"As she faces death, this one topic looms over all others: the frustration and contempt that she feels over her trans kid's refusal to be the daughter she wanted. The book, animated by Barbara's reflections, is a striking, darkly comic portrait of a mind narrowed by disappointment."
"As a result of this litany of defeats, she has soured on nearly every ideal, but there is one that Barbara still fully embraces, and that embraces her back: her sense of what it means to be a man or a woman. She is a ruthless arbiter of gendered behaviors."
"She's periodically attended by her estranged child, J., whom she calls 'the bird' and describes as a large, feathered creature with a beak that retracts into a normal nose 'like a flaccid penis.' Something other than drugs is obscuring her vision of the person J. has grown up to be."
Night Night Fawn follows Barbara Rosenberg, an elderly Jewish woman dying in a Manhattan apartment, as she drifts through memories while medicated on OxyContin. Her estranged trans child J. visits periodically, but Barbara perceives them through a distorted lens shaped by her own unfulfilled aspirations. Her life has been marked by repeated disappointments: failed acting dreams, a mundane administrative job, an unremarkable marriage to Stephen, and a friend's greater success. These accumulated defeats have calcified her worldview into rigid gender ideology, making her trans child's identity the focal point of her frustration and contempt. The novel presents a darkly comic portrait of a mind constrained by bitterness and disappointment.
Read at The Atlantic
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