Read A F---ing Book: Rae Spoon's "First Spring Grass Fire"
Posted byCarmen
on November 13, 2012
http://www.autostraddle.com/read-a-fcking-book-rae-spoon-first-spring-grass-fire-149005/Rae Spoon needed two things: a voice and a home.
A personal narrative that is as sincere as it is pulverizing, Rae Spoon's First Spring Grass Fire is the transgender singer-songwriter's first published foray into prose. A story of escape, liberation and love, there is no need for Spoon to fictionalize in order to make us believe in the impossible. As a survivor of an abusive father, an isolating pentecostal background and a sheltered community, their own successful attempt to arrive at self-acceptance and self-love is enough to convince us that nothing ever is impossible in the first place.
Spoon was born into girlhood and quickly realized it was as ill-fitting as their sister's hand-me-downs. But the story can't end there. Told in the first person, First Spring Grass Fire is a series of memories from Rae's childhood in Alberta, Canada, delivered in the form of chapters that read like short stories and that add up to, and make possible, their eventual understanding of who they are - without everybody else's expectations. As Rae navigates a misleading and frustrating adolescence as female, they tell of each step toward the eventual end of that forced identity with poignancy and perfect hindsight. Leaving nothing out and saving no face, the book takes on gender, homophobia, and ignorance in the first-person without looking back. It's an honest account of how it feels to unprogram yourself from our world and how difficult it is to make sense of it at all. Within this book exists multiple journeys, each told with a forgiving nostalgia for a place the author never got around to understanding as "home," including a wrestling with religious faith and the beginning of a new life.
