Dysphoria sucks.

Unlike euphoria, dysphoria is often a pervasive and persistent state of mind, particularly when the cause of the dysphoria is something physical like a part of your body - your hands, your legs, your nose, your genitals. 

Yep, gender dysphoria has got to be one of the suckiest dysphorias. Not only is it essentially culturally taboo to talk about genitalia, but at what age is someone equipped to recognise and express their feelings about their body? Who has parents or mentors that are able to engage in a supportive and meaningful way? Now chuck in a time-sensitive process like puberty which tosses your body and emotions all over the place while you're trying to navigate away from the darkness.

The core of the story is the journey of Sam, from a youth finding boundaries to their expression, to the external forces of identity control and the accompanying shame, to the disgust at physical changes mismatched with the internal person, and ultimately to the escape sought from an existence that can't be reshaped. Essentially Sam hates the man lurking in the mirror, hides the love of dressing like mum, can't find a path through life with acceptance and without pain. 

We join Sam at the attempted escape point - but so does someone else, one of the better written and more believably real characters, an old retired widower, Vic. Both Sam and Vic meet on a bridge that they were intending to use as an exit from their respective lives. I imagine most suicide attempts are not conducive to companionship, and in this case I go on to think that Vic couldn't tolerate letting a young kid with so much potential life ahead of them not have another chance at realising it. 

Vic provides a comparatively stable and supportive adult in Sam's life, spurring on a series of positive connections to Aggie, an effusively accepting geek neighbour of similar age; Peter, a too good to be true drag-queen-nurse-protector; and Diane, a therapist who can somehow immediately start sessions with Sam. These characters, as well as the less savoury pre-Vic contingent from Sam's earlier life, are all painted with broad, stereotypical strokes, yet also fail to be believable. I found Dane was the most unbalanced in this - army buzz-cut type with ex-wife rolling with small-time criminals super coherent instruction on how to bulk up Sam's muscle with a good side of fight training - and somehow able to perfectly reflect on his own life, what life in the army does to people and NEVER manages to be a dick to Sam?

Nonetheless, much of the peripheral character's storytelling presence in the novel is easy to understand because they are character archetypes we've seen before. We can fill in their stories and personalities and motivations using our own pre-loaded imaginations. It makes for quick'n'easy reading and allows us to focus on the central figure of Sam without investing too much in anyone else. We ride with Sam, connect with Sam at times, feel for Sam often, struggle to believe how so many convenient plot developments can occur, even for one as competent as Sam in so many spheres of life (cooking, theft, physical training, motorcycle repair, etc). Particularly as Craig Silvey has stacked the deck against his protagonist with an alcoholic, drug-addicted, resentful and absent mother; an impoverished, meagre, crime-normalising upbringing; a manipulative, controlling, abusive step-father figure; a friend-less, intermittently schooled, socially isolated existence. 

So....is this the narrative trope of a broken home once again rearing its head as a stand-in for well-developed character backstory? Disappointing if so. Is any of that broken home stuff really necessary to make Sam's journey interesting and worth telling? What if Sam had a perfectly average home/life situation but wasn't surrounded by dysfunction? Imagine Sam not able to identify and express inner self with family members; a perfect childhood moment in costume was allowed for a short time but gently and firmly suppressed before long; bullied at school for being awkward and different, as we all are, but resonating more with Sam's own internal story; resorting to burning and cutting and theft and Julia Child. Perfectly 'normal' on the outside, all barely contained on the inside. The same story could have been told - a meeting with Vic on the bridge, an accepting and understanding new neighbour Aggie down the street, finding Peter and the world of queer, a journey with Diane to discover the language and possibility of becoming yourself. Does the broken home origin provide a false depth to the story, a lazy way to add grandness to the story arc, a classic pauper-to-prince scale to the journey? Is Sam's story worthy without all the dirty beginnings?

Sebastian Saliba (Ascot Vale Chapter)