Overview

A New York Times bestselling feminist author’s sparkling memoir of gender transition (among many other things). Reasons for Transitioning: Want to impress good-looking ex; Want to upset good-looking ex; Bored of existing wardrobe, looking for excuse to buy all-new clothes that don’t fit in a new way; Younger siblings getting too much attention; Neoliberalism??; Want to sing both parts of a duet at karaoke; Something about upper-body strength; Excited to reinforce a different set of sexist stereotypes; Cheaper haircuts; Just love layering shirts ... From the beloved writer behind The Toast and Slate’s ‘Dear Prudence’ column comes a personal essay collection exploring popular culture, literature, religion, and sexuality. With wit and compassion, Daniel Mallory Ortberg revisits beloved cultural and literary figures in the light of his transition.

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9781913348144

Table of Contents

Reviews

Praise for Texts from Jane Eyre: 'Humourist Ortberg offers a side-splitting take on famous literary characters from Gilgamesh to Hermione Granger by peeking into their imagined text messages ... Ortberg charmingly captures, in short, palatable bytes, what is most memorable about famous books and their indelible characters.' * Publishers Weekly * Praise for The Merry Spinster: 'Unlike most modern versions of fairy tales, Ortberg's sly, scathing renditions avoid cliches and self-referential edginess, and instead strike directly at the heart ... The book brings the shock of the new and the shock of recognition into play at the same time; it's a tour de force of skill, daring, and hard-earned bravura.' * Publishers Weekly * Praise for The Merry Spinster: 'A wholly satisfying blend of silliness, feminist critique, and deft prose makes this a collection of bedtime stories that will keep you up at night for all the right reasons.' STARRED REVIEW * Kirkus Reviews * 'The 'Dear Prudence' columnist and expert culture commentator returns with his sharpest, wittiest collection yet, a survey of pop culture ranging from scathing to plain weird.' -- David Canfield * Entertainment Weekly * '[Ortberg] puts his dazzling wit and humour on display in a 'memoir-adjacent' collection of essays that touches on topics as wide-ranging as Lord Byron, the Bible and House Hunters in his exploration of self as a transgender man.' -- Barbara VanDenburgh * USA Today * 'With this collection of essays, he will make you laugh and cry with stories of transition, family, culture and William Shatner.' -- Karla Strand * Ms. * 'Daniel Mallory Ortberg's Something That May Shock And Discredit You is three eloquent books in one: memoir, essay collection, and treasure trove of cultural analysis, all coming in under 250 pages. Ortberg is as nimble a storyteller as they come, so the shifts from painful personal revelations to pithy observations about Lord Byron turn on a dime while still mostly feeling part of the same whole ... The details are all Ortberg, as is the ability to turn eschatology into something more accessible and less judgmental.' -- Danette Chavez * The A.V Club * '[A] a hybrid of incisive cultural criticism and heartfelt rumination on transitioning and queer identity.' -- Erin Keane, Ashlie D. Stevens, and Hanh Nguyen * Salon * '[A] memoir comprised of the humorous essays that have become his trademark ... Some are essays and some are scripts or imagined conversations; at first the chapters and interludes are distinct, but at a certain point they start to blend together. All are hilarious, infused with the type of magical thinking Lavery excels at. They weave Lavery's life experiences together with his historical and pop-cultural obsessions.' -- Claire Landsbaum * Vanity Fair * 'Deeply honest and often sidesplittingly funny.' -- Michelle Hart * O: The Oprah Magazine * 'This book is clever and strange and lovely and sad and hysterical and poignant. These are the qualities that make up most of my favourite people and all of my favourite books. You really need to read this now.' -- Jenny Lawson, <i>New York Times</i> bestselling author of <i>Let's Pretend This Never Happened</i>and <i>Furiously Happy</i> 'Like all of his work, Something That May Shock and Discredit You is a stand-alone pillar in Ortberg's remarkable canon, one in which the lines typically drawn around topic and genre are obliterated, resulting in a wide-open field of possibility.' * Electric Literature * 'Slate advice columnist Ortberg (Texts from Jane Eyre) brings the full force of his wit and literary depth to this genre-bending essay collection. Describing it as 'memoir-adjacent,' Ortberg intersperses searingly honest passages about his journey as a transgender man with laugh-out-loud funny literary pastiche ... Ortberg provides an often hilarious, sometimes discomfiting, but invariably honest account of one man's becoming.' * Publishers Weekly * 'At last, we have the work of transgender bathos we didn't know we needed, but very much do ... Ortberg's narrative is anything but linear: It skips back in time to mythic Greece, traipses across the landscape of contemporary pop culture and, in one wonderfully fabulist entry that would make Carmen Maria Machado proud, slips outside of time altogether ... One of our smartest, most inventive humour writers, Ortberg combines bathos and the devotional into a revelation ... By broadening what transgender memoir can do, the author is in good company with Viviane Namaste, who decades ago diagnosed autobiography as 'the only discourse in which transsexuals are permitted to speak.' Ortberg partakes of neither the damaging trope of tragic transness nor the sentimental sanctimony that we are permitted, offering instead the comic and the transcendent.' -- Jordy Rosenberg * The New York Times * 'Ortberg's playful takes on pop culture as he explores everything from House Hunters to Golden Girls to Lord Byron, Lacan, and Rilke ... Ortberg's writing is vulnerable but confident, specific but never narrow, literal and lyrical. The author is refreshingly unafraid of his own uncertainty, but he's always definitive where it counts ... You'll laugh, you'll cry, often both at once. Everyone should read this extraordinary book.' STARRED REVIEW * Kirkus Reviews *

Praise for Texts from Jane Eyre: 'Humourist Ortberg offers a side-splitting take on famous literary characters from Gilgamesh to Hermione Granger by peeking into their imagined text messages ... Ortberg charmingly captures, in short, palatable bytes, what is most memorable about famous books and their indelible characters.' * Publishers Weekly * Praise for The Merry Spinster: 'Unlike most modern versions of fairy tales, Ortberg's sly, scathing renditions avoid cliches and self-referential edginess, and instead strike directly at the heart ... The book brings the shock of the new and the shock of recognition into play at the same time; it's a tour de force of skill, daring, and hard-earned bravura.' * Publishers Weekly * Praise for The Merry Spinster: 'A wholly satisfying blend of silliness, feminist critique, and deft prose makes this a collection of bedtime stories that will keep you up at night for all the right reasons.' STARRED REVIEW * Kirkus Reviews * 'Deeply honest and often sidesplittingly funny.' -- Michelle Hart * O: The Oprah Magazine * 'This book is clever and strange and lovely and sad and hysterical and poignant. These are the qualities that make up most of my favourite people and all of my favourite books. You really need to read this now.' -- Jenny Lawson, <i>New York Times</i> bestselling author of <i>Let's Pretend This Never Happened</i>and <i>Furiously Happy</i> 'Like all of his work, Something That May Shock and Discredit You is a stand-alone pillar in Ortberg's remarkable canon, one in which the lines typically drawn around topic and genre are obliterated, resulting in a wide-open field of possibility.' * Electric Literature * 'Slate advice columnist Ortberg (Texts from Jane Eyre) brings the full force of his wit and literary depth to this genre-bending essay collection. Describing it as 'memoir-adjacent,' Ortberg intersperses searingly honest passages about his journey as a transgender man with laugh-out-loud funny literary pastiche ... Ortberg provides an often hilarious, sometimes discomfiting, but invariably honest account of one man's becoming.' * Publishers Weekly * 'Ortberg's playful takes on pop culture as he explores everything from House Hunters to Golden Girls to Lord Byron, Lacan, and Rilke ... Ortberg's writing is vulnerable but confident, specific but never narrow, literal and lyrical. The author is refreshingly unafraid of his own uncertainty, but he's always definitive where it counts ... You'll laugh, you'll cry, often both at once. Everyone should read this extraordinary book.' STARRED REVIEW * Kirkus Reviews *

Author Information

Daniel Mallory Ortberg is the ‘Dear Prudence’ advice columnist at Slate, the co-founder of The Toast, and the New York Times bestselling author of Texts From Jane Eyre and The Merry Spinster.

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