A CBC Books’ pick for the top Canadian nonfiction of the year
One of Autostraddle’s best queer books of 2020
Longlisted for the American Library Association’s Over the Rainbow book list
“bennett’s personal experiences serve as the roots of their queer politics. Exploring beyond binary conceptions of gender, bennett shares fresh perspectives on subjects cerebral and practical.”
“Like A Boy but Not a Boy is a distinctive, appealing, and candid essay collection about nonbinary life.”
“Both moving and illuminating, this stirring series of reflections is definitely worth picking up.”
“Critique mixed with love letter is an ethos of Like a Boy but Not a Boy, which deftly explores class, mental illness, gender, and parenthood.”
“This is a book that asks hard questions about queerness — who defines it and who gets to claim it? How do we perceive it in each other? What makes it visible or invisible? Where does it live in the body? ... Bennett beautifully captures the ways in which their identity as a queer nonbinary person changes [their] experiences, and the ways that it doesn’t.”
Inquisitive and expansive, Like a Boy but Not a Boy explores author andrea bennett’s experiences with gender expectations, being a non-binary parent, and the sometimes funny and sometimes difficult task of living in a body. The book’s fourteen essays also delve incisively into the interconnected themes of mental illness, mortality, creative work, class, and bike mechanics (you can learn a lot about yourself through trueing a wheel).
In “Tomboy,” andrea articulates what it means to live in a gender in-between space, and why one might be necessary; “37 Jobs 21 Houses” interrogates the notion that the key to a better life is working hard and moving house. And interspersed throughout the book is “Everyone Is Sober and No One Can Drive,” sixteen stories about queer millennials who grew up and came of age in small Canadian communities.
Like a Boy but Not a Boy addresses the struggle to find acceptance, and to accept oneself; and how one can find one’s place while learning to make space for others. The book also wonders what it means to be an atheist and search for faith that everything will be okay; what it means to learn how to love life even as you obsess over its brevity; and how to give birth, to bring new life, at what feels like the end of the world.
advanced praise
“The undramatized care with which bennett offers us their own life, alongside the lives of other queer millennials, is a gift to queers like me who, in a world with too few queer stories, often worry they don’t belong.”
—John Elizabeth Stintzi, author of Vanishing Monuments and Junebat“andrea bennett’s measured and compassionate voice is compelling in these pages. Their humanity, intelligence, learning, and gift for synthesis shine bright.”
—Bill Richardson, author of I Saw Three Ships: West End Stories“Like a Boy but Not a Boy transforms the exploration of self and world into high-stakes writing.”
—Carmine Starnino, editor for the Walrus“andrea bennett’s razor-sharp essays cut to the quick. The intimacy and compassion of andrea’s writing is balanced by deep insights into the way power operates at multiple levels.”
—Hannah McGregor, host of Secret Feminist Agenda and co-editor of Refuse: CanLit in Ruins“These essays give space to reflect on how labels are applied and misapplied, and how we might describe our internal worlds better.”
—Sarah Berman, author of Don’t Call It a Cult