Bad Habit

A contribution to The Hope Library Project

Here is what happened. I wrote this phenomenal review of a book, and then my computer died, and it ate the entire document I’d written. Every single word. It was worse than my dog eating my homework—it felt like I’d lost a piece of art that I had created. I cannot simply rewrite everything that initial review contained. I spent time on it. I worried over my word choice. I delved. I fucking delved.

It was unrecoverable.

That long and winding tale of woe and despair only just ended this week with the utter demise of that laptop (good riddance), but I’m back in action with a functional machine, and I’m not going to let anything stop me this time.

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The following review is part of

Tara Penry

’s The Hope Library project. It ends today, so I’m running in just under the wire. Her question?

When did a book give you hope?

You can read more about this project over at Tara Penry’s post here! While you’re there, subscribe, poke around the other contributions to this project, and stay tuned for more opportunities like this one. Tara is a wealth of brilliant ideas, and I’m so grateful for her getting my attention to join this time around.

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Bad Habit

by Alana S. Portero

I am fascinated by trans memoirs. There are some good ones. There are a few that you could probably skip. Heck, I’ve even been writing one of my own. Bad Habit came my way by recommendation in a book list, and it set the bar higher in many ways.

Alana S. Portero has a gift for drawing you in to her writing right through your heart and your nerves and your organs. I felt this book as much as I read it, and it compelled me to reread sections as they passed under my gaze just so that I could experience her emotion over and over. Growing up as a little girl who did not get to look like a little girl was both heartbreaking and achingly beautiful through Portero’s eyes. Her book begins in the small village outside of Madrid and expands to other cities, each of them rich with characters and stories of their own. They are, at first, foreign and interpreted by a child who cannot possibly understand the reasons adults do what they do, and that innocence spills out into a kind of familial beauty that yanked tears out of my eyes when Portero’s transcestors fail or die or leave.

There is a lot of death. There is a lot of heartbreak. Consider yourself forewarned.

No, this is not just her memoir. It is the memoir of transness in those villages and cities, the memoir of young love lost, the memoir of self-hatred and loathing which cannot become self-love without first falling and failing itself.

And, no, I cannot tell you more than this without ruining the magic of her words and her stories. You should explore them for yourself. After all the trans memoirs I’ve read, this is one of only two I have reviewed and recommended to you. That should mean something.

I must add here that the original book was written in Spanish. I read the English translation, and I wonder how much the translator, Mara Faye Lethem, wound her own wordsmithery into the pages. If given the chance, I’d sit down with both Portero and Lethem for a drink and a chat about their thoughts and dreams, and I know I would not come away disappointed (or thirsty).

My takeaways from this book are multiple:

• How we tell our stories is every bit as important as what we say in them.

• There is hope in our survival for all of us who grew up trans.

• Beauty resides on many levels, especially the kind we see when we look in the mirror.

You should check it out from your local library. Or you should buy it. Yes, buy a book by a trans author and support trans writing. Be part of a revolution that believes in our words and our lives and our artwork! And when you’re done reading your copy, give it to a friend. Spread trans stories everywhere you go. Show the world our value. Give someone else a piece of hope to carry with them.

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Your trans friend,

Robin