The Daily Telegraph - Saturday - Review
Sir Gawain’s guide to sex changes
Tristram Fane Saunders enjoys the virtuoso mash-up of pop culture and the classics by this American humourist
SSOMETHING THAT MAY SHOCK AND DISCREDIT YOU by Daniel Mallory Ortberg 256pp, Scribe, £14.99, ebook £11.04
omething That May Shock and Discredit You isn’t a memoir. There is a very particular memoir which it isn’t, a memoir the author has carefully not written: “The fight against writing Son of a Preacher Man: Becoming Daniel Mallory Ortberg, My Journey Trekking Through the Transformative Expedition of Emergence, Voyaging Shiftward Into Form – An Odyssey in Two Sexes: Pilgrimage to Ladhood must be renewed every day.” This, thank God, is not that book – although Ortberg does spend several pages listing its imagined chapter titles. (Reader, I guffawed.)
Some of Ortberg’s funniest pieces for his much-missed humour website The Toast were literary spoofs, each one a jousting match between form and content: Jane Eyre as text messages; a report on Jennifer Aniston’s wedding as the Book of Revelation. The 33-year-old American pulls off a similar assault on received ideas of genre here, galloping full tilt against the “on-the-nose, po-faced” gender transition memoir (a small but growing niche). It’s not the usual linear narrative, but a bundle of short, eclectic and wonderfully funny essays, where probing self-analysis is interrupted by spoofs of Gawain and the Green Knight, Le Morte d’Arthur and “dirtbag” Sappho. Pop culture and the classics collide throughout. Some readers may find the very idea of a mash-up between Mean Girls and Sarah Kane’s Crave, or Rilke and Bugs Bunny, off-putting. I feel sorry for them.
When tackling the subject of gender identity head-on, Ortberg wears irreverence as armour. On the term “sex change”: “There’s something pleasingly retro about it, but I’m not quite sure I’m tall enough to pull that style off.” Humour is, perhaps, the only response to the confused, unintentional cruelty of people who think, “It feels like someone died” is an appropriate reply to a friend or relative explaining their change of gender.
There are many passages of vulnerable, self-questioning writing here – Ortberg recalls his struggles with drink and depression with a musical turn of phrase and clear-eyed candour – but the most powerful moments arrive elliptically, as diversions in essays that begin by claiming to be about something else (such as why Star Trek’s Captain Kirk is “a beautiful lesbian”). When writing about silly things,
Ortberg finds a space in which to be very serious indeed. “The year I asked for top surgery, five years into sobriety, was the first time I admitted publicly to having a body and wanting to do something about it”: that this is somehow the natural conclusion to an analysis of the Western Destry Rides Again makes it more, not less, affecting.
Knowing Ortberg’s work, I expected astute cultural criticism and literary gags, but not God. And yet this book is immersed in Christianity. Raised by an Evangelical Presbyterian family (with whom he is no longer on speaking terms), Ortberg returns to the words he grew up with, looking for comfort in Paul’s letters, finding a parallel between transition and the Rapture, and seeing a reflection of himself in Jacob, whose wrestle with the angel leaves him with an altered body and a new name.
This search for echoes of Ortberg’s own experience in unlikely places reaches its peak when Gomez Addams is put forward as a poster-boy for post-transition gender euphoria. “Everyone in the Addams family slides neatly into type: Morticia is a Vampirella/Elvira type, Lurch is a Frankenstein’s monster, Grandmama is a witch,” and so on, “but what is Gomez Addams, besides ‘an obviously transsexual man’? [...] He delights in getting to be a man, short and boisterous and nurturing and bursting with hope and pocket watches.” Gomez, and perhaps Ortberg too, is struck “with renewed absurd glee every morning when he gets to wake up and be one”.
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