.\u201d Their rapport has faded and their conversation is awkward, burdened with omissions and silences, particularly surrounding the now-absent Valerie. They\u2019ve drifted apart, and Edith sees this as a missed opportunity, even as it\u2019s clear that Tessa has moved on. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Regret saturates Edith\u2019s inner monologue\u2014her visit to Boston, and especially her meeting with Tessa, represents to her \u201call the eventualities she\u2019d removed herself from.\u201d We start to realize that Edith\u2019s regret is one of the things getting in the way of her writing. To wish that your life had gone another way is to fail to come to terms with what it actually is; when we see Edith thinking things like \u201c[she] couldn\u2019t tell stories about her own life when she understood it so poorly,\u201d what she\u2019s really doing is evading herself. What she longs for is a kind of settled, monogamous closeness, an uncomplicated happiness, which she feels locked out of now\u2014partly because of her transition, partly because of what feels to her like some nagging, innate flaw. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

After the fateful meeting with Tessa, she gives a wildly off-script talk to Adam\u2019s class of writing students:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cWhat I learned writing a book is the same thing I learned becoming a girl: you still have to wake up every day and be the person you are. And now you don\u2019t have the promise of being fixed by some future choice you\u2019ve been waiting to make.\u2026 So you keep on searching for new things, or waiting for the old things to work in ways they never have, and then one day you\u2019re twenty-nine years old and your ex-girlfriend is calling you to tell you that your other ex-girlfriend\u2014if she counts, if she ever loved you in a way that matters\u2014has died.\u201d <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Writing hasn\u2019t saved Edith in the exact same way that transition hasn\u2019t saved her, because people are never saved. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

The first half of the novel is heavily freighted with Edith\u2019s past: once she goes back to Texas, we get to see the queer adulthood she\u2019s built for herself in its wake. The plot gets anecdotal and loose. Edith attends queer house parties and trans rights protests and goes on a bunch of unsatisfying dates with men. Essayistic passages on Sondheim musicals and Gossip Girl <\/em>are interspersed more often in the text. Many colourful side characters are introduced, each with their own set of reasons of why they get on Edith\u2019s nerves. We get the sense that Edith is working toward something, growing up a little, even if she\u2019s still a bit of a mess. She\u2019s taking stock of herself, trying to move on. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Late in the novel, we learn that Edith developed a love for autofiction from Valerie, who recommended authors such as Ben Lerner, Kate Zambreno and Sheila Heti to her. Thinking about her, Edith rereads these books and has a small, but real breakthrough. \u201cWriting about life is antithetical to living and vice versa,\u201d Edith thinks. \u201cYou must empty out certain parts, must fill those gaps with something else.\u201d <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Still Life <\/em>has a lot in common with Heti, Lerner, and Zambreno stylistically, with its essayistic passages on art and the close conjoinment of life and the writing of it. Another thing that Burke\u2019s novel has in common with these writers is that it is about how little one can really understand <\/em>about one\u2019s own life while in the middle of living it\u2014that life is never solved, but that accepting this brings a kind of resolution. Shortly after Edith\u2019s small breakthrough, we see her abandon her project about Valerie\u2014an attempt to capture some essential, ineffable truth of their relationship and her death\u2014and we see her, while packing up her apartment, begin to write the first sentences of Still Life<\/em>, <\/em>the novel we are reading, a kind of metafictional fourth-wall break that also serves as the first real, albeit small, triumph for Edith. She has learned that it\u2019s better to linger in irresolution than to strain under the compulsion to squeeze her life into a false coherence.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Torrey Peters once wrote that \u201cparadoxically, for members of a group as marginalized as trans people, fiction frees writers to safely tell the truth.\u201d This freedom is what Edith discovers. Burke\u2019s novel rings true to my own reasons for writing fiction as a trans woman: fiction is a way of getting everything on paper, including the mistakes and missteps; the discomfort of leaving a life story filled with holes and blurry bits, events that fail to foreshadow and even the persistent, nagging sense of having lived a wrong life. It holds out the possibility, not of redeeming this material, but of giving it its own kind of dignity; it wagers that acceptance is more powerful than shame. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Katherine Packert Burke\u2019s novel explores how little one can really understand about one\u2019s own life while in the middle of living it<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1175,"featured_media":268126,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"editorial_slug":"7","_editorial_slug":"7","exclude_from_latest_block":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[6,7],"contributors":[2976],"topic":[70,113,141],"clients":[],"series":[],"timeliness":[61],"editorial_format":[2137],"type-of-work":[2542],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/xtramagazine.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/268116"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/xtramagazine.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/xtramagazine.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/xtramagazine.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1175"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/xtramagazine.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=268116"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/xtramagazine.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/268116\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":268122,"href":"https:\/\/xtramagazine.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/268116\/revisions\/268122"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/xtramagazine.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/268126"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/xtramagazine.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=268116"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/xtramagazine.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=268116"},{"taxonomy":"contributors","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/xtramagazine.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/contributors?post=268116"},{"taxonomy":"topic","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/xtramagazine.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/topic?post=268116"},{"taxonomy":"clients","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/xtramagazine.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/clients?post=268116"},{"taxonomy":"series","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/xtramagazine.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/series?post=268116"},{"taxonomy":"timeliness","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/xtramagazine.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/timeliness?post=268116"},{"taxonomy":"editorial_format","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/xtramagazine.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/editorial_format?post=268116"},{"taxonomy":"type-of-work","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/xtramagazine.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/type-of-work?post=268116"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}