Bookstore Creep: Paul Takes the Form of a Mortal Girl from Wallace Books
This column may be perplexing without context. Check out the previous columns in the Bookstore Creep series:
I - Love After the End, from Belmont Books
II - Hikuri, from Mother Foucault
III - Alien Daughters Step into the Sun, from Word Virus Books
IV - Free Association
The first time I took this book out to read in public I could have hooked up with the bartender. Rolling up with my headphones on, in from the icy wind at nearly midnight on a Monday, I plopped this hot-pink title on the bar and ordered a Phở. After about a half a page the soup came out, brought by a young guy with gauges and a smirk, telling me “I hope you got to read a page at least”. I replied that I had not been able to, with a primarily genuine smile. If I hadn’t been interrupted by dozens of men in the past before even finishing a page of a book that I’d had the whimsical notion to read in public, it may have been a fully genuine smile. Then, of course, he asked me “what are you reading anyways?”
You see, the cover and synopsis of this book are on the prowl just like the main character, Paul Polydoris, who spends 337 pages fucking and thinking about fucking. My copy was obtained at Wallace Books, right in the bougie downtown of Sellwood. The interior of this bookshop has no bougie notions, refreshingly. Julie has owned the house-converted-to-bookshop for 27 years, and it seems that the shelves themselves have remained the same precariously stacked pieces of 2x4 for all those years, slowly warping. Usually when I play the game of finding my next book for this column, I choose from a few titles suggested by the bookstore owner. This time, I was directed to a stack of new titles by trans authors that was close to the entrance. It was the first time that I realized that trans is 5/13ths of the word transgressive. While there has been some sort of interest in queer writing that does not overly sexualize the characters and instead portrays them the same way that authors have always portrayed ‘everyday people’, Andrea Lawlor does the opposite in Paul Takes the Form of a Mortal Girl. Self-proclaimed as a work of fiction that loosely conceals their real queer experiences from the 1990s, Lawlor takes the title of trans author and becomes transgressive author by going deep. There is so much pride in this book that it resulted in a paperback that actively seduces with its cover.
“It’s this book about a college-aged guy named Paul who lives in Iowa City, and he can change his body so that he can engage in whatever kind of sexual deviance he wants.” The bartender raised his eyebrows and leaned over to read the cover (I’ll reiterate that it is bright pink and add that there is a spray-painted black pair of cherries). He read outloud from the cover “Tight. Deep. Hot.” I smiled and spooned at my Phở, although it was still too steamy to eat. Squeezed some lime and sprinkled some bean sprouts on top for something to do. Listened to his responding reference of some netflix show where a witch gives birth to a pussycat out of her ‘side pussy’. Then some more customers came in and I was able to keep reading.
Sometimes, for Paul Polydoris, the game is enough. He just wants to know that he has caught someone, he doesn’t necessarily need to fuck or even kiss; there is not one end game. The one kind of sex that Paul does not have and can not have is straight sex. Take the game he always plays on elevators: “He could tell within a very close margin of error whose cock he could suck, who would drop to his knees the minute everyone else left the bathroom, which girl would beg him to shove his pussy in her face, which girl would probably expect him to lie on top of her like a man and pump for three minutes before leaking bare sperm into her vagina, that unassailable proof of the heterosexual success of all parties. Paul could tell this last type and knew he couldn’t provide what the situation required.”
Paul Takes the Form of a Mortal Girl was first published by Rescue Press in 2017, an independent publisher of “chaotic and investigative work” out of Iowa City. By 2019 it was picked up by Vintage Books, a division of Penguin Random House, living proof that publishing with a small press does not mean the book will inhabit indie-press-land forever. There is an osmosis that occurs between works that are self-published, works that appear first on online journals, contests, those that are indie-published, and the bigger presses. It’s like an ocean ecosystem, with whales feeding on krill and all sorts of other odd eerie happenings.
After reading some of Andrea Lawlor’s interviews, it is clear that they drew off of a couple of Greek myths. Here is a quote from their interview with the Guardian “I was retelling Greek myths as a way to figure out how to write a story without having to make up a plot. I was trying to write Tiresias and to work out some kind of autobiographical material. In Greek and Roman mythology, gods are always taking the forms of mortals.” Tiresias, who spent seven years a woman as punishment for disrupting the natural state of two snakes mating. Polydorus, which means ‘many gifted’ in ancient Greek, is a character who appears in many discrete roles in different myths, even as birthed by different mothers.
