Bent

By Teri Louise Kelly

A memoir in her most personal voice, Teri Louise Kelly tells us what it is like to be born in the wrong body.

"Let’s forget the flounce and frills and sugar and spice; this isn’t Cinderella and there aren’t any glass slippers or pumpkins that change into carriages, but there is the simple madness of everyday existence as adequate compensation. And while there may not be many tears, there are tantrums and insane asylums and self-deprecating binges. None of which has anything to do with the most bizarre decision a person could make—changing one's sex—but all of which are central to this tale of outlandish head games with oneself and one’s imaginary self, a three-foot-tall high priestess of mass deception. After all, if you’re going to write a book about changing sex, then why not bend it completely out of shape and give it some balls?"

A surreal, courageous, and compelling account of one person's realization, transition and reemergence, you will not soon forget Bent.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Books
• Release date: Jun 27, 2014
• ISBN: 9781310122187

Teri Louise Kelly

Even God makes mistakes.True enough. Tiny little screw ups that can occur in utero, or beyond . . . small shit like chromosomes going awry and the magic hormone fairy forgetting to do her damned job after a heavy night on the juice. Sure, no big shit, get over it – grow some balls, maybe some facial hair, and get drinking. Teri Louise Kelly managed all three in her previous human incarnation when as a surly young tearaway in London, England, she served 'his' time at one of Elizabeth Regina's juvenile detention facilities for wilful destruction of public property, resisting arrest, and assaulting a police dog at a football match. Confused? Well, join the damned club. After muddling through as a 'cute' but rather lippy boy, becoming a chef and traveling the globe, he finally became 'she' in Australia. A strange place to do it for sure, but then again, way down there in the big sandy desert, no one can hear you scream, and, even if they do – nobody gives a wombat's ass.After all of this, out of the cocoon, emerged Teri Louise Kelly, who quite suddenly, decided 'she' could write. And why not? There were worse aspirations – so, she did. Her first book – 'Sex, Knives & Bouillabaisse', (March 2008) set in the swanky rat-face infested bowels of luxury hotels, earned her critical acclaim in Australia's mainstream press – not bad for an untrained chick with a uh . . . yeah, you get the picture.Following on in March 2009 with the sleazy reminisces of a low-rent lfe with the novel 'Last Bed On Earth' (six-months in the lice-riddled backpacking industry in Christchurch New Zealand), Teri Louise Kelly started to earn herself a reputation as a fast-talking, even faster-writing, Bukowski-eque with boobs figure. Obviously, she waved away such comparisons, claiming instead in a major interview that she was, in fact, Hunter S. Thompson reincarnated. Whichever she is, or indeed isn't, what remains, is a style that is simultaneously outlandish, candid, and brutal in its literary execution. Stormtrooping into the poetic genre this year (November 2009) with the release of her first poetry anthology 'Girls Like Me', Teri Louise Kelly has delivered a first-up assault on the flowery genre which will either stand, or fall, merely on its content. Never one to shy away from a fight, from speaking her own mind, or doing exactly what she feels is right – Teri Louise Kelly's latest work 'American Blow Job' pretty much extinguishes any mainstream or alternative media fantasy about transgendered writers avoiding their 'pasts'. She currently lives in a holding tank about forty-five clicks of an undisclosed Australian location where she is under heavy sedation and taken out in disguise each day to attend 'happy hour' and gladhand a few numbnuts.

Book preview

Wanted: one boy for working class family with upper middle class aspirations—must be of good disposition, hygienic, able to follow simple instructions and adequately fulfill the roles of dutiful son and cherished grandson. No girls need apply.

My name is Teri Louise Kelly, although that is not the name I was given at birth. People change their names for many reasons; to avoid being apprehended, to prevent family from finding them, to simply become someone different. I wanted to be someone different, which is probably worse. Then again, in life there are only two choices, which when you think about it makes the art of choosing relatively straightforward. Choice is the luxury we can afford, no matter how high the price tag. Of course, any choice has repercussions, and my choice was no different. Still, I learned at an early age that life is a circus, a twice daily show performed under a big top made of your own flesh wherein your mind is the hall of mirrors, your heart the ghost ride and your soul the house of horrors—and all you really need to do is learn to be the ringmaster and conduct matters with a certain aplomb—learn to accept the bouquets and barbed wire that come your way with dignity; after all, there's no turning back, and as they say in the business, the show must go on.

