Elliot Page came out as lesbian before coming out as a trans man a couple of years later. Just these facts make it a huge milestone for the LGBTQ+ community, as Hollywood is a conservative industry and being a successful queer actor/actress is still not mainstream. The bottomline of these memoirs is that would anyone else than Elliot Page have written them, they wouldn’t have been published.

What you expect is a full introspection of the events of finding his sexual and gender identity and how roles, people or trauma shaped him to the person Page is on screen and in his personal life. What you will find in this book is a series of traumatizing events that are (often) not even remotely linked to each other. I am not a super fan of Page, so I don’t know when he was working on which set and I don’t keep track of whom he worked with. But I definitely lacked a reason to writing this book and a narrative line. It makes it increasingly difficult and frustrating to read as you just neither understand the point nor the goal of these memoirs. The prose aims to be deep, sometimes blunt and sort of poetic and it ends up in very cringe moments where I personally wanted to throw the book at the wall.

Driving south down Laurel Canyon at Sunset Boulevard, I would pass a giant poster of her, the poster of her latest film. Her beauty is dangerous, I’d think, it’ll cause a car crash.

Seriously, how is it even possible to write that? It’s plain … bad. People from the LGBTQ+ community have had very much mixed feelings about this book as well and I don’t think it’s a prime example of the community’s cultural and rich variety.

The memoirs were definitely not a page-turner (pun intended) for me and I struggled through the book. It gets better by the end, but I gained zero insight on the process of finding oneself in a queer identity in this book.