This is a novel about a queer punk shapeshifter in ’90s Iowa who is so busy having graphic encounters of every imaginable permutation that he struggles to find the time for his zine.
In Paul Takes the Form of a Mortal Girl, Andrea Lawlor’s novel newly rereleased by Vintage, twenty-three-year-old Paul can make himself taller, more muscular, scrawnier. He can make himself biologically female, adjust his cup size. He just has to focus. And then he steps into the night, wondering if he’ll live forever.
The forms he takes aren’t really about what another person wants. (Not usually.) His choices more about who he wants to be that night, and the kind of unconventional person he wants to attract in that form. It’s easy: dress to attract attention, to tell a story. Then, when somebody looks at you, he says, “Just look back; that was the whole trick.”
He doesn’t know why he is this way, why he can do this. But he is this way. He can do this. So as his journey takes him from leather bars to Womyn’s Festival tents to a Provincetown house-painting gig to a San Francisco bookstore, as he struggles to find his people and to treat them well, the question of his life is this: If he can be anybody he wants, who does he want to be? PLEASE READ
Paul Takes the Form of a Mortal Girl by Andrea Lawlor, from Vintage