I'm so tired and I can't sleep...

I'm a liar and a thief...

When one door opens you can bet your last dollar that several hundred others will close with a resounding bang—which is why it pays rather handsomely to know a little something about the intricate mechanisms of locks, indeed.

1959

You're more afraid of life than you are of death, too busy protecting your precious mortality, tied up striving to fit in, worrying about a beginning and an end that's the same in every story—and there you are, writing a middle that's the same in every story and all the while conning yourself into believing you're different.  Kid, you'll only be different when you reach that preordained end and say, I did instead of I wish.

There are three different colours of blood in England: Red, Blue and White. The national pastime is mindless violence.

It was one of those glorious summer days, a lazy blue sky languid over the council estate, and I am about to be born. Those destined to be my family are gathered expectantly in the back bedroom of a damp flat in Brighton. My mother-to-be, in the lead role, is swearing blue murder while her sisters take turns daubing her forehead with a damp cloth, telling her to breathe—in and out, in and out. My grandmother, the gypsy, has already dangled the wedding ring over my mother's swollen belly and the result is indisputable. My grandmother's mother's wedding ring has never been wrong—my mother is going to give birth to a daughter.

Finally, I gondola down my mother's Venetian canal and plop, bloody, onto a frayed towel; this is not Brideshead Revisited, there are no nice nannies secreted in the attic, no handsome gay boys with drug problems, no suave soldiers carrying notebooks; I have not been born into splendor, I have been born into ordinariness. A deathly hush engulfs the room, not because I have been born dead, but because I have been born with something between my legs that ought not to be there—according to Romany lore. My grandmother stares at the wedding ring in bewilderment, my aunts stare at my shriveled appendage and my mother just stares at the ceiling in exhaustion. I am here, in the world, the apple of everyone's eye, only I'm not an apple, I'm a pear.  

My mother had already picked out my names, Tanya Michelle. A girl called Tanya Michelle, with red hair and blue eyes, could have gone a long way in this world. They took stuff seriously back then, stuff like wedding rings. I spent my first night on earth swathed in pink; they hadn't bothered with blue. It would take me forty years to get back to my true colour; the wedding ring has never been wrong since.

Denial

Nothing happens. You are just another helpless and bewildered human being. The world goes on, some people leave, more arrive. You start to talk and stand and run and you go to school and they split you in half, the girls to one side, the boys to the other. It is all terribly confusing. They call it education.

Little Miss Constellation

...is sitting next to me, we have been seated at desks made for two, we are happy couples, five- year-old speed daters with no idea what's going on—well, apart from the girl with pigtails next to me, my de facto partner in educational crime who appears to know everything there is to know. She is obviously the bi-product of over-zealous beatnik guardians. Every time the teacher asks a question up shoots the pig-tailed girl's hand and she literally wiggles in her seat with excitement. The pig-tailed girl gets a star for every question she answers correctly—at the rate she's going she will have named her own constellation before milk break. I walk home in a daze, over-informed but under-educated for one day, my head buzzing, not a star to my name. What have I learned? Well, I have learned that girls are extremely fast starters, but boys excel at coming from behind, which is probably already some kind of Aesop's fable.

My best friends are a cornfield and a lagoon. I like the cornfield because you can hide amidst the stalks during summer, and walk across it in winter when it's barren; I like the lagoon because of the birds. Birds can do anything, go anywhere. I can't go anywhere, I'm too small; I'm stuck here, I want to be a bird.

