GLR November-December 2023

entertaining. When asked how she learned so much in so many fields, she explains that she was born with an unusually good memory for facts, acknowledging that she “simply got a lucky roll of the genetic dice on that front.” On top of this genetic gift, she was nurtured in a home with “knowledgeable parents who believed in the value of knowledge as its own reward.” Schneider does not go into the ins-and-outs of the game play on Jeopardy!, but she does give her view on what it takes to be a winner. The show attempts to measure natural talent for re call in a very unnatural setting. What’s needed to win is breadth of knowledge rather than depth. And it’s not only a matter of how much you know but how quickly you can remember it and ring in. Schneider allows that some of her competitors may have been just as smart, but their timing with the buzzer just wasn’t fast enough. Finally, a winning contestant has to be able to un derstand the syntax of a question that’s being posed and quickly decide what they’re looking for. For that, you often have to “cut through imprecise and convoluted language to recognize the real question.” She believes that this Jeopardy! skill is uniquely useful in real life. In discussing her gender identity, she writes that throughout her first thirty years of life she really didn’t know that she was a trans woman. But she states that upon reflecting on her life, the evidence was in front of her all along. In hindsight, she writes of many moments when an awareness of her identity was evident and she should have known, such as her desire to read the “American Girl” books in the third grade, or her envy of girls for having so many choices about how they looked, from clothes to hair. She writes of the trauma of hitting puberty, when your body begins to change and hair starts growing where it is neither functional nor æsthetically pleasing. She writes of her experiences in the theater, where she got to wear girls’ cloth ing, and how comfortable that made her feel. Schneider has written In the Form of a Question as anhon est account of her life and experiences. She has held nothing back, telling an inspirational and informative story about a re markable life. ____________________________________________________ William Burton is a regular G&LR reviewer based in Jensen Beach, FL.

but with much of the text redacted. Through conversation and exchanging stories, the narrator comes to understand Juan’s connection to this material. In “A Sort of Postface” at the book’s end, Torres reveals that all of the characters in this novel are real people, though “they have become fictional characters.” Two of the most en gaging are Jan Gay, the uncredited author of the book that the narrator discovers, which is called Sex Variants: A Study in Homosexual Patterns , and her partner, Zhenya. At least by the way Juan tells their stories, they could make great subjects for biographies or novels. Jan was the daughter of the so-called “Doctor to the Hobos,” who abandoned his family to wander the country and work for progressive causes, and who had a re lationship with anarchist Emma Goldman. A nudist, Jan wrote a book about the naturist movement and turned it into a docu mentary. One of her later lovers was Franziska Boas, daugh ter of the famous anthropologist Franz Boas. She shared an apartment with a young Andy Warhol (then still going by Warhola). One of the most dramatic sections of the book is Juan’s re counting of Jan’s struggle to publish her research on the topic of lesbianism. Despite having studied under German sexologist Magnus Hirschfield, she needed an accredited doctor to pub lish her results. She found one who would supposedly work with her, giving him her notes. He formed a committee to con duct further interviews with lesbians and then buried Jan’s name in their published book, refusing to return her notes. Juan tells this story as a movie, using the recurring image of doors open ing for each scene. Zhenya was an illustrator who apparently used Juan as a child model for her children’s books. Juan recounts the plot of one, Who’s Afraid? , about a little boy encountering wild ani mals, while resetting the story in a gay bar. Stories, told in different ways, make up most of this novel. The narrator talks about his father, who worked undercover for the state police, wearing chains and crosses while in character, which leads the narrator to pursue men who have these attrib utes later in life. He recounts the early, tumultuous years of his parents’ marriage, the arguments and beatings and the police being called. As if in a movie, he tells of his relationship with an older man, talking in a bar about the small town he grew up in and the women there, single mothers who cared for him even though they knew he was odd, and the teen girls whom he tried to love but could not. The novel is filled with photos, illustrations, and copies, many of them from Jan’s book, showing the pages heavily blacked out. “Blinkered Endnotes” helpfully explain the source of each image. These give a further sense of the reality of these characters. The title comes from the censored pages of Jan’s book, as well as the narrator’s seizure-like moments, where he loses both time and memory. Juan and the narrator have a ten der relationship with lots of playful teasing back and forth. Juan shares his wisdom and experiences, with lots of amusing liter ary, cinematic, and queer references. Despite the novel’s strangeness, it offers a surprisingly coherent reading experi ence, with all of its elements making a kind of sense within its world. ________________________________________________________________ Charles Green is a writer based in Annapolis, Maryland.

Sex Variants Author Revealed

C HARLES G REEN

B LACKOUTS is an unusual novel, blending fact with fic tion, a loose sequel to author Justin Torres’ debut novel We the Animals . The narrator, a young man of Puerto Rican descent who spent time in a mental ward as a teenager, travels to a mysterious building known as the Palace out in the desert. There, he meets up with Juan Gay, a much older man whom he knew on the ward. In Juan’s room, the narrator finds a book documenting the lives of early 20th-century lesbians, BLACKOUTS: A Novel Jus ti nTorres Farrar, Straus and Giroux. 301 pages, $27

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