Daddy Lessons

In this bold and irreverent memoir-in-essays about growing up queer and Mormon in Alberta, Canada, Easton (Why Tammy Wynette Matters) puts their sexuality under a microscope. Each of the book’s 14 essays are arranged around a “lesson” gleaned from pornography—“The Farmer Teaches the Kid How to Be a City Boy,” “Are Boys Who Took Care of Me Daddies?”—amounting to “a book of pornography that functions as a defence of the pornographic.” Easton, whose own father left their family when Easton was young, is keenly attuned to their childhood longing, often for older boys or men in leadership roles. Struggling to navigate both the confusing sexual repression of the church (a disciplining bishop “would send your parents out of the room, saying with great tenderness that he wanted to talk to you man-to-man”) and the explicit sexual abuse they suffered as a teenager, Easton was sent away to reform school due to their “feralness” in seventh grade and landed in a psychiatric facility by ninth. “This suffering and enduring [was] enough to provide a lifetime of anxiety, a lifetime of fetishes,” they observe, but the prevailing tone is sensitive—Easton is refreshingly unafraid of their own complicated desires, admitting that they “know a daddy isn’t good for me, but I want a daddy anyway.” Though the style sometimes skews academic (Barthes and Foucault show up), this is a moving and largely accessible dive into the thicket of human sexuality. (Oct.)

Correction: An earlier version of this review twice referred to the author by the incorrect pronoun.