No beliefs, I am the product of lapsed Catholics and failed Jews, no yarmulke, no bar mitzvah, no rosary beads, no confession, you get to keep your foreskin, condone contraception—my mother is Church of England, but not devout, she only prays when praying is the last hope. She needs an easy religion, pay as you go. I am excused from Religious Education at school because my father listed my faith as atheist; they don't need non-believers in Biblical re-enactments. We are our own god and we can perform miracles, all it takes is concentration and application, plus a little help from the medical profession.

It was a terrible and fascinating decade, one of liberation, war, assassinations and temptation. A man reached the moon, and if he'd have held off for one day he would have walked on it on my birthday, and I would have received a commemorative coin at school. I would have been a moonwalk child instead of just a moon child. As it was I was born on the same day as Ernest Hemmingway, and they don't give you anything for that achievement; no silver shotgun, no book deal, no pewter tankard with your name on it.

The first time I met Alice I'd just fallen off a wall—gravity had an irresistible lure and there I was spreadeagled on the concrete path making superheroes out of clouds. Did it hurt? she asked. She was wearing a white dress; I thought she was a cloud.

No, I answered categorically, there being no way I would admit feeling pain to a girl dressed as a cloud.

You'll need to be on the lookout for impairment, she offered with a smile.

I was six years old and I had no idea what impairment was; I'd only just gotten a grip on constellations, many of which I was seeing at the moment.

Right... I smiled back.

The thing with impairment, she began, stooping to savagely rip a dandelion from the path, is that it can creep up on you. I mean, you might feel okay now, even next week, next year, but then one day you'll be walking along whistling a happy tune and suddenly your head will begin to hurt and bingo! She started to rip petals from the dandelion and blow them into the sky. Make a wish, she said.

I wish I won't get impairment, I said.

Good wish, she said. Her smile reminded me of that French girl and her razor blade.

You live around here? I asked, finally sitting up.

You got a wardrobe, don't you? she countered.

Everyone's got a wardrobe.

And some have lions and witches in them.

What's your name, anyhow?

Alice. And you have a rat on top of yours.

I thought it was supposed to be a rabbit?

The rat ate the rabbit—you're in the wrong story.

Or maybe you are...

Alice sighed deeply, picked up a stone and hurled it into the next door neighbour's yard.  I heard glass breaking. No, I'm in the right story.

Mr Cooper from next door was yelling about his greenhouse and my head hurt. No doubt impairment was setting in; so much for wishes made on the petals of dandelions. My mother turned up unexpectedly (maybe she'd fallen off her cloud), chastised me brutally for throwing stones and smacked me on the head. I saw stars, millions of them; when I grow up I will be an impaired astronaut.  

Think back: remember snow, the bread van, the rag and bone man, the corner shop, summer, apples, fireplaces, gaslights, bacon, egg, sausages, Dr Who, black and white television, football, porridge, bubble gum and trading cards ... every day like a Dickens novel, a Christmas card, a frozen radiator, a prize chrysanthemum in a flower show; and you know that you will live forever.

Alice is a three-foot-tall question mark in a white dress. She talks like an adult, keeps gibbering on about karma, intuition, the inner self, civil rights, metamorphosis; I just want to run up and down the street shooting other kids with my cap gun, not be constantly harangued by this cherubic Hell's Angel. If I don't listen she gets mad, messes up my bedroom or interferes with my blossoming sporting prowess. One day she was crapping on about imagination when I told her I was going to play cricket. There I was in some ridiculously named fielding position when the ball was walloped in my direction—running, eyes heavenward, arms outstretched, hands like two suction cups when suddenly I hear someone calling my name and then ... then I catch a glimpse of this demonic ball of white hurtling toward me and ... and forget cricket; you're better off in your bedroom, with your imagination.

Imagination, we had it; we had to. Our toys were dustbin lids and broomsticks and cardboard boxes; the world outside, our playground. We would fight off a Panzer division at one end of the street, protect the Alamo at the other; there was always room for a distressed Fräulein or a tied-up squaw—it's only when you try to re-enact those roles as an adolescent that the boys get uppity with you. Life is an act, a drama in which you're offered the role of yourself; turn it down and you'll spend your entire existence wondering just who the hell you are and why other people are taking turns at playing you. I will never be the same again as I am today, never as young; tomorrow things will taste and smell different, my thoughts will be marred by my fondness for today and I will constantly compare how it was with how it is. I will continually look back, wondering just where it all went wrong.

