Dissociation Fiction: Nicola Dinan is Dissapointed in Us

I just finished Nicola Dinan’s Disappoint Me. It did not disappoint me, probably. The arc of the plot (spoiler), however, makes me wonder if the key is maintaining low expectations. If you never dream of being swept off your feet you can’t be left at the altar. Or something.

The book was algo recommendation because I had read Bellies, her first novel, and my reading habits do trend toward the trans. I enjoyed Bellies, a story about two young gay men (Tom and Ming) at uni who–delightfully–find one another and have a healthy, supportive lil’ tale of first gay love before Ming transitions and the two slowly, achingly, drift away from each other. The book switches between perspectives, both somewhat reserved (or maybe just British?) narrators hesitating on the edge of adulthood. Ming authors a play that re-narrates their relationship, her transition, and deeply wounds Tom. Though the more conservative on many levels (becomes something or other in finance, is a pretty mild gay man, is British), Tom’s narration always struck me as the more emotional, capable of deep love and anger.

Ming’s narrative remains at arm’s length and that voice is what stuck with me. Ming, from Malaysia (like the author), seems to always be writing the scene in her head as opposed to feeling, a voice-over in her own life. I was struck by Ming’s experience with their circle of friends reuniting at a point after her transition. She describes a feeling of having transitioned away from them, a new set of experiences, friends, and a way of being in the world she cannot convey to them. That distance also casts their past in a different light, since she had a piece of herself they did not know, an entire life story happening to her while they were watching and they didn’t even realize it. Her arc projected her into a future removed from their story but that also re-wrote her past, a twist in her story that brought home how little they actually knew her. I had not really metabolized the title–bellies are the most vulnerable part of animals (allegedly) which is why they so rarely show them. Tom and Ming–and all their friends–are in the stage of life that feels like exposed bellies all the time: big life choices, first loves, first jobs, adult friendships. Tom and Ming expose specifically queer bellies, the parts of themselves that once out might change their relationships to others, the frisson of coming out.

Ming’s voice, however, remains remote. Passivity is obviously an incorrect description of transition, an action that is transformative of one’s life and relationships in unique and incommunicable ways. Yet Ming writes her life as a character to be performed on a stage and not in a real body in relationship to others and itself. That feeling was uncomfortable familiar, adrift in a way that is both universal–coming of age and such–and singular. That voice is melancholy, resigned, and familiar. Like Samuel Beckett–try again, fail again, fail better.

Dinan’s second novel, Disappoint Me, has a similar form sliding back and forth in the narration between Max, a trans woman, and Vincent, the hetero man she meets on a dating app. Max, we understand, is roughly a decade into transition and has a job she is embarrassed about not because it is shameful but because she is earning way too much money as a lawyer who writes legal documents that her company is selling as an AI product–a very funny, very real bit about the little lies we tell about humanity. She is adrift post-breakup and has the same dissociation voice, ironic distance, cutting observation of the world. She has a metaphorical wake-up call when she gets a concussion falling down the stairs at a party while on ketamine. (Ket the dissociation drug. Don’t tell Elon he is Becoming Trans on K). Still, even in the thick of Bad Stuff (a breakup! a brain tumor!) she remains at a distance, a convincingly human simulation.

Again, while Vincent is the more conventional character he has a stickier voice in part because while Max is trying to move forward away from her bad relationship, from her uncomfortable though loving relationship with her family (which mercifully has nothing to do with being trans!), Vincent’s story goes backward, into his past that is hurtling forward toward their future. Vincent seems generally unbothered by Max’s trans-ness, does not hide her or her identity, and he integrates her into his hetero world. It is his backstory that threatens their relationship when, in a moment of anger with his friend he lets slip information about his previous relationship with a trans woman, Alex. They met on his gap year trip in Thailand when he fell for her and then pushed her away when he learns she is trans (and in Thailand for bottom surgery). In a series of events Alex hooks up with his friend Fred, Vincent outs her, Fred beats her up, and Vincent cares for her (and hooks up with her, repeatedly) until her surgery only to promptly leave her while she’s in the hospital. It’s a lot.

So Vincent finally does it–he disappoints her. Max learns this shortly before she is having surgery to remove a (probably benign) brain tumor that is likely a consequence of her testosterone blocker and that might have been caught earlier, if only she’d had the brain scan when she got the concussion. Again, a lot going on here including a lot–and I mean a LOT–of descriptions of food. Max is frequently cooking (or describing cooking or eating), often to fill the space in relationships, pulling people together and filling them up. The descriptions of flavors, smells, and textures provide the sensual texture between characters.

I found insights again in Max’s remove from those around her, particularly as she navigates entry into Vincent’s world, bridging between a queer, artistic space into the heteronormie rituals, chatting with the girlfriends, meeting old friends, always with just that bit of difference that makes a lot of difference. At Fred’s birthday party, where Max is uncomfortably at the center of a conversation about fertility, she bumps into a trans friend who, for an impressive fee, smokes a vape through her ass for a paying client. They share an inside joke about it, a moment of two worlds, two languages, slipping past one another. She can be a part of Vincent’s life but never fully of his world–she cannot give him the child his parents want and she will always be just outside the bounds of normal in a way she cannot share with Vincent.

Max’s other-ness remains a continual tension as events propel their lives forward–Vincent’s father has a heart attack so Vincent has to tell his parents about his new relationship. Her brain tumor propels her more deeply into Vincent’s life–including Fred and his wife Aisha’s lives. Her struggle to maintain distance fails and she finds herself faced with a choice not only about how comfortable she is drifting into normie-hood but with how to deal with Vincent’s secret. Her agony–because it has taken so long to arrive–is palpable, especially as she faces the stark reality of Being Trans. It will always, perpetually be A Thing between her and world, us and the world, a pane of glass that separates us, that must be explained, and will sit in the air between us in conversations whether in accidental misgenderings, thoughtless comments, or just the lingering stare (can I tell? what’s underneath there?) Dinan captures that fog for Max but also for Vincent who, while waiting for Fred to join him in Thailand, recalls his friend’s careless racism toward him when they were younger. Vincent does not want to be alone and so he welcomes Fred, only to lash out at him when he hooks up with Alex, turning her most intimate secret into a weapon against his friend that ricochets and damages her. The ways we disappoint one another return to us, spoiling possible futures.

Just as Vincent returns to Fred in spite of his capacity to harm, Max painfully considers whether she is simply settling for Vincent as she processes his violence, Fred’s violence, against a trans woman for being trans. Is she merely a vehicle for his salvation? Does that capacity for violence, for abandonment in a moment of extreme vulnerability, still exist in Vincent? Is being alone, being lonely, better than settling for what you can get? Will she be disappointed–such a relatively tame word for being left alone with and as an open wound. That question lingers, always. Being trans transforms relationships, in the secrets we keep, the parts of our selves we cannot share or explain, our families who become newly strange even if not estranged. Being loved feels impossible because we learn that being trans makes us unlovable, strange, an object of disgust. Or we fear our trans-ness is the real object of desire, a token of virtue. As a trans men I have felt like a talisman against masculinity, an idealized manhood, rather than being my very imperfect selves.

Loneliness propels us towards others who disappoint us and who we will disappoint, never being quite who we wish to be. Toward the end Max has a conversation with her father, a recovering alcoholic who was an absent (at best) parent, who quotes a line of her poetry back at her–no person is less than two things. Max sees herself through the eyes of her father as he sees himself, in a line of her poetry. The dissociated trans identity translates itself into language to allow the narrator to write their own character, fictional and real, language and body, self and other, always at least two.