Whether he is at school, on the swim team, chopping off his curly pigtails or fighting bullies, J continually encounters a “world seemed confused and backward to him.”īeam describes J’s lifelong dilemma in a somewhat overused but effective metaphor: “He was clearly a boy everybody else was just wearing the wrong glasses.” When J makes a move on his best friend Melissa, she sees him as the girl she has always known, and distances herself. The shame J absorbs from his father’s response is repeated in a number of encounters as he matures into a gangly seventeen-year-old. When a neighborhood mom tells J’s father Manny that his son is cute, Manny replies, “That’s my daughter,” with embarrassment. In J’s earliest memory, he is two years old, running through a sprinkler with no shirt on. That vision eventually became the character of J in Beam’s newest novel, published by Little, Brown in May. While Transparent was a non-fiction text, Beam longed to use fiction to tell “an emotional truth” through the character of a transboy. What happens when you identify as an adolescent male on the inside, but the outside world-including your conventional Puerto Rican and Jewish parents, your classmates and sometimes even your best friend- see you as female?Īuthor Cris Beam was “inspired to write I am J more than ten years ago while researching her first book, Transparent, about transgender teenagers in Los Angeles,” according to her Author’s Note.
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