So I'm walking to school, the smell of fresh-cut grass heavy in the summer air, birds swooping, kids yelling, knowing that the holidays are coming, kicking a football against a brick wall, thinking about nothing at all, knowing nothing at all, just an empty vessel on a summer morning with time to kill.

The teacher is asking us questions; our answers will help her to understand us better. Afterwards she calls me over and tells me that my answer to question six (Who is my best friend?) bothers her.

Why? I ask.

Well, you said that your best friend is a cornfield.

I did...

You do understand that you can't be friends with a field, don't you?

I can't?

No. A field isn't a person.

It isn't?

Yes it is, Alice tells me as we walk home. A cornfield, in fact, makes the absolute best kind of friend, and I shouldn't listen to teachers because they'll only fill my head with nonsense, with boiled cabbage and equations, and I should stick with the cornfield if I want to get ahead.

Later, I played hide and seek with the cornfield; it closed its eyes and I hid, but I hid so well that it was never able to find me.

The underlying intention and philosophy of the English public education system is relatively straightforward. Teach children that the world outside is a vicious and merciless environment, and that to survive within it they need to know how to handle both themselves and any useable weapons at hand. Recruit the teaching staff straight from HM Prisons and leave to simmer for a decade or two, and finally, make the school itself a cesspit of stand-over merchants, fire-bugs, con artists, psychotic predators and knife-wielding sadists.

And yes, the powers-that-be achieved their blueprint for success faster than they could ever have envisaged; within a decade England had a generation of boys at its disposal who were ready, willing and able to fight for sovereignty, and a gang of girls, ready, willing and able to breed for the bloodline. The only trouble was that there was no war; war was over and out and dope-smoking Japanese women posing naked were in. Thus, with no war to die a hero or coward in, the finely-machined kids they'd mass-produced could only fight or fuck up one another, so they did.  

Some kid will tell some other kid that yet another kid has done so and so—maybe they shit their pants, maybe they cried when they got told off, maybe they punched some fucker in the face over trading cards; who knows? But soon enough each kid will have his own version of whatever occurred, whether it actually occurred or not. Once you get known as a pant crapper, a cry baby or an angry little fuck that talks with his fists, your cards are marked. Kids are naturals at turning a half story into the gospel truth.

Stand and stare at the night sky for ages—there is no discernible sign, no obvious way out—no single star beguiles or entices; they are all imposters, no more real than me.

Or maybe we are all literature destined for cataloguing in the library of time. Books made of flesh and bone, books with the same beginning and end—but at least we get to write our own middle, even if editing isn't an option—that's the publishing deal we've struck with life. Pick a genre, any genre: I'm going to be a psychological thriller because I figure there is already enough historical romance, true crime and how-to books in the world.

I'm the kind of dog that came from the pound, a real cross-breed. On the one side there's the Irish, the gypsies and the tinkers, the petty crooks, protestors and drinkers, the ones that migrated to the north of England, impregnated the enemy then drifted south like beer in a slop tray. Then there are the Brazilians, the swarthy con men who sailed up the Thames on banana boats and headed straight for the Jewish areas of North London. Yet more odd job men with crooked smiles and gold teeth who bred their own race of pickpockets and tax evaders, who made women with Latin American hair and nails so long they couldn't even make a sandwich—not that food interested them—and watching them unscrew gin bottles with those talons made me wish I was a bottle of gin. I'm made of mixed-up faiths, phony beliefs and a stack of contradictions, all topped with red hair. I have a skill for picking locks and listening in on my mother's phone calls without her knowing—most of my uncles work for British Telecom and know how to lift handsets. The shit that you learn while staying with your relatives... 

