STILL LIFE

A transgender woman struggles to write about her tangled relationship with two women—one living and one dead—in this keenly observed debut.

Edith met Tessa and Valerie in Boston during college, before she knew she was a girl. Tessa identified as a lesbian and Valerie was a transgender girl from Texas who began her transition at 18. Both embraced the ostensibly straight, cisgender male Edith as a friend, while Edith harbored a secret crush on Tessa that she believed would not and could not result in anything real. But as is so often the case, identities, desires, and priorities shifted as the trio moved toward adulthood. Now, six years after Edith left the East Coast for graduate school, she’s living in Austin, largely estranged from Tessa, and Valerie is gone, having died in a car crash. Edith’s abiding love for Stephen Sondheim’s work—particularly Merrily We Roll Along and Into the Woods—brings questions about cause and effect and the value of wishes to the forefront of her mind. When a trip back to Boston, the deadline for a draft of her second novel, and the decision whether or not to stay in an increasingly transphobic Texas all converge, Edith must make sense of both her past and her future. Burke builds a captivating cast of funny, complicated people and deftly captures the warm and sometimes irksome elasticity of queer friendship. Her deceptively simple prose brings the bigness of life down to earth without trivializing. (“What was six years? A graduate degree, a tumultuous romance, the death of your closest friend. You became a girl and so what? Time kept passing. There was so much, too much, life left.”) Any reader who is on the precipice of change or feels like the universe might occasionally be playing a trick on them will find this novel deeply resonant.

Wry and intimate and real, this character study is worth lingering over.