Thoughts on Nevada – Imogen Binny [SPOILERS]

This book was totally different from what I expected, just going off the blurb. I went in fully anticipating a road-trip novel: Act One setting up Maria, Act Two kicking off the trip and introducing James, and Act Three giving us the emotional payoff — James figuring their shit out and Maria finding some closure.

That… is very much not what happens.

Part One being as long as it is felt wildly unnecessary at first. To be honest, I actually put the book down for a bit before I came back to it to finally finish it, yesterday. But once I got into Part Two, I realised just how much all that setup and all those establishing shots in Part One mattered.

Interestingly, I found myself relating way more to the people around Maria than to Maria herself — mostly to Piranha, actually.  She’s the stalwart, friendly face of the NYC trans community. Kind of where I sit in Southampton — the one who seems to have their shit together, who everyone comes to for help… while secretly very much not having it together at all. That part hit me hard.

Then came Part Two.  Yeah.  This is where it got grizzly for me.  The way James manages his dysphoria really took me back to my teenage years — convinced that my desire to be a girl was just some dirty little fetish I had to keep quiet.  Going to bed early to scroll through Fictionmania.  I actually chatted to a friend, Izzy, about it, and she put it perfectly: there’s a kind of catharsis in reading Part Two, because it forces you to confront that intrusive thought of “god, why didn’t I just do this earlier?” But the reality is nothing could have forced me out before I was ready.

Maria trying to brute-force James into seeing “the truth” about himself was never going to work.  When the only person you have to talk to about being trans is someone like Maria — a frankly awful human being who has set her own life on fire, stolen her ex’s car, and decided to drive aimlessly across America instead of, y’know, going to therapy or doing anything even slightly healthy — you’re hardly going to see transition as a hopeful or viable option.  If that’s where it leads, why would you?

So yeah, the ending sucked.  But it sucked because it was supposed to.  Nevada isn’t a happy story.  But it’s not a tragedy either — not in a Shakespearean sense.  It’s just a story about two people who have no idea what they’re doing.  Messy lives, messy choices, and the weird liminality that comes with being trans.

It also left me sitting with this grim little truth: being trans still dominates my headspace far more than I want it to — because that’s how it’s been engineered.  And I’m trying not to launch into a full-on anti-establishment rant here… but what really struck me is that Nevada was written in 2013 (and seems set at least five years earlier) and yet the trans experience it captures has barely changed at all.  That’s heartbreaking.

I finished the book this morning and I’ve been thinking about it ever since.  It’s raw, unresolved, messy, but it feels real.  I really hope more people read it.

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