This Time for Me: A Memoir

In this effervescent debut, Billings candidly recounts the turbulent road that led to her trailblazing career as a trans actor and activist. Right out of the gate, she reveals she’s not about respectability politics: “I sat at the table in... the first designer gown that I didn’t either steal or give a hand job in order to own,” she writes of 2015’s Golden Globes, where she and her castmates from Amazon’s Transparent were awarded Best Comedy. From here, Billings looks back on a life containing many lives. As a bisexual, assigned-male child in the 1960s and ’70s, Billings turned to alcohol to escape the racist and homophobic slurs she endured in school. After surviving sexual assault and a suicide attempt at age 17, she entered Chicago’s “female impersonator” scene, where she found friends, role models, black-market hormones, and, later, sex work, which brought with it HIV. Straddling eras, Billings toggles between a time when AIDS meant “funeral after funeral” and trans people lived in the shadows, to a new world in which she made her way to the screen as a boundary-breaking actor. What unfolds alongside a narrative marked by adversity and raunchy humor is a poignant portrait of an artist in search of meaning and personal peace. This begs for an encore. (Apr.)