Andrea Lawlor
“I am interested in the seeking, in the quest. It is always going to be messy.”
Andrea Lawlor
(c) Joanna Chattman
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“Joyous and ever-changing, whip-smart and brilliantly perverse, Paul Takes the Form of a Mortal Girl is quite simply one of the most exciting—and one of the most fun—novels of the decade.”
“I love this book in all it’s ecstasy, wit, and hilarity....As rare as it is contagious.”
“If anyone has ever endeavored to reclaim the canonical—specifically Ovid and Gertrude Stein—not to queer it, but to genderqueer it, it is Lawlor.”
“Groundbreaking…. A fresh novel that elevates questions of sexual identity and intimacy.”
Andrea Lawlor is the author of a chapbook of prose poems, Position Papers (Factory Hollow Press, 2016), and a novel, Paul Takes the Form of a Mortal Girl (Rescue Press, 2017; Vintage, 2019), which was shortlisted for the Lambda Literary Award for Bisexual Fiction and the CLMP Firecracker Award. Lawlor has been awarded fellowships by Lambda Literary and Radar Labs, and is the recipient of a Whiting Award for Fiction.
In an interview with Boston Review, Lawlor discussed their desire for a multiplicity of trans narratives: “The filmmaker Jules Rosskam has a documentary called—I love the title of it so much—against a trans narrative (2008). I have always felt like I am against the trans narrative. I don’t want to be representative. I don’t want to be the one voice. I don’t want to be pinned down. I also don’t want to speak for people. I don’t want to write some anthem. I am happy if other people do that—as long as there are lots of them. I want to be one book among many. Let Paul Takes the Form of a Mortal Girl be just one voice. With Paul’s abilities, it’s the same thing: what could be more boring than a single answer to why he can do what he can do?”
Lawlor was educated at the University of Iowa, Temple University, and the University of Massachusetts at Amherst’s M.F.A. Program for Poets and Writers. They teach writing at Mount Holyoke College in Western Massachusetts.
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Paul Takes the Form of a Mortal Girl
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Position Papers
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