My whole life I’ve felt like a bad girl, like something was inherently wrong with me that I couldn’t manage to play the part society (and my immigrant family) had carefully laid out for me. From coming out to being splashed across headlines for listing “sex work” as a work experience on LinkedIn, I always seemed to be doing something wrong. Never mind my ADHD and autism—just recently discovered—that now puts a whole new lens of understanding behind my “badness”.
I can only speak to my experience, which I do in my debut, Being Bad: Breaking the Rules and Becoming Everything You’re Not Supposed to Be, so the books below—spanning from auto-fiction to fiction and back to memoir—recount stories of AFAB people (Assigned Female at Birth) and trans women, and all the ways society has claimed our behavior—and sheer existence—bad.
It’s not always that obvious, and some of these works never say it out loud, but to be born without a penis—let alone born with one and being a woman anyway—makes us all bad from birth. And if we choose to not conform, constrict, and consistently meet all the instructions laid out for us before we ever exited the womb, well, society deems us doomed.
The books below are some of my favorites. From a trans non-binary butch memoir about a person going to a conservative Catholic college, to a postmenopausal woman orgasming herself into trouble, each work is not only achingly well-written, but infused with the particular perspective of those who know what it is to be on the outside—even if they pretend not to be.
Playboy by Constance Debre, translated by Holly James
Constance Debre’s prose is direct, emotionally removed staccato sentences that makes it clear she’s now a butch dyke. The granddaughter of France’s former prime minister, Playboy, the first in her trilogy of memoirs, is a series of sharply cut short vignettes, chronicling her first sexual encounters with women—an older married woman, a young model—and her fumbling liberation away from her prominent career as a lawyer, and becoming a broke, single lesbian—which is already “bad” enough. But add her obvious distaste for her grandfather’s politics, and descriptions of her eye-fucking passing woman, and she becomes one of the foremost contemporary voices in French literature and discourse to date. Her writing is vivid, unworried about offending, and alive.
Luster by Raven Leilani
Dark and uncomfortable, this novel begins with Edie, a young Black woman having online sex while sitting at a desk at her day job. The man she’s talking to is older and white, a midwestern married man living in Jersey with a much simpler life. Narrated in the first-person, there’s a self-destructiveness about Edie, an attraction to violence and an apathy towards herself. We see her on an uncomfortable first date with the white man, Eric, and after losing her job, she finds herself in front of his home, meeting his wife, and offered the guest room. It is a fascinating work, yet I found myself wanting to close my eyes and cover my ears through some of the violently visceral descriptions of Edie’s life—a woman making “bad”, if not terrible, choices that you keep rooting for.
Burning Butch by R/B Mertz
This searing memoir is one of bravery, courage, and a shitload of confusion. When Mertz moves away from their abusive father and moves in with their mother and stepfather—who’ve entrenched themselves into conservative Catholic homeschooling, and all that comes with that—Mertz is just starting to feel the first stirrings of queerness. And yet, Catholicism becomes the safety shield away from their father who’s a non-believer. We watch Mertz choose a Catholic college in conservative Ohio, navigating their way through sexual attractions, questions of identity, and whether there’s space for them in the community they gave so much of themselves to, or anywhere else. Mertz isn’t just a bad Catholic, but not even a girl, at all.
Vladimir by Julia May Jonas
I can’t talk about this book without talking about the cover, the first reason I picked it up. A cropped close-up shot of a man’s chest peeking through emerald green corduroy, his gold braceleted wrist resting on his thigh, his hands right over the pants of his crotch. The narrator is a literary professor in her late 50’s, married to the chair of the English Department who’s had his fair share of sexual student relationships. Now, the narrator’s “feminism” is being questioned as she doesn’t support the removal of her husband from faculty after 300 hundred students sign a petition against him. She now has become “an enabler” by frowning upon the female students’ claim of no agency. She stops being a student favorite just as a young new assistant professor moves to town with his brilliant writer wife. Our narrator becomes hopelessly jealous of the wife—not just of her husband, but of her writing career that’s taking off, while hers has stagnated. A postmenopausal woman filled with lust, ambition, and a little hint of violent recklessness, a story of an older woman doing none of the things she’s “supposed to”.
Bad Girls by Camila Sosa Villada, translated by Kit Maude
“Las Malas” (translated from the Spanish) dives into a community of Argentinian trans sex workers, mirroring the author’s real life experience. Our heroine is Camila, a young trans woman who’s born to a poor family that violently rejects her once she starts dressing like a girl. She finds her way to university, and, to support herself, starts working as a sex worker and finds her way into a community of trans sex workers who take her in and become family. In the bushes, they find a baby, and the magical realism begins to unfold. Funny, gritty, and perfectly magical, Sosa Villada writes to her community, not for anyone else to understand.
The Guest by Emma Cline
A summer in the Hamptons with a self-destructive sugar baby. Need I say more? Okay, okay, I will. Alex fucks up at a fancy dinner party and gets dumped by her rich older “boyfriend” and put on a train back to Brooklyn. Except, she doesn’t get on it and instead spends a week pretending to be totally fine—with no money, no phone, and nowhere to sleep, conning and causing destruction along the way. All she needs is to get through the week until her ex’s Labor Day party where she can win him back. I won’t spoil the ending. A story of excess, addiction, and dark comedy, somehow you’ll find yourself rooting for this antiheroine.
Nevada by Imogen Binnie
Easily one of my favorites, this book is often considered the first work of the new “trans lit”. Written by a trans woman for other trans women, the novel follows Maria, a Brooklyn internet blogging trans woman who writes tips for other trans women online. Although she’s positioned herself as an “educator” of sorts for baby trans women, she’s a mess. Her external and internal lives come undone as she gets dumped, gets fired, and borrows-but-actually-steals her best friend’s car and begins a roadtrip across the country, meeting a young sales assistant at a Walmart in Nevada who she can tell is maybe, probably, trans. She takes James under her wing and you’ll have to read the rest because it’s an absolute cult classic for a reason, primarily because it’s not written for anyone else but Binnie’s own community.
Milk Fed by Melissa Broder
This book is wildly visceral, strange and somehow extremely relatable—at least for me, having struggled with eating disorders, and being queer and Jewish. The story follows Rachel, a mentally unwell young woman working in LA who falls in love with a Jewish Orthodox woman who runs the frozen yogurt counter at her chosen spot. The story is filled with self-loathing and perfectly accurate descriptions of what it is to be food-obsessed with an eating disorder, a repressed queer person, and a lonely human. The whole time I was reading I found myself being completely captivated by Broder’s mind. A book that shows all the traps of trying so hard to be “good”.
