Some Strange Music Draws Me In by Griffin Hansbury

The stitching together of gender in bodies

From the moment I heard about Griffin Hansbury’s Some Strange Music Draws Me In, circulating in both mainstream literary and queer psychoanalytic circles, I believed I would love this novel. But I had not anticipated just how powerfully it would affect me. Continually, I search for books that arrest my attention, pulling me into their worlds so powerfully that, once I reemerge, my perspective has been irrevocably changed. Those books then get placed on a specific shelf in my office. Not an altar, per se, but close enough. That shelf is now so full, I had to get rid of another book just to make space for Hansbury’s novel—where it will stay.

Hansbury is the first psychoanalyst to practice and publish as openly transgender. Combined with the aesthetic experience of reading his creative writing, it is his professional insights as a trans man into gender, sex, and class that, for me, make this novel extraordinary. It is as enchanting as it is instructive.

A plot synopsis, from Hansbury’s author site:

It’s the summer of 1984 in Swaffham, Massachusetts, when Mel (short for Melanie) meets Sylvia, a tough-as-nails trans woman whose shameless swagger inspires Mel’s dawning self-awareness. But Sylvia’s presence sparks fury among her neighbors and throws Mel into conflict with her mother and best friend. Decades later in 2019, Max (formerly Mel) is on probation from his teaching job for, ironically, defying speech codes around trans identity. Back in Swaffham, he must navigate life as part of a fractured family and face his own role in the disasters of the past.

Populated by a cast of unforgettable characters, Some Strange Music Draws Me In is a propulsive page turner about multiple electrifying relationships—between a working-class mother and her queer child, between a trans man and his right-wing sister, and between a teenager and her troubled best friend. Griffin Hansbury’s elegant, arresting, and fearless prose dares to explore taboos around gender and class as he offers a deeply moving portrait of friendship, family, and a girlhood lived sideways. A timely and captivating narrative of self-realization amid the everyday violence of small-town intolerance, Some Strange Music Draws Me In builds to an explosive conclusion, illuminating the unexpected ways that difference can provide a ticket to liberation.

It is in this narration, toggling back and forth between Mel, the teenage girl, and Max, the adult trans man, that Hansbury elucidates the stitching together of gender—as an ongoing translative process rather than an intrinsic “core identity,” or a telos, to which anyone consciously aspires. For me, Hansbury’s greatest gift to the reader is his invitation to live inside his body, through Mel and Max, as he becomes increasingly legible to himself—as fluid, nonlinear, and plural. Through Mel’s struggle, via Hansbury’s ability to articulate it, the reader (including normative identities) can identify with gender’s fugitiviy beneath the strictures of our material bodies, regardless of how each of us individually manifests these conflicts.