Like a Boy but Not a Boy

In this layered collection, bennett (Canoodlers) assembles 13 essays on mortality, pregnancy, and being a millennial nonbinary person. Spanning from their tumultuous and emotionally abusive youth and persistent obsession with death to their anxiety-ridden pregnancy and attempts to learn to take life slowly, bennett’s essays fit together like pieces of a puzzle, each exploring a given idea—bicycle repair and its relation to the mechanic’s own body; bipolar disorder and needing to be one of “the good sick”—while allowing its implications to ripple out among the rest. In the title essay, bennett describes the experience of gender dysphoria brought on by aggressively feminine language surrounding childbirth; in “Milk and Generativeness,” they ponder whether the act of lactating itself has, culturally, “ceded a right to [their] gender.” Muddying the waters is “Everyone Is Sober and No One Can Drive,” a series of 16 short interviews with other nonbinary individuals (edited into third-person narration) interspersed between each essay, which add flavor to the collection but also introduce so many people that it becomes difficult to remember what has and hasn’t happened to bennett themself. Both moving and illuminating, this stirring series of reflections is definitely worth picking up. (Nov.)