Fierce Femmes and Notorious Liars by Kai Cheng Thom

(3) In the first section, called “Runaway,” the protagonist chooses to leave her parents, her younger sister Charity, and the doom and gloom of her hometown on the day that all the mermaids threw themselves on the shores to slowly die by mass suicide in seeming protest of the mess humanity made of the waters.

She is raised by her Chinese immigrant parents in a “crooked house whose walls curved and bulged in the middle and narrowed at the top and bottom, like a starving person with a swollen belly” in a city called Gloom. It also, I believe, ushers in a new wave of trans literature and one that you should be paying attention to whether you’re trans or not.įierce Femmes and Notorious Liars is a novel, or confabulist memoir, about a trans girl in her late teens whose name we never learn. But there is far more to it than its emotionality or even its genre-queerness. It jerks tears, boils blood, tickles fancies, and punches you right in the feels. It’s a debut novel of equal parts fact and fiction, fantasy and true crime, bildungsroman and memoir. That is the kind of book that Fierce Femmes and Notorious Liars is. And I can already tell this book will not only change the game for trans lit, but it will also change me. When Rapunzelle says “She said to me because you’re worth holding onto,” (1) I let go and begin softly sobbing into the whir of washers and dryers. As Rapunzelle gears up to tell our protagonist what Kimaya said to her when asked why she held on, I can feel the familiar sensation of tears welling up and a lump forming in my throat.

One night she takes the heaviest dose she can find at a club on the Street of Miracles and shape shifts so rapidly and violently that she might have been lost forever, if not for Kimaya latching onto her and holding her through every transformation until she came down. Rapunzelle had become addicted to a drug that causes the user to shape shift, which she used to become lost to herself and to the world. I’m about fifteen minutes into my wash cycle and forty pages into the novel when Rapunzelle, described so far as “an obsidian globe of a woman,” tells the unnamed protagonist how she met her lover Kimaya, the Street of Miracles’ trans guardian angel. It is a Saturday morning in early Spring and I’m sitting in a laundromat with my partner reading Kai Cheng Thom’s Fierce Femmes and Notorious Liars: A Dangerous Trans Girl’s Confabulous Memoir.

Fierce Femmes and Notorious Liars by Kai Cheng Thom