Overview

I AIN'T A GIRL follows Paul Joseph, a Catholic school teen with a girlfriend, a spot on the soccer team, and a recently deceased father-who, without explanation, wakes up to find his body transformed: smaller, long-haired, and with female breasts. His mother and her lover, the family priest, blame drugs; Paul Joseph swears otherwise. When the priest insists he transfer to an all-girls school, Paul Joseph flees to his late father's remote cabin along the Allegheny River to understand what's happening to him. There, he encounters three strange visitors who force him to confront his identity-culminating in a violent struggle for his life and his sense of self. Set between Ash Wednesday and Easter Sunday in Pittsburgh and its wooded outskirts, the novel unfolds as a ""therapeutic accounting"" Paul Joseph writes for his skeptical therapist-who may or may not have leaked it. Written in a rough-edged, Huck Finn-like vernacular, I AIN'T A GIRL balances tragedy and comedy while exploring the dissonance between body and identity, and society's urge to define both. Influences include Mieko Kawakami's Breasts and Eggs, D. Foy's Made to Break, and Carola Dibbell's The Only Ones. The work riffs on Twain's Huckleberry Finn in the way Murakami's Killing Commendatore riffs on The Great Gatsby and Kingsolver's Demon Copperhead on David Copperfield.

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