irish trans writer soula emmanuel’s debut novel explores fresh starts, lesbian exes and the complexities of transness
you would think, with all the reams of text devoted to the pains and absurdities of ageing, we would find it less surprising. transness compounds this. how can i be 30? you might exclaim. i only got started three years ago, so i must surely be three.
wild geese is the debut novel of soula emmanuel and suspected to be the first novel by any irish trans person. she was born in 1990 to an irish mother and greek father, and she studied in universities in both ireland and sweden.
it makes sense, then, that wild geese follows an irish trans woman who has been living in copenhagen for several years. recently 30, phoebe – the character’s name is phoebe – left ireland for a fresh start at being a new person. she’s broken off all her connections and forged scarcely any new ones; she denies her past and has built only a scant present, let alone a future. but this changes when her ex, grace, pays her an unconvincingly ‘spontaneous’ visit.
i went into this novel expecting it to be a window into my future: i’m 27, irish, i began my medical transition less than a year ago, and my long-distance relationship suggests i may be hightailing it out of here sooner or later. but really, it was a window to the past. a couple of years ago, i moved from tramore to limerick to transition out from under my (lovely, supportive) family’s feet, and for the first eight months or so, i used pandemic restrictions as an excuse to stay away from the world. it’s easy to remain inside when you feel like you’re still in the oven, like you’re not done yet. since then, i’ve found myself more, and i didn’t do it by staying alone; i constructed myself in relation to others.
there is no sense in which this is a morality tale about the wrong way to be trans; it’s an honest story about how, when you find yourself, you can lose yourself along the way. the present is a foreign country.
what’s striking about phoebe’s initial state of lonely dissatisfaction is that it’s not despair. another version of this book could see her completely drawn into herself, bo burnham style, and that could also be good, because there’s a lot of scope for a story like that to be true. but phoebe doesn’t understand that she needs to make a change because her life is acceptable in most respects. she’s been living her life as a trans woman, her phd (in a field she’s lost interest in) is progressing without any major speed bumps, and she has a dog named dolly. while not despairing, a melancholic narrative voice moves through the opening passages, akin to a voice that might ignore a health problem out of laziness, like dragging out a mild pain in the knee.
for phoebe, the ‘fresh start’ created a tyranny of the present moment. one of the major fundamental challenges of transness is the casting aside of an old identity and the slow accumulation of a new one from whatever cultural concepts best resonate, which can feel like trying to make a sculpture from about seventeen cool rocks you stole from a beach. that cutting-off of the past to some degree is a necessary step, but it can lead to denying your context.
phoebe thinks that “a woman without a past can be anyone she wants”, but it leaves her struggling to be anyone very specific, although she doesn’t seem to notice it. this challenges the typical notion of transition as, well, transition: a move from being one person to being another, different person. but don’t misunderstand the book as overly discursive. there is no sense in which this is a morality tale about the wrong way to be trans; it’s an honest story about how, when you find yourself, you can lose yourself along the way. the present is a foreign country.
where there is humour, it feels less like a joke and more like a snarky complaint made during a smoke break.
emmanuel has a particular knack for humorous and surprising similes. wind turbines “stand in staggered succession, as if stitching the sky to the sound.” reuniting with grace makes her feel “like my life is constantly shifting orbits around a distant but essential axis.” even old chestnuts are made new, like “a dish of cold-served revenge.” it’s trite to say that a book is good because it’s well-written, but even many great books aren’t this pleasurable to read moment-to-moment.
at the very start of the book, phoebe’s narration is more morose (although not drearily so). where there is humour, it feels less like a joke and more like a snarky complaint made during a smoke break. once grace arrives, you realise there hasn’t been any dialogue up to this point, made clear by how phoebe speaks quite differently to how she thinks.
this is why the humour is important to the book – on top of its entertainment value, it also communicates the disconnect between her interiority and her default joke-y banter voice, a common trait of millennials reared on social media and possibly buffy. there is no dishonesty here, only an unwillingness to be immediately vulnerable. but the trick here is that this doesn’t seem like phoebe is unwisely hiding away her bruised heart. quite the opposite: she’s making a connection. the abrupt and purposeful arrival of funny dialogue into the story makes clear the simplest thing: grace makes her happy, and when she spends time with her, she comes into her own. and ‘coming into her own’ means becoming not only who she is now but also who she was then – in the eyes of grace, who can see her whole because she saw both.
wild geese is sweet and moving without being sentimental, clear-eyed about the trans experience without being either lachrymose or didactically hopeful, and as entertaining as it is smart. it deserves all its success and more.