Sitting at the window in my mother’s room, the sun breaches an encompassing canopy of leaves, aimlessly casting rays of smooth chartreuse before me. For the first time, I feel old. This is, of course, ironic, seeing as it’s days until my fifth birthday. I recall this as the moment I broke into an amateur awareness of space and time, its totality, and my helpless submission to it. There, I prayed, in whatever language I had then, for my life to be something worthy of existing in this world, deferent of course to the majesty of the trees, the sun, the clouds, and yet, something complementary to their splendor.
Aurora Mattia’s second novel, Unsex Me Here, named for the infamously ravenous line from Lady Macbeth, reads like a spellbook of surrealist transsexual musings. It breaks down into ten self-described “prayers” that are not far off in general sentiment from my own prayer above. Out of necessity for classification, the work locates itself somewhere in the realm of autofiction. It is important to note, however, that in the novel’s appendix, the author declares that “beyond any question of genre, what I want to write is a way of seeing.” This way of seeing is methodically bound to all that is precious. Each page is lush and animate, pulsating with ruby blood, adorned by orchids, precious stones, and kisses that taste of vanilla or gunpowder. Mattia’s prose imbues us with a sense of what it’s like to live within the abundance she cultivates: we are left looking outward at the rest of the world from the center of her seemingly unlimited and distinctly feminine interiority.
Before all else, the work explores what it means to play a part in this epic, drawing kinship with primordial lifeforms and even the molecular structures that preceded them—what it means to be a blip of miraculous life, bodies made of cells tuned to 90-or-so godly degrees. Mattia reckons with the enduring wisdom of asterisms, of seafoam and silver, of ritual fires billowing with honeysuckle smoke. Then, with seamless finesse, she marries these immortal artifacts with far more contemporary concepts: Twitter micro-celebrities, neo-vaginas, and “leftist punk harm-reduction activist/sex work-adjacent nightlife” grifters. Across this sprawling canvas of warped space-time, Mattia broaches a dizzying array of emotions: wonder, betrayal, longing, lust, self-hatred, grief, ecstasy, with astonishing diction and dextrous complexity. The parameters of her mythos are lofty, and, in spite of this, the end result still has both feet firmly planted on Earth.
During the chapter “Via Crucis,” in one of the most striking ideas in the entire book, the narrator calls attention to the nature of her vagina: a miraculous feat, achieved by years and years of desire and scientific perfection, which the misguided could misrecognize as a useless reproductive mutilation. She calls for the reader to “remember with me” that, as exhibited by peacock feathers, which do not allow the birds to fly at all, that nature, too, forgoes its initial evolutionary purpose for that of “artifice: or more precisely, communication.” This link between artifice and communication is reflected in her plentiful use of language, which could similarly be seen as extravagant—but as with any creative decision, corporeal or intellectual, this extravagance is ultimately indispensable in the author’s overall transmission of meaning.
Mattia aims to explore some of the most fundamental questions at the center of transsexual existence: what does it mean to take control over the exertion of one’s own reality, and for that exertion to be rooted in pure desire? What does this do to the nature of the relationship between our mortal flesh and our immortal spirits? Grasping through the dark in this abyss of self-creation can push even the most self-assured among us to the point of crisis. She does not shy away from the troubling effects this can have on the autofictional subjects of the worlds she conjures throughout the book: many struggle with addiction and self-harm, face abuse from their lovers, and endure contempt and violence from a world which is unsettled by deviance in most any form. Despite this, and despite the ongoing culture war that finds trans people at its center, Mattia makes the case for a life in pursuit of beauty, pleasure, and belonging above all else. Her characters may writhe in desperation at the burden of such an immense existential undertaking, but their brilliance, their empathy, and their dignity never falter.
The novel’s soul-searching, flow-of-consciousness contemplation takes inspiration from Clarice Lispector, whom Mattia names in the acknowledgements. In the interviews making up the book’s appendix, which serve to provide insight into the author’s mindset while writing the novel, she invokes the concept of “the simultaneity of time” from Água Viva, where Lispector says, “I’m a concomitant being: I gather in me time past, the present and the future.” In this transmutation of time, Lispector breaks through observable reality and harnesses a metaphysicality that brings us closer to truth on a more expansive, cosmic scale—an ability Mattia is also able to exercise.
Nowhere is this feeling of simultaneous futurepresentpast more potent than in the central chapter, the apparent heart of the book, “Celebrity Skin,” named for the Hole song, where Mattia conveys a trans-womanhood that seems to be derived from a timeless and deeply human tradition. She takes us back, or perhaps forward, in a speculative version of ancient Greece, to a journey that many people can find something of themselves in, and will likely continue to in the ever-expanding present.
The chapter reads like a myth, and its main character, Hylonome, wanders in search of something to quell her nagging intuition, or perhaps out of spite for the men of her village. These men mock those they see as “false nymphs,” accusing them of deceiving men with their “mirages of feminine charm.” These malignant whispers lead her wayward to the Temple of Cybele, into the arms of her first lover, and then eventually behind a far-off waterfall, into the pink caverns housing the hermaphroditic Daughters of Aphroditos, in search of the Goddess herself. Hylonome imagines what the first contact with the Goddess would be like: