It can be difficult to pinpoint exactly what makes Something that May Shock and Discredit You hang together so spectacularly. The razor wit? The self-effacing candor? The oddball moments of cultural redux? The truth is that Daniel Mallory Ortberg (now known as Danny Lavery; The Merry Spinster) has a discerning and oracular ability to illuminate personal experience through media touchstones--not least of which is the Bible.
"One of the many advantages of a religious childhood is the variety of metaphors made available to describe untranslatable inner experiences," he writes in the opening essay of a book that largely considers his gender transition. Readers, regardless of spiritual discipline, however, will be glad such variety is at Ortberg's disposal--although he has plenty of originals to dispense as well, like when he writes of the Rapture as "being swept up by the Raisin Bran scoop of heaven."
All this within the first four pages, because Ortberg is just warming up before delving openly into his transmasculine experience with unrivaled panache. Passage after passage sees him refining a riveting portrait of his life and transness fit for the pages of an illuminated manuscript. Biblical stories of transformation, transfiguration and renaming become equal to the T4T energy ("couples, usually fictional, mostly heterosexual, that somehow manage to emblematize a particular trans-on-trans dynamic") between Gomez and Morticia Addams. Ortberg's Something that May Shock and Discredit You most certainly astonishes and amazes--it may even be transformative. --Dave Wheeler, associate editor, Shelf Awareness