I read Nevada by Imogen Binnie for the first time in 2020. The plague year was in full swing – I was sitting at my bed-desk and adjusting to working from home as a government survey-taker, calling mostly housewives with perversely leading questions about policing. Freed from the panopticon of the office, I wanted something to rest my eyes on while I worked. Originally published in 2013, I’d heard Nevada feted as the watershed of the modern ‘trans novel’, which was then just coming into popular currency. As far as I was concerned, I was a cis man looking for ‘insight’ into the many trans people who’d floated into my life over the years and become my closest contacts. This reflected, I was sure, no strong felt affinity or longing on my part. I worked through it fast – I believe in a single shift – on the desktop .epub reader which I kept windowed alongside my work script. I didn’t really give it my full attention, if I’m being honest. I didn’t pay anything much attention in those days. Attention felt almost dangerous.

I remember feeling like I was supposed to sympathise with the protagonist, Maria – a trans woman who tries to dispel an ambient sense of dissociation from her life by ‘borrow-stealing’ her cis girlfriend’s car and driving it across the country – but being unconvinced. Her narrative voice struck me as grating, simultaneously arrogant and self-effacing in a way I assumed the author intended as charismatic, and I registered her essayistic circling on the topic of transness as the book’s attempt at edification of a cis audience. I felt condescended-to. In the climax of the book, Maria tries and fails to counsel a Walmart cashier, James, who she believes is a repressed trans woman; on a long drive, she alienates him with monologuing on her favourite subject until he steals her heroin and ditches her. I didn’t blame him. I logged it as three stars on Goodreads and moved on.