In ‘Pageboy,’ featured here, Page traces his path from Canadian child star to Oscar nominee for ‘Juno’ to a proud trans man. “I feel the best I’ve ever felt,” he says
elliot pagemuch awaited memoir, page boyWill be released on 6 June. It’s a deeply personal story that promises to discuss Page’s relationship with her body, her experiences as one of the most famous trans people in the world, and cover mental health, assault, love, relationships, sex. Will do , and the cesspool that could be Hollywood.
Page, 36, admits to being a little nervous. “A little overwhelmed!” he says laughing. “But grateful.”
Page specifically told People, “I didn’t think I could write a book.” “Books, especially memoirs, have really changed my life, offered me inspiration, comfort, humbled, all those things. And I think this period of not only hate, of course, but misinformation or just lies about our healthcare, about LGBTQ+ lives, it felt like the right time. Trans and queer stories are often alienated, or worse, universalized. first chapter of so page boy– quoted below – “I just sat down, and it came out and I just couldn’t stop. I just kept writing.
Page knows that his own personal experience is not that of most people in his community. “My experience as a trans person and this life that I have, and the privilege that I have, does not represent the reality of most trans lives.” Still, representation and visibility are important, he says. “I think it’s important, I think we need to feel represented and see ourselves, you know, it’s not something I loved as a kid. The reality is that trans people Are disproportionately unemployed, experience homelessness disproportionately. Trans women of color are being murdered. People are losing their healthcare or not being able to access it.”
Connected: Elliot Page receives emotional unboxing copies of his memoir for the first time: ‘Wow, it’s real!’
But to be clear, it’s not as if Page’s journey has been easy. “Obviously there have been very difficult moments. I feel like I’ve barely made it in a lot of ways. But today, I’m just me and grateful to be here and alive and taking things one step at a time.
And, as her fans may recall, her fame really started with a little 2007 film Juno And at the same time he was making his personal identity.
Here is the first chapter of the page.
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I met Paula when I was twenty years old. Sitting on our friend’s couch, eating raw almonds from her knees to her chest, she introduced herself, “I’m Paula.” The sound of her voice radiated warmth, a kindness. It wasn’t so much that his eyes lit up but that he found you. I could see and feel her. We went to Reflections. It was the first time I went to a gay bar and would be my last for a long time. I was a pathetic flirt.
Flirting when I didn’t mean to and not when I wanted to. We were standing close, but not too close. The air was so thick, I was floating in it. That summer we took a friend’s boat camping on a deserted island. We did the mushrooms around the fire and wrapped the salmon in tinfoil. The stars are pulsating, reaching, as if making a sentence. Mushrooms always made me cry, but she loved them, eventually turning my worried tears to joy. I was jealous of the self-assurance in her body. We danced on the beach. There was a guitar being played, we took turns playing dirty covers.
I had just returned from a month-long trip through Eastern Europe backpacking with my childhood best friend, Mark. We started in Prague and caught trains to Vienna, Budapest, Belgrade and Bucharest. We stayed in hostels, except for one day in Bucharest, when Mark was so sick that we got a hotel room with air conditioning. I bought individually wrapped cheese slices from the store and put them in the tiny freezer of the tiny hotel room tiny fridge. We waited while they cooled, and I pressed damp cloths down the back of his neck and along his spine. When the paneer pieces have solidified. I put them all over Mark’s body, and it seems to help a little. There was a jacuzzi in the room, and we sat down without stuffing it and flipped through television channels, landing on a porno that happened to also happen to be in a jacuzzi. Mark ate cheese.
Connected: Elliot Page announces tour dates for his upcoming memoir: ‘I’m Grateful’
This was before smartphones. Navigating trains, hostels, men with a guidebook. We used to go to internet cafes to send messages home. “Hey, we’re alive.” I’ll email Paula, pining for her. I kept thinking about him—when we were walking in Austria, looking at the sea of sunflowers; When I drank blueberry beer in a cellar in Belgrade, lips purple, heads spinning, like the last time we kissed, which was the first time; On a twelve-hour train ride from Belgrade to Bucharest during one of the worst heat waves in decades. Mark and I lay next to each other on a single bunk, our heads as close to the opening as we could get to the window below. There was no air-conditioning, and we had no running water. We listened to Cat Power through shared earphones and took sips of absinthe. Are you listening to it at the same time? cd i made you? I thought, almost saying the words out loud. I watched the night pass, the Serbian landscape, rural, motionless with its sparse, fleeting light. I thought of Paula.
That time in Reflections was new to me, being in a strange place and being present, enjoying it. Shame had seeped into my bones since I was the youngest, and I struggled to rid my body of that old toxic and corrosive marrow. But there was a joy in the room, it lifted me up, forcing a jaw-dropping response, an uncontrollable, steady smile. Sweat is dripping down my back, down my chest as I dance. I watched Paula’s hair twist and bounce as she was at ease, chaotic but controlled, sensual and strong. Would I catch him looking at me, or was it the other way around? We wanted to be caught. deer in the headlights. Shocked, but not broken.
“can I kiss you?” I asked, shaken by my boldness, as if it had come from somewhere, might be powered by electronic music, a circuit of release, demanding that you leave your repression at the door. And then I did. in a strange bar. In front of everyone around us. I could understand what all those poems were about, what a commotion. Before everything was cold, motionless, emotionless. Every woman I loved didn’t love me back, and the one who probably did, loved me the wrong way. But here I was on a dance floor with a woman who wanted to kiss me and the hostile, cruel voice that filled my head whenever I wished was silenced. Maybe for a second, I could give myself pleasure. Our lips brushed as we leaned in, the tips of our tongues barely touching, probing, sending tremors through my organs. We stared at each other, a quiet wisdom. Here I was on the precipice. Getting closer to my desires, my dreams, me, without the unbearable weight of self-loathing I’d carried for so long. But a lot can change in just a few months. and in a few months, Juno Will premiere.
page boy publishes June 6.
Page’s tour begins on June 6, Publication Day, in New York City, then heads to Los Angeles for an event on June 8. He will then be in San Francisco on June 10; Madison, Wisconsin, June 12; and will conclude the tour on June 14 in Washington, D.C.
Dates:
Tuesday, June 6 – Town Hall, New York City
Thursday, June 8 – Los Angeles Times Book Club at the Montalban Theater, Los Angeles
Saturday, June 10 – City Arts & Lecture at the Sidney Goldstein Theatre, San Francisco
Monday, June 12 – A Room of Your Own at The Barrymore Theatre, Madison, Wisconsin
Wednesday, June 14 – 6th and I, Washington, DC
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