A Safe Girl to Love
Casey Plett
Arsenal Pulp Press, 2023
Review by Roz Milner
For a few years, Casey Plett’s first book, A Safe Girl to Love, was hard to find. Originally published by Topside Press almost a decade ago, the short story collection was generally unavailable after that press went under. But earlier this year, Arsenal Pulp Press reissued the book with a new cover and an afterword. It’s a treat to see the book back on shelves.
In the time since its original release, Plett has won multiple awards and served as a Giller Prize juror. She also co-founded LittlePuss Press, which continues to publish cutting-edge trans literature. And Plett herself? Her writing has grown by leaps and bounds in some senses but, at the same time, one can see the seeds of her later work here, too.
A Safe Girl to Love opens with the powerful story, “Other Women,” a homecoming story of sorts about early transition, finding boundaries, and navigating the past as a new self. To wit: the story follows the way Sophie, the narrator, becomes both an object of desire and curiosity to an old friend once she’s transitioned. Sophie lets her touch her boobs, they hook up, and when Sophie has sex, it’s a messy experience that straddles questions of consent and Sophie’s dysphoria.
What rings true in “Other Women” are the little details of coming out that Plett captures. For example, there’s the way Sophie has to think about and study social dynamics, like the way people hug and shake hands. Contrast this to, say, Gore Vidal’s novel Myra Breckenridge. When Myra transitioned, she took to it like water filling a vase and didn’t have to relearn anything. That’s the cis gaze, where the nitty gritty is glossed over. The little anxieties and details Plett includes were a shot across the bow of literary fiction. It’s no wonder so many people saw themselves in her book. No other writers seemed to have taken the time to really think about the experience of transition.
Meanwhile, “Portland, Oregon” follows the life of a trans woman who’s struggling to make ends meet. She pushes herself past her limits by engaging in sex work on top of her day job. Told from the perspective of her cat, it’s a story with a gentle sense of humor that balances out the darker elements of the piece: the physical and emotional strain of balancing sex work with a day job, the way the protagonist’s relationship with her cat changes, and the way she sinks into isolation. The more fantastical elements seen here are something that Plett has moved away from in her fiction; in A Dream of A Woman, she stuck closer to realism.
Key to this collection is “Not Bleak,” a story about Zeke, a trans woman who returns home to a Mennonite community where there is no real concept of being trans among the members. It’s the longest and most fleshed-out story in the collection and one that touches on several themes that Plett has returned to over the years. The level of detail and care that went into crafting this story still shines through nearly a decade later. Indeed, in the afterword, Plett mentions how much this story meant to her. She even had a soundtrack for the story, comprised of Taylor Swift songs that would play at specific moments.
When viewed in the rearview mirror, however, “Not Bleak” takes on a couple of new meanings for her fiction. First is a comparison to her breakout novel, Little Fish, which builds on the idea of being trans and Mennonite and takes it in powerful new directions. Zeke is not exactly a precursor to Little Fish’s Wendy Reimer, but she does inhabit a similar part of the CanLit landscape. Secondly, one sees that Plett is not only able to capture memorable characters but also to create a small, intricate world around them, a skill that would pay off in spades in A Dream of a Woman.
Elsewhere in the collection, there are notable recurring elements: a mom who is a nurse, a youth spent in a choir, and, above all, the sights and sounds of Winnipeg. Maybe someday there will be an interesting monograph about The Peg’s role in her fiction and the way it differs from, say, Meira Cook’s.
Since her fiction is often serious in subject matter, it’s easy to forget that Plett is charming and funny. When Plett reads in front of an audience, she’s engaging and comedic. This side of her work comes out in the shorter stories here: “Twenty Hot Tips To Shopping Success” and “Real Equality (A Manifesto).” They serve as ballast for the longer stories and as a nice change of pace. Indeed, part of the interest in returning to a writer’s first collection is having the opportunity to see the paths not taken. This is most apparent in these short pieces. “Twenty Hot Tips” is written in a This American Life mode, while “Real Equality” is more polemical than Plett’s later fiction.
In the years since A Safe Girl to Love came out then sank from view, both Plett and Trans Lit as a whole have grown by leaps and bounds. Where once it was up to micro presses to get these stories out there, now we have Detransition, Baby released by a big five press. Meanwhile, the indies have ramped up their coverage; Arsenal Pulp Press, Menotomy Press, and Coach House Books have all published trans authors and stories with trans elements.
In some ways, the dream Plett wrote about in “Real Equality” has been realized. Her books aren’t confined to an LGBTQ shelf. They’re right in the fiction section next to Ann Patchett. And yet, and yet. When one looks at what else has been published—Irreversible Damage, Trans: When Ideology Meets Reality, and Camille Paglia’s latest brain droppings in Provocations—one sees how the pendulum has swung back the other way and how far we still have to go. There was no trans tipping point, but perhaps A Safe Girl to Love captures a moment when Trans Lit broke new ground.
Still, this burst from the initial salvo of Trans Lit is nice to have back in print, both for completist reasons, but also because it’s a good collection of stories. It’s not for nothing that Plett’s star rose so rapidly. Her stories pack an emotional punch that lingers after you shut the book.
Roz Milner (she/her) is a freelance writer and critic based in the Toronto area. Her work has appeared in Broken Pencil, Lambda Literary, Xtra, The Quarantine Review, The Temz Review, and many other places. She is currently working on a collection of short fiction.