Annotation
Maria is a 29-year-old trans woman in New York. Four years after transitioning, her life is stagnant: the same dead-end bookstore job, the same girlfriend she no longer loves, the same inability to tell anyone how she feels. After getting dumped by her girlfriend and fired from her job, Maria decides that a big, irresponsible adventure will fix her life. She steals her ex’s car, buys $400 worth of heroin, and drives towards California. James is a closeted trans woman living a meaningless life in Star City, Nevada. When Maria meets her at the Wal-Mart where she works, she decides that the journey can save both of them.
Nevada is a foundational work in transgender fiction. Its unapologetic depiction of the messy and the mundane as well as the ecstatic aspects of trans women’s lives changed what could be written in trans literature.
Reflection
Nevada undermines readers’ expectations about adventure novels. Though its premise is a road trip, we see almost none of Maria’s month-long drive from New York to Nevada. Instead, Binnie shows what came before and after that journey. Nevada undermines traditional trans narratives in the same way. We see none of the supposed adventure of gender transition, only characters struggling to make sense of life before and after coming out. Both of these moves were deliberate – in the afterword to the 2022 edition of Nevada, Binnie wrote, “because the mysterious in-between phase [of transition] is the most salaciously interesting thing to people who don’t have to go through it, I decided to cut it out” (Binnie, 2022, p. 268).
Where, then, does the adventure reside in Nevada? It is in the small things around the edges of the journey. It is in the break-up, the firing, the chance meeting between Maria and James. These are things many of us have experienced. Watching two characters who are cut off from their emotions (Maria through alcohol, James through cannabis) experiencing these things in all their emotional intensity forces us to question which adventures we seek out in literature, and which we choose to ignore.
Citation
Binnie, I. (2022). Nevada (2nd ed.). Farrar, Straus & Giroux. (Original work published 2013, Topside Press)
