Pretty A Memoir
Pretty A Memoir by KB Brookins, published by Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group on May 28, 2024, is a 240-page exploration of queerness, masculinity, and race through the lens of a young Black trans writer. This memoir delves into the complexities of identity, highlighting the beauty and toxicity of Black masculinity from a transgender perspective. Brookins articulates the daily negotiations between self-definition and societal perception, offering insights into the challenges faced by those who exist at the intersection of multiple identities.
Readers will find a powerful narrative that serves as both a love letter and a call for change, informed by Brookins’s personal experiences and cultural criticism. The memoir addresses the marginalization of Black transgender masculine individuals, drawing on themes from Black queer studies and social science. Pretty invites reflection on the unique experiences of being perceived as “other” in a society that often overlooks these narratives, making it a significant contribution to discussions surrounding LGBTQ+ and transgender studies.
Official synopsis Publisher
Winner of the 2025 GLCA New Writers Award • By a prize-winning, young Black trans writer of outsized talent, a fierce and disciplined memoir about queerness, masculinity, and race.
Even as it shines light on the beauty and toxicity of Black masculinity from a transgender perspective—the tropes, the presumptions—Pretty is as much a powerful and tender love letter as it is a call for change.
“I should be able to define myself, but I am not. Not by any governmental or cultural body,” Brookins writes. “Every day, I negotiate the space between who I am, how I’m perceived, and what I need to unlearn. People have assumed things about me, and I can’t change that. Every day, I am assumed to be a Black American man, though my ID says ‘female,’ and my heart says neither of the sort. What does it mean—to be a girl-turned-man when you’re something else entirely?”
Informed by KB Brookins’s personal experiences growing up in Texas, those of other Black transgender masculine people, Black queer studies, and cultural criticism, Pretty is concerned with the marginalization suffered by a unique American constituency—whose condition is a world apart from that of cisgender, non-Black, and non-masculine people. Here is a memoir (a bildungsroman of sorts) about coming to terms with instantly and always being perceived as “other”
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