There are an awful lot of questions and unsolved mysteries, there are deep water trenches and black holes, there are undiscovered species, strange girls in white dresses, talking rabbits and the law of gravity; obviously our life is not long enough and we will have to exit stage right at some time fully aware that we only learned a fraction of what there was to learn. The trouble with education is that it uses up the time you could have spent learning something more interesting, whereas the problem with knowledge is that it only comes in useful at certain kinds of dinner parties—and if you're never invited to a dinner party, then you've wasted your time acquiring it.

I was a child with an adult inside me, but I killed it the first opportunity I got.

Sometimes I don't feel like talking—it seems like such a waste of effort when no one's listening anyhow. So I don't talk; instead I let Alice talk for me, because she has all the answers and most of the questions too.

My aunts preferred the dead; at least they preferred the free booze and homemade cake that inevitably accompanied them to a better place. It didn't matter to them who had died, one stiff was pretty much the same as another and a wake was something to do when the bingo wasn't on. The best way to crash a wake is to accompany a small child—no one questions a gaggle of women with a small child in tow. I didn't mind, I got fed. It was always the same, after a while some mournful looking ghoul draped in black would wander up to me and tell me about the deceased (people who are dead are always remembered fondly). I didn't mind, I liked stories. I was a small Demonic priest always ready to hear a confession, and by the time I was ten I'd kissed more cold foreheads than Dracula.

Swinging ...

A man walked on the moon, can you believe that?

Kennedy & Martin Luther, gone!

People in the street, weeping...

Free love, campus riots, flower power: I was born into pseudo freedom, into happy and sad times—times of great strides and big steps backward. My old

Reviews for Bent

[kristincedar · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Worth the wait! I was given this book as a part of early reviewers, and I have to say that it is stream of consciousness book, so if that isn't your cup of tea, you probably won't like it. Teri's writing is very good; she is rhythmic and almost artistic in crafting passages that are very good. The reason I didn't rate the book higher, is because it can read a bit disjointed. Good story, though.

[pamjw · Rating: 2 out of 5 stars]

Somewhere in here is the story of Teri and transitioning. A poignant, searching tale of trying to find what you are meant to be in a society of norms and expectations.Sadly, as I was really looking forward to the insights, I found this book very jumbled and hard to follow. It jumped from character to character and place to place in a way that I was never sure where we were. It's not a style of writing I could get a handle on. There are some heart-rending gems in there, but to me they were in danger of being missed. What I could get of the story through it I enjoyed, but it was a real battle for me to stick with it.What the book does have to say is something profound about community and labeling.Brave and gritty writing, but not for me.

[hjvanderklis_1 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

Bent on amending one's physical gender, while wrestling with the mind, soul, friends and familiy is not an easy story or Cinderella kind of fairy tale. Teri Louise Kelly throws in a series of short stories from different view points and moments in time. It really takes more than one third to get used to the raw, harsh language with f-, b-, d-, and c-c-words on every page. Reason enough to put aside, barely enough to sustain and try to figure out what this male to female really likes to portray. Memoir or coming of age isn't a right categorization, a stream-of-consciousness kind of brain dump full of sex, drugs, alcohol music, literature, and distorted relationships characterize Bent. While certainly not every human being thinking that he or she's born in the wrong body may deal with it this way, Kelly and her alter ego Alice do play a game, offending and enjoying, distracting and acknowledging to end up without friends. "I am an outside, I am Alice" closes off."I'm a girl now, sort of, at least I'm in development, a prototype, some of this, some of that, nothing is definable." Though Kelly tries to convince readers that gender doesn't matter and certainly doesn't define a person, it's not that simple. Quotes from medical journals function as markers where Kelly is in the gender transformation process. Treatment with hormons, plastic surgery, experiments, unlearning and learning. "We are not born this way; we make ourselves over to underscores our failure at rebellion.""The term 'sex change' has such an awful connotation. To be precise, you can't actually change your gender; you can only shift it further toward your desired preference." Painful insights, not an average DIY guide or 7 steps to instant success. Though Bent's a struggle for both the writer and the reader, it was worth finishing it.

