BOOK PRESENTS PORTRAIT OF GENDER IDENTITY
Author explores his history growing up as a nonbinary person in the U.S.
The Bridge: Writing Across the Binary
Keith Maillard is one of the finest English-language novelists in Canada today, although to date he has not received all the attention and praise his stellar record of achievement deserves.
Since his debut novel Two Strand River in 1976, the prolific author has published 16 other books, including a book of verse plangently titled Dementia Americana, the exquisite novel Twin Studies in 2018 and an earlier memoir, Fatherless, which was reviewed in The Sun in 2019. And much of this impressive oeuvre was written while the author taught full time at the UBC School of Creative Writing.
The Bridge is a moving and honest memoir of growing up different in West Virginia in the middle decades of the last century. As chronicled in his earlier memoir, Maillard grew up among women after his father disappeared. He was an odd kid who was tormented, like so many men of his generation, by his failure
to master the behaviours that signalled culture-normal masculinity. He was, in the damning phrase of a sexist epoch, too much “like a girl,” and no amount of heavy drinking or reckless driving could quell his anxieties about gender.
In those days, of course, the sophisticated understandings of gender, gender fluidity and similar issues that have been generated over the past decades by feminist, gay liberation and gender theorists was not available. Nor was the idea of “nonbinary” as a gender identity. Now, looking back over his life with the benefit of those newer discourses, Maillard understands his life through the lens of a lifelong struggle to know and accept his own identity off
the simple-minded male/female binary. There is much in his life work to support the usefulness of the “nonbinary” concept in understanding Maillard's fiction. From the magical shape-shifting of gender and identity at the centre of Two Strand River to the North Shore suburban gothic elements in Twin Studies, Maillard's characters are busy turning the multi-faceted gem of identity over and over, trying on different understandings and living, sometimes uneasily and sometimes joyfully, with the sense of being outside of the socially permitted limits of the male/female binary.
But Maillard is no polemicist. He does not force any simple resolution on the tensions and dialectics of gender he explores. His powerful fiction and this lovely memoir are both driven by the energies of gender ambiguity and the painful process of existential self-creation.
Highly recommended.
Tom Sandborn lives and writes in Vancouver. He welcomes your feedback and tips at tos65@telus.net