Paul Takes the Form of a Mortal Girl

Can’t believe this was a debut. This book tore my fucking heart out. Love, love, love.

A hallmark of good literary fiction to me is if I’m constantly questioning my ideas about the main character(s) as I read. That experience mimics our ever-shifting, ever-expanding ideas about the real people we interact with & it allows characters to come to life in a way that’s rare to find in other genres. Paul Takes the Form of a Mortal Girl excells in this area. If you like almost entirely character-focused books this is a great choice.

We see all of Paul’s painfully vivid flaws play out and are offered background information but never excuses, never intrusion on the author’s part to guide us into one way of thinking or the other. Paul simply is who he is, and was who he was, and the book seems to present this information to you almost in the style of a self-shot documentary, fitting for a character who views himself as a nearly 24/7 actor on-stage and likes to communicate through (pop) cultural references.

The fairy-tale exposition dumps were surprisingly well-executed. I thought I would hate them when I started reading the first one, but the dramatic change in tone and style ended up providing some much-needed breathing room away from the increasingly tense, gritty life of Paul, as well as being a really creative and fun way of letting us know more about him without breaking up the flow of events too abruptly.

What I really enjoyed most about this book was the amount of thought put into Paul’s special ability, and I guess Paul in general. Wanting the power to shapeshift is so common it’s a meme in trans culture, but instead of running with just a surface-level trans allegory, the author bundles that with a critique of the kind of person Paul represents: one who is sexually predatory, one who is willing to change even the most fundamental aspects of their being in order to win the (usually very temporary) affections of another, one who prioritizes conquest and status above all else. He is also not any of these things randomly. All of these traits can be traced back to his past experiences, and once he has to face them and subsequently face his own inaction, his own failure to pay attention to anything outside of himself and his pursuit of pleasure to cover up & run from the pain of living in this time period amidst all this unthinkable suffering, he finally begins to grow… or so you think, until those final few gut-wrenching pages hit.

I also really like that Paul doesn’t claim specific labels. He is most likely a bisexual trans woman and explicitly doesn’t consider himself a man, but in describing himself and thinking of himself continues to use he pronouns unless he’s actively shifted into Polly. Paul is obsessed with queerness and all things queer culture, but personally seems to feel little emotional connection to his own queer identity, likely because of that past pain causing him to want to distance himself from… himself, in order to avoid future trauma & not have to think about his own fragility and mortality. Also because of, again, who Paul is beyond just a queer person — the sort of person for whom labels are only useful when they are tools to be used in boosting one’s status or aiding conquests. He also derides cishetereonormativity and essentialism but doesn’t realize the extent to which his own concepts of straightness and gayness similarly trap him. He sorts every single person he sees into these neat little boxes he’s constructed based on their sexuality and/or gender expression and immediately forms very presumptive judgements on them. It’s a phenomenon I’ve experienced in queer spaces but not seen described much in fiction before, and it’s cool to see a depiction of this kind of odious self-righteous queer who thinks they’re the high royalty of gender-fuckery though they employ the exact same thought patterns they scorn conservatives for.

(Sidenote: on behalf of all the other campy faggy butches with septum rings out there: fuck you, Paul.)

There are some lines in this book I read multiple times because they scratched the part of my brain that loves fun, interesting sentences. One example: “Robin’s face betrayed nothing, a mirror looked into from an angle.” The previous passages painted the scene of the fashion show, the lights, feathers drifting around, and now I have this mental image of Robin’s head as a mirror that Paul’s failing to see himself reflected in… gorgeous. Just gorgeous. The kind of writing I want to do someday.

Every detail of these characters seems to have some significance, right down to their names. Robin, having a very gender neutral name, seems to have found some kind of long-term partnership and stability after making peace with his body, his special ability, his identity, his very self. Paul, having a traditionally masculine name, struggles with and almost seems to overcome similar problems to what Robin likely faced to get to where he is, but ultimately Paul can’t bear to stay grounded in himself long enough to truly change. He’s unable to free himself from the box of Paul, this special gender-related box he’s constructed alongside the various boxes he’s created for everyone else, and unable to even see this pattern of behavior because he thinks of himself as a liberated queer, already free of this pathological categorizing. And living in these boxes, putting all of his focus into identity and sex instead of family, friends, school, work, etc., is much more comfortable than living in the grim reality of life around the AIDs epidemic, the endless trauma, the constant death, all that completely preventable suffering, and also the consequences of his neglect of his personal life—aforementioned family, friends, etc. If we had all had to suffer as Paul and his peers did we probably would’ve been just as fucked up. This story is a tragedy, a bonafide tearjerker that expresses raw queer pain and reality and assholery in a beautiful way. At least imo.

Reading this book is like looking very closely at one leaf on a tree and only occasionally getting a glimpse of the whole branch. It’s easy to focus on dissecting Paul most of the time — then you sometimes begin to see the branch more clearly, to realize that Paul is not only running away from his past but also his present. His entire life is a carefully constructed distraction from the imminent threat of illness and death. Many of us today are living in a similar manner, constantly worried about & distracting ourselves from the threat (and in some places already, the reality) of unprecedented political persecution, so unfortunately it feels pretty topical. Also a reminder of the horrors of the epidemic, what the US gov allowed to happen to our communities.

So many nice little details, like for example when Paul is healing a bit and decides to cook for Derek he does so from a French cookbook, indicating his sexuality is changing focus from these rapid-fire hookups to building his (unfortunately doomed) connection with Derek, a shift from the “French” thoughts of relentless promiscuity to the cozy cooking of domestic partnership. And that line where Paul receives the present from Derek and thinks the picture without the money would’ve been enough? God that was great, that really tugged the ol’ heartstrings.

I kind of want to start a very sex-positive queer book club just so I can have other people to talk about this book with. It seems to be a bit divisive but I 100% adore it, though I will say the scene where Paul had to face Robin-as-Paul could’ve gone on for longer and some of those filler slice-of-life scenes could’ve been cut. Minor complaints though, ultimately the many great things about this book outweighed my tiny little gripes and I’d love to read it again someday.