[jimleask · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

This book is a collection of memory dumps and as such is difficult to follow if you do not read large sections of the book at one sitting. The book probably rates 4 stars but as I do not read for very long at each sitting it is more difficult than most books to follow when picking it back up again.Saying that, the writer has great imagery and a wonderful turn of phrase which for me were genius. For example: "you get home from too many hours of busting your balls for a swarm of moneyed maggots" and "- that wonderland you craved will turn out to be Elm Street and everyone is Freddy." There are many, many more - some with language that cannot be repeated here, but all well worth the read.The book seems a sincere and truthful account, some of the stories would be left out of most books where an author could not bear to show themselves in such a bad light. For me it shone a light on how society does put so much significance on what gender you are.This review contains no gender specific pronouns.

[kimmyd76 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Confusing and disconnected... those were the first words to come to mind while reading this book but as you read through you get to understand that I guess that's what the author may be trying to portray. To be born the wrong gender, what else can you say. If you can't feel at home in your own body then where do you belong. This is a very unique memoir of one persons struggle to, dare I say, normalcy. Maybe the work would be a better place with no gender identity, it is just too much.

[shayd-6 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

I don't quite know what I expected when I requested this book, but what I read when I started wasn't it. This memoir is like a waterfall: it sucks you in and carries you along in a rambling stream of conciousness. I know I'm only getting maybe a third of the pop-culture references (being of the wrong (younger) generation), so many of the layers of meaning are just washing over me unnoticed.Strangely fascinating, but disjointed and non-linear. I'm finding it difficult to track the progression of the journey, which makes me wonder if there is one, or if it's just a series of moments strung together like rocks along the shore.Still reading.

[meiloslyther · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

I'm not normally one for memoirs or any kind of non-fiction in general, but as a trans person myself, this book caught my eye on the Early Reviewers list. I have to say, stream of consciousness is an acquired taste (or you have to be the right kind of mind), and the more I read, the more I got into it. Perhaps I've grown since I tried to read James Joyce in college. Either way, I love the descriptions of her adventures, and her journey through gender, and the conclusions she comes to at the end. I actually was reminded of a friend as I read. Could have used a (more?) thorough copyedit, but the mistakes were relatively easy to overlook.

[victoriabrodersen · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

"Bent" is a stream of consciousness retelling of Teri's coming of age. Teri skips around and hands the reader selections of growing up an English boy in the 60's and 70's while wanting to be a girl. Do not be deterred by the sudden drifting of conversation or change of memory. This is a book worth sticking with. It is a tale of transgendered conflict is told through a haze of drugs, punk rock, and self-loathing. The ties that bind Teri to an unsupportive family are the very ones that make coming out such an alien idea. This memoir is the perfect illustration of how difficult transgender youth have it, even today. Bent opens your eyes and forces you to see the truth; that sex is delightful, whether you resent your penis or not, and has real life repercussions. Whether you want to open your mind or make sense of a friend's seemingly nonsensical experience, Bent will let you into a world many of us cannot imagine - a world which is far more tragic than even today's headlines would have us believe.

[viennamax-1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

She is ‘bent’: Her gender dysphoria leads her – at last – to become a transgender person. She lives through the necessary hormonal and surgical treatments – and all the horror that goes by with the outing of her new identity. In her words: ‘I was an English man who became an Australian woman – losing everything, but finding myself.’ And: ‘I have no past; for all intents and purposes, I’ve ceased to exist. […] Changing your gender renders everything that’s come before null and void.’Her story is full of extraordinary shrill and figurative language like ‘drinks, by-passing the liver and heading straight for the polar region of your brain’. Or the ‘ladies shithouse that can resemble Pompeii on a hectic Friday night just before the volcano goes pop’.And we learn in her book that there are as many F to M transgender people as there are M to F ones. Forget gender, Teri says, it means nothing. For her, gender ‘is the last hurdle to be surmounted on the track to social freedom’ and the transgendered community is becoming the ‘revolutionaries of the twenty-first century’.Well, I would not go that far. But I loved her book nevertheless. For her style. And for her courage.