Rather than mythological interludes, there are fairy-tale interludes, very whimsical presumed origin-stories for Paul and some of the other magical characters. The tales loosely explain the special powers of the new characters introduced to the main storyline. They also seem to come in to save sticky places where Paul might actually have to process emotions or do something unglamorous. In general, the form of the story follows that of an avoidant mind, instead of processing or having hard conversations the storyline switches abruptly into some interlude or another. When Paul gets called out in class for not doing his homework, we dive straight into a fairytale. When Paul almost gets beat up on a greyhound bus, we dive straight into a fairytale. On a long heartbroken train ride with Paul realizing he has no friends or resources, instead of resolving these emotions we dive straight into a sweet and mysterious retelling of Paul’s birth. I do not know how much of all this is intentional, or ever is. Sometimes analyzing a book is like psychoanalyzing the writer. If the writer teaches at an institution and has studied writing as a craft extensively, perhaps all of these devices and quirks are premeditated. I would argue that this painstaking amount of thought would turn the art of writing into the science of writing. Would lose the muse. I would also argue that a fairy-tale origin story just feels right for those living the queer experience and those born into the quirky oddball experience in general.
The same way that this novel is sprinkled with fairy-tale interludes, it is also sprinkled with a breadcrumb-trail of references that hint at a magical underground world behind a thinly veiled door. A portal. I am certain that this is the portal that I have been searching for by asking bookstore experts for their recommendations, and so I wonder if I may be let in by Andrea Lawlor. I wonder if I am already in, if I was brought onto this Earth already on the other side of this door, and that is why I am only partially-human (see previous columns). Still, I am dying to join the historic oddities on the other side. I was left salivating and suspicious by the author’s blatant name-dropping of Patti Smith and Robert Mapplethorpe, Temporary Autonomous Zones, the festival of Dionysus, Ursula K. Le Guin. I started to wonder if all of the people that I look up to as gods are partial-humans, mutants like Paul Polydoris and me, Rosalie L.H. Caggiano.
Now for the biggest love arc of the story. Diane is another magical being that is able to speak to animals. This lesbian interlude is the most heartfelt and the most critical part of the book. Paul (Polly in these chapters) is really deep in his love for Diane, really blind to her imperfections, really terrified to lose her, really heartbroken when he does lose her. At the same time, the author portrays Diane as… kind of shitty. She seems a bit dissociated from actual pleasure, on which Paul notes “Sometimes he did wonder if she liked liking what she liked”. She is a militant vegan hardcore lesbian-type and Paul pretends to be vegan for her, sneaking out to eat gas station meat whenever he can.
In real life, the author Andrea Lawlor never actually hung out with these girls from Michigan. Here is a quote from their interview with Pan MacMillian in 2020: “I wasn’t interested in lesbian separatist spaces at all, and certainly never went to Michigan – I had what I thought at the time was an aesthetic aversion but which I think now was a feeling of being wrongly welcomed, if that makes sense. I didn’t feel excluded as much as misunderstood. Later I came to understand the ways in which Michigan, for example, was excluding trans women, and then my objections became largely political.”
That’s what Paul went through, holding his femme form for longer than he ever had and constantly feeling nervous that he would slip up. Even that wasn’t enough for Diane. Paul started to believe that he could be a woman forever, but he was probably deluding himself, and Diane knew it. In fact he definitely was deluding himself, blocking out parts of his time in Provincetown. He was in Provincetown, for god’s sake. He was ironically staying with Diane in one of the gay capitals of the country. He is everything, how could he stay with her? But it was also a real taste of the woman’s body and mind, the deepness with which he fell in love with Diane, and it is beautiful the way that he is able to experience that. After hundreds of hours of fisting and other steamy sex scenes Diane breaks up with Paul because she knows that he will eventually want something else.
I felt very attached to this story by the end. In between reading sessions, I was also living my own life, feeling confused, and dying to know the way that Paul’s story resolves. Feeling like the ending to this book would give me some key that I was missing, I read the last 150 pages without looking up.
Paul’s story ends in San Francisco. In a way, he ends as San Francisco. He is so varied, he is everyone, he is a shapeshifter and he creates this reputation as a mysterious cruiser who is everywhere and nowhere at once. When he meets another like him, he is instantly enthralled. In a way, in love with himself. But even this does not seem to be his true love. What is one true love to a young shapeshifting player? The only resolution that is given towards the end of the book is the assurance that Paul and the other shapeshifters are “like everybody else, only more so.” That is no fairytale ending, but it is a real place to leave 23-year-old Paul. He’s nowhere close to an ending, he’s just taking a breather when the book ends.
Rosalie L.H. Caggiano
Bookstore Creep contains recommendations from the continuous investigation of Rosalie L.H. Caggiano into modern-day authors who are writing about the counterculture and the underground in the USO (The United States Of...). The USO is a zone that may encompass the whole of what is known as North America, or might not quite make it to the Southernmost and Northernmost hinterlands of what is known as Mexico or Canada. Rosalie searches for modern writers that upend the impression that “nobody does anything even remotely interesting in real life anymore”. She talks straight to the book-tenders of the City of Portland, exploring bookshop by bookshop instead of wallowing in the depths of the 129+ million books on Earth without guidance. She is beginning the construction of an extensive stainless-steel 3D diagram that documents the intricate webs of writer’s connections and histories, which become more and more clear with each column. This diagram already takes up most of her backyard.
