Still Life is a novel about a trans woman trying to make sense of her messy life and the realities of queer love and friendship. Edith is trying to write her second novel and trying to deal with the fact out of her two best friends, now both two exes, one is dead and the other is marrying a man. She’s returning to Boston for the first time since her transition, and the narrative moves between the present and the past, her friendships and relationships with Valerie and Tessa, and whether Edith can move beyond this tableau she’s caught in to some kind of movement forward.
I didn’t know what to expect from this novel, but it really hit me hard. It functions as a character study, exploring not just Edith but snatches of Tessa and Valerie as well, a narrative about transness and queerness and the messiness of moving between categories and identities and existences, and a meditation on autofiction and art more generally, even when a lot of that art is Sondheim and Gossip Girl. It can be disorienting to read at times, moving between the ‘present’ of the novel and the story of the ‘past’ chronologically, but for me that works, letting the line between past and present bleed together as Edith tries to form her past into a coherent narrative she could turn into a novel.
The book doesn’t offer much closure or many answers, but I love how visceral and full of emotion it feels, making me genuinely cry and laugh (I loved Edith complaining she didn’t want to have to learn what 100 gecs is). Like another recent novel, Greta and Valdin, Still Life offers a bittersweet look at the joy and messiness of queerness through the three women that made up its central characters, and it is also an exploration of the glimpses of what might’ve been and how we cannot solely dwell on these. I think I’ll be haunted by Edith for a while.
Fiendfully Reading 
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