Cactus Country

Starred review from March 4, 2024
Brevity magazine editor Bossiere’s enthralling debut depicts a young adulthood on the margins. Growing up in Arizona, Bossiere felt strongly that they were a boy, especially when running with a feral pack of young men at Cactus Country, the trailer park near Tucson where Bossiere’s parents moved from the Virginia suburbs when the author was 11. Though many of the boys and men in Bossiere’s orbit were violent and troubled, the author mirrored their dress and mannerisms to gain their acceptance. Once puberty struck, Bossiere’s ambiguous gender expression and impoverished circumstances began to make them stand out among their classmates. By high school, they no longer tried to pass as male, and gradually came to admire feminine strength. While volunteering to teach preschool in their senior year of high school, Bossiere marveled at the confident, nurturing dispositions of their female co-teachers. That experience helped situate them in a fluid, nonbinary gender expression, and stoked their ambition to escape the harsh environs of Cactus Country and attend college in Oregon. Bossiere’s concise prose style and gift for scene-setting draws readers in as they unpick the somewhat esoteric nuances of their gender identity. This will resonate with anyone who’s longed for escape—from a hometown or their own body—but lacked an exit plan. Agent: Maggie Cooper, Aevitas Creative Management.

March 1, 2024
A memoir about gender, the Sonoran Desert, and how stories can save. When Bossiere's family packed themselves into an Airstream and moved to Cactus Country, an RV park situated in the desolate landscape outside of Tucson, the author was an 11-year-old boy. Bossiere was assigned female at birth, but with a cropped haircut, an affinity for dirt, and the "hard masculinity, stoicism, and camaraderie of the boys and men I knew in those years," the author found friendship within Cactus Country's pack of boys, as wild as the park's roving herds of javelina. The boys chased trains, tarantulas, and troubled neighbors, honing their masculinity among the creosote bushes and prickly pears. As puberty began--and with it, romantic confusions, experiences of body issues, and probing questions from peers--Bossiere found themself in a "mixed-up, turned-around, in-between gender story." They turned to online queer communities for answers about their gender. "I wanted to read a story like mine," Bossiere writes of their young, searching self, "because I wanted to know how that story would end." In these tightly connected essays, the author creates such a story, asserting that within the letters LGBTQ+, there are "so many ways a person could find themself in that ever-expanding acronym, its '+' containing multitudes." Bossiere returns to images and ideas from their childhood and adolescence in new landscapes and identities, haunting the memoir to prove that, "[i]n the end, we're left with what the body knows. Its memory runs deep, rooting us to our past no matter how far away or long ago." In that way, though Bossiere's life has taken them far from Cactus Country, "the ghost of the boy I was is still running somewhere out in the desert." Bossiere's hopeful, powerful life story also serves as a memorable study of gender and home.

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