Review: A ROTTEN GIRL by J. Ursula Topaz
At the risk of sounding like a breathless publicist, the most apt description I can think of for A Rotten Girl is that it’s sizzling and topical. Did you enjoy Yellowface and its take on the commodification of identity in publishing? Would you like something like that except from a transfeminine perspective? Try this!
Because this book deals with a trans woman writer, her circumstances are a little less glamorous than what’s in Yellowface: more along the line of small presses than big trade publishing, expensive writing workshops, and six-figure deals. Pearl Camellia, a litfic author, has her debut put out by a micropress. The book sinks, and the publisher not soon after.
“That wasn’t entirely your fault, Pearl,” my agent had said. Well, typed. I had never actually met Beatrice. “They were rather incompetent, even for a small press,” she continued. “But your book’s Titanic reenactment didn’t help. I really thought your story would have broader appeal, you know, connect to normal people. But the market must have shifted. Perhaps if you’d made it more miserable, that would have hit the mark.”
“It was drawn from real experience,” I explained, again. “It has precisely the level of misery of my actual life. Which is more than I’d like, but is not infinite.”
“Right,” said Beatrice. “I’m just saying that if the protagonist got beaten up more, that would probably sell better. Maybe she could have fallen for her bully? Gritty but spicy. She mends his transphobia; that would have been a good ending, right? You could write about how you shouldn’t be transphobic.”
“Inspiring,” I said. “Maybe we can get J.K. to blurb?”
“Oh, I don’t think—ah, you’re mocking me?” said Beatrice.
“A bit.”
Thus begins Pearl’s pivot to something more… commercial, that is, a gay male romance very much aimed at voyeuristic male-attracted women (the titular ‘rotten girls’), except in a market hungry for authenticity she can’t very well be publishing that as a trans lesbian. Very well: she concocts an alternate identity, Paul Sisters, a cis gay man who absolutely loves his female readers, and plays up ‘his’ identity for the same.
It’s a delightful setup that immediately skewers ‘the market’, the publishing industry, and the many ways in which a marginalized author has to sell their identity and make it both palatable and legible to ‘the market’. As Paul, our heroine is asked to remove mentions of body hair from her gay male protagonists; she’s also asked to completely remove a secondary trans lesbian character, or otherwise make the character cis and male-attracted. ‘Our audience is very tolerant of trans genders, of course,’ her editor informs her, but, ‘I just worry this is confusing for them. They don’t really like politics.’ The audience eager for hairless gay men, after all, doesn’t have much use for trans lesbians in their erotica.
She leaned across and kissed my cheek, leaving biscuit crumbs. It was very quick; we were both nervous about public displays of affection, but there was no-one around. (On an evening walk, we had once almost tripped over a couple fucking behind a bush. We were all terribly British and made our apologies. Barbs wanted to warn them about compressing the topsoil, but I managed to persuade her not to. It left me wondering whether our aversion to outdoor PDA was somewhat over the top. But then I’d remembered that we would be doubly hated if we revealed that we were both transgender and had an actual sexuality.)
One aspect that’s omnipresent throughout the book is the fear of what’d happen if they are seen being trans (let alone romantic or sexual) in public, something that of course doesn’t appear in Pearl’s novel—it’s a part of queer life that rarely appears in media made for a straight audience (unless it’s misery porn, ala A Little Life), a concern that Pearl’s editor might have told her is ‘a little too political’, a disruption of the sexual fantasy. Pearl knows she’s sanitizing and amputating the book so the result would be more palatable, and deep down she is contemptuous toward her new readers, but she’s come too far now to stop.
As the book’s star rises, though, Pearl’s personal life begins to unravel. Her girlfriend Barbara discovers that Pearl was mining their love life for the book—turning the imaginary them into two imaginary men, something that with good reasons upsets Barbara, who sees this not as just a violation of their intimacy but an act of misgendering. And Pearl isn’t exactly always lovable: she is self-centered and more invested in her new career—as well as the public praise and commercial success she’s experiencing for the first time—than she is in her girlfriend’s feelings. Simultaneously she exults in finally being read, while at the same time feeling flashes of dysphoria about her alter-ego and resentment that she can’t claim the work as her own.
The eventual collapse of Pearl’s lies is calamitous: she becomes, as they say, the main character on social media—not quite like the protagonist of Yellowface, because unlike June, Pearl is not a white person who’s stolen material from a woman of color; she’s a trans woman who tried her best to be sincere in her writing, and quickly realized the world doesn’t want a trans woman’s sincerity or authenticity. Her actions are far more understandable, and her treatment not so much just desserts as an awful tragedy: a different person—a cis man, say—would have been easily forgiven and allowed to move on, whereas at the end Pearl is left with almost nothing.
But this isn’t a story about suffering: ‘I am one of those red dots on an aeroplane diagram; damaged but alive,’ Pearl says toward the end. She gets a second chance, at least with her girlfriend and maybe others too.
A Rotten Girl is also available in audiobook.