Book Review: Pretty-By KB Brookins

Reviewed by Managing Editor Yasmine Dashti

‘I want to pretty’ 

KB Brookins’s memoir Pretty is a collection of prose and poetry; diving into childhood and adulthood, the uncertain future and the past that creeps into the present. There are musings on pop culture, the struggles in high school, girlhood, lesbianism, a reckoning with familial and sexual trauma, but entangled within all of this is an illustration of black trans-masculinity in Texas and what this means and looks like for Brookins. 

With a backdrop where the rights and healthcare of trans people is continually at risk, Brookins sets out their memoir with a striking note: 

‘I wrote this book on a want and a need to see Black AFAB trans literature [...] I wanted my truth- just one that lives among the many of Black transmasculine people- to be centred in something other than death’ 

This is a memoir about living. The complexities, confusion, the ups and downs, the joy, the sorrow and everything in between. Split into four sections, we are privileged scenes and personal anecdotes from Brookins’s life. From the very beginning, Pretty solidifies itself as a subversive text; a re-writing and re-claiming of sorts for Brookins. In an early piece, ‘Until I wasn’t’ we read: 

“It’s a girl,” the nurse said, softly. My mother smiled big, then nodded in silence. That was the first sentence of a book that describes my undoing. That was the first story someone else told for me.

Brookins’s memoir sets out to take the pieces of themself undone in that moment, before they were able to voice their own story and sense of self, and patch them together to construct a journey that is authentic and real. In that restructuring of their story, the moments of their childhood are reflected on and often wrestle with the adult voice that narrates their memoir. Most notably in the piece ‘Lost’, Brookins illustrates the internal battle in lines such as ‘I was the lovable girl caricature of a human my parents wished and wished for.’ Not only does Brookins memoir navigate struggles with one's identity, they also explore how, in the act of writing back, a continuous edit of one's life takes place. This edit is both physical and literary with pieces in the memoir directly commenting on and editing others seen in the entries ‘How to Identify Yourself with a Wound (2018)’ and ‘Who Am I Kidding: I’ve Only Ever Been a Question.’

That act of striking through one’s story and continually opening themselves to be edited and rewritten, heavily contributes to the inherently subversive nature of this memoir and continues to speak up and against the first words spoken of their life in that delivery room. 

As Brookins writes in the opening authors note: 

‘[t]here are so many ways to experience Blackness and/or talk about the trans experience. Some of us are masculine, feminine, or something else entirely.’ 

This memoir is their experience whilst also being a comforting voice for their younger self. A voice that is tinted with age and experience, one that has found an acceptance for themself and their body and a voice that, with time, has developed a greater understanding of the life they have lived. 

‘I've always been me: fat, Black, queer, trans, pretty. I deserve a world where I don’t have to be resilient.’ 

You can buy Pretty here.