Book reviews can often feel like a hot food court in the mall on a Sunday afternoon—full of background noise and the skimming of menus for something familiar and comfortable, actively ignoring everything else. Tar Hollow Trans: Essays, Stacy Jane Grover’s new book, is not to be swallowed and digested with ease, but rather is a tome filled with challenging history and identity politics, to be meditated upon as a prompt for self-reflection on one’s own personal narrative.
This immersive collection of essays on Grover’s life, childhood, and home region in Appalachian Ohio is a gift to the grown-ups of the rural queer community she grew up in. “For my generation, moving out of the region was seen as a choice,” she writes, “as if something other than simply needing to earn a living lured us out of the county.”
Her voice speaks softly yet firmly to the challenges of identity and the violence of rewriting an experience to fit the narrative. Grover’s essays bring forward artifacts of Appalachian history tied closely to her own experiences as a child and young adult. “I couldn’t just bloom where I was planted. My generation never really could.” Throughout, she lifts heavy thoughts about identity and self-knowledge, confronting the difficulty of telling a nuanced story in favor of an oversimplified one: “I don’t want to create a dominant narrative at the expense of the more complicated reality to gain the acceptance of legible visibility over authentic representation.”
‘Tar Hollow Trans: Essays,’ By Stacy Jane Grover, The University Press of Kentucky, 152 pages. Publication date: June 20, 2023.
Grover’s extraordinary ability to manipulate the stark imagery of small-town Ohio onto the page allows readers to smell the soil of the corn fields beside the unpaved roads and the cigarette smoke in the parking lots behind the local Walmart. Her fondness for the place seeps into even the unpleasant details and uncomfortable memories; to share is itself an act of defiance in the face of personal essay controversy.
The author weaves in a fair amount of media criticism; in one essay she distinguishes how the colossal media engine, fed by clickbait, laps up trauma and spits out writers brave enough to share their personal stories. Tar Hollow Trans pushes back against this content millstone, with Grover demonstrating a deft ability to fluctuate between nostalgia and neoteric observations.
What could have been a book circling the drain on transgender identity rhetoric and false idolatry, mounting rural queer folks on a pedestal, Tar Hollow Trans is instead an oasis for kin to come together and share stories on equal ground. “I don’t care what transgender means or what it can do,” Grover declares in “The Line Spins Through Time,” one of the essays. “I experience myself and my surroundings and all that’s been passed down to me without needing to fit a mold, to fill a role, to be a part of some compulsory group for the sake of visibility that will never save me.”
The reader feels the steady push and pull of insistence and energy throughout the pages as Grover extrapolates her theories of self onto the many artifacts attached to memories, events, and Appalachian cultural phenomena; each shown with admiration and awe, proving their significance.
The challenge of writing about transgender experiences is that there are very few willing to step outside a traditional narrative of exploitative coming-out stories of trauma to triumph. Grover fully contradicts this method by allowing each essay to reveal itself, and in doing so, maintains her autonomy as narrator and author. There is no hand-holding in Tar Hollow Trans, no justification for hyperbole or extreme. These nine essays flow easily between past and present, and new and old ideas.
The triumph of Tar Hollow Trans is that the author challenges the reader to consider that not every story should be told linearly, without tarnish or rough edges. “I want to make the present more liveable, to scramble timelines and carry the past into the endless future,” she writes. In fact, it is clear that in the process of excavating these memories, a well-established ecosystem shrinks back from the inspecting light. Grover merely holds a lantern as she guides the reader through the exhibit, pointing to the exposed visage.