[jessiqa_1 · Rating: 2 out of 5 stars]

This book is very stream-of-consciousness, with little to no transitions, bouncing back and forth between various periods in the author's life. Normally, I have no problem with this sort of story-telling, but in this case the writing style was so clunky that it was hard to follow. Most of it is in present tense except for a chapter or two that are in past tense for no particular reason. There was also a chapter inexplicably in second person narrative. Aside from the poor writing, I had a very hard time getting interested in the story at all. Kelly comes off as a complete asshole most of the time, treating everyone around her like shit. I could never be certain if the other people in the book are so one-dimensional as a result or poor writing or because she doesn't really see others as actual human beings. I felt justified in this confusion when I read the except from her therapist’s notes that describe her as "borderline sociopath." Honestly, I couldn't even finish. I only made it about 3/4 of the way through.

[pennadams-1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

I received an early review copy of this book 5 years ago and then promptly forgot about it. Having rediscovered it in a dark corner of my email I think it's time I actually reviewed it.This book is ambitious. Its chronology and point of view are often disjointed and unclear. The style is just as mercurial. This can make it hard to follow, however, Bent's sometimes jumbled structure helps communicate the difficulties of the memories it describes.This memoir is unconventional and the stories recounted within are often ugly, but few people's lives are strictly conventional or pretty. If you are willing to dig through the nontraditional form, Kelly offers an unfiltered honesty that make Bent worth checking out.

[bibrarybookslut · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

What a strange, twisted, unorthodox tale Teri Louise Kelly has woven here. Abandoning the standard conventions of the genre, she has put together a memoir that initially comes across as nothing more than stream-of-consciousness rambling, but which slowly begins to reveal the threads of a life remembered.

There’s no doubt that style makes for an intensely personal experience, and the reader’s confusion and uncertainly are part of that experience. It’s as if we’re meant to be just as unsure of our place within the narrative as Kelly was unsure of her place in the world around her. She jumps from memory to memory, framing each with the wisdom of experience earned long after the original scene was lived.

Approaching this as a story of gender identity and expression is to do it a severe injustice, and to neglect everything else about her life. If there’s one thing we immediately take from her story it’s that gender is not who we are, but simply a part of our lives. There’s no doubt it describes us, but it doesn’t solely define us. A lot of her life revolves around understanding her gender, and of coming to terms with its expression, but there’s no illusion that her entire life has been spent in pursuit of some gender ideal.

Ironically, some of the most insightful observations in the story come not from Kelly, but from her invisible, imaginary friend, Alice. Initially, it’s unclear just who or what Alice is, whether she’s a real person, an imaginary friend, a ghost, or a representation of some sort of schizophrenic break. Eventually, however, it becomes clear that Alice is both a coping mechanism and a reflection of who Kelly is inside.

“Love cannot kill Alice any more than hate can. The girl has a voracious capacity for passion; and then it dawned on me—the only way to kill Alice was to become her, to grow into her; because then, and only then, could one be consumed by the other—be free—whole.”

There is a lot of darkness to Kelly’s tale, including drugs, alcohol, dysfunctional relationships, thoughts of suicide, and even a stay in an asylum. It’s almost as wearing as the confused rambling of the narrative itself but, once again, it helps to bring the reader into her world and force a sort of emotional connection.

Interspersed throughout the tale (and extraordinarily jarring in the way they jump out of the text) are various quotes from celebrities, famous thinkers, and medical journals. They’re never commented upon, but left to stand as a placeholder in time, something to help illustrate her place in the world and her own understanding.

"Let’s forget the flounce and frills and sugar and spice; this isn’t Cinderella and there aren’t any glass slippers or pumpkins that change into carriages.”

As cover blubs go, few are as honest or as compelling as that of Bent. This is not a fairy tale, not a happily-ever-after tale of transformation, and not an inspirational guide on how to accept your own gender. Instead, it’s the insightful (and often painful) tale of one woman’s journey from discovery to understanding, intimately woven into the story of a life influenced, but not defined, by that journey. It’s not an easy reason, but it’s not an easy journey.


Originally reviewed for Frock Magazine