By Nicole Walker

I first met Zoë Bossiere (they/she) when I visited Ander Monson’s undergraduate nonfiction course. We had an intense conversation about how to balance information and lyricism in our essays. I knew them as the managing editor of Brevity Magazine which publishes essays of writers working in the brief form. Many of these essays lean toward the lyrical side, like Brenda Miller’s “Swerve,” which begins with one very grounded scene but then spins out to include a litany of mini-scenes whose sonic and imagistic connections blow the top of one’s head off. Bossiere also recently edited and published, with Erica Trabold, The Lyric Essay as Resistance: Truth from the Margins (Wayne State University Press, 2023) which draws from a broad group of writers to argue that the lyric is indeed a powerful persuasive force for change.

So, I was surprised when I started to read Cactus Country (Abrams Press, 2024). On a flight to Minneapolis, as I turned page after page like the book was on fire, I thought, This book is the most narrative memoir I have ever read. I am prone to exaggeration. I know of many memoirs that move by story more than association, but Cactus Country holds tightly onto narrative and doesn’t let go. And, neither could I, as I fell in love with the author’s rendering of place and of their allegiance to how the narrator’s body moved through that place.

Brief summary: Cactus Country recounts the story of the narrator, Zoë Bossiere, as their family pull up sticks and move to a trailer park near Tucson, Arizona. The parents are hippie-ish, looking for a simpler life, living close to nature. Bossiere embraces the nature part of that promise but, for them, things are not simple. Bossiere, born as a girl and raised as such until they move to Cactus Country, embraced their boyhood. Embrace might be too strong of a word, because, as Bossiere writes, nothing about boyhood, or girlhood, or childhood, is simple. This is, to me, the core of the book and why it’s so important that it is told in such strict narrative fashion. This book is not speaking about Gender, capital G, or the politics of transitioning, or the complications of pronouns. Bossiere’s story, told in close, first-person point-of-view, articulates a principal truth: my experience and my story exemplify the complexities of gender and childhood, in all their specific, magnificent detail.

This book shows that while the lyric essay can be a form of resistance and political change, it’s not the only form capable of doing this work.

A foreword to the book, entitled “The Beginning,” provides context for the reader. Here, Bossiere describes a photograph of a boy with a “scruffy family dog wrapped around his shoulders like a feather boa.” When friends later in life ask if that’s Bossiere’s brother, we read, “They are surprised when they learn the truth: I was that boy, that boy is me.” This is one of the few retrospectives in the book. The rest takes place in simple past tense, but with an immediacy that may as well be present tense. But I take the presentation of this photo to heart—two facts stand: “I was that boy, that boy is me,” which confirms the iterative nature of the past but also affirms that our past selves are still ourselves. Gender may change but we contain layers.

In my writing classes, I often say, “Put your body in a place,” as a way to ensure that you’re developing scene, not summary. Here, Bossiere commits to that body in a place, scene by scene, chapter by chapter. In fact, place serves as a body itself to some degree. The relationship between the narrator and this new trailer town shows how place shapes body and bodies shape place. Upon their arrival in Cactus Country, they meet a boy who is sitting at a picnic table, playing a video game. Bossiere writes,

                             Reaching under the picnic table, I grasped at an action figure’s
                            disembodied leg.

                             Without looking up from his game, the boy pulled a knife from his
                             pocket. In one motion, he whipped it open, pointing its blade at my
                             face.

                             “If you touch that,” he said, “I’ll cut you.”

                             I froze, staring cross-eyed down the knife’s sharp, gleaning tip. Before
                             today, my vision of the Southwest had consisted of lonely cowboys on
                             saddled horses, roving marauders in wooden stagecoaches, and bloody
                             O.K. Corral–style shootouts against a vast landscape of sand. I knew the
                             region had a violent history, but never expected another child to
                             threaten me with a dollar-store pocketknife.

My writerly tendency here would be to zoom out, to make sweeping generalizations about how the West allows identities to shift. Or I’d write something about how I wanted to be at the handle-end of that knife. But Bossiere doesn’t do that. They continue their up-close and immediate observations that seem in keeping with an eleven-year-old’s mindset: “ . . . I realized three things: First, this boy thought I was another boy. Second, his threat was a test. Third, if I had any hope of surviving here, I needed to pass it.” Then, Bossiere continues to describe the boy’s hair and how it shoots up “the way cacti sprouted from chapped earth.”

As Bossiere deepens their relationship to the landscape, the complications of boyhood become as abundant as spiky desert creatures. As a student, they want to be recognized by fellow students as a boy, but one teacher knows that their birth certificate reads “girl.” In another fully rendered scene, Bossiere describes how difficult (and terrible) it can be to try to pee when you’re a kid who does not easily fit into gender binaries.

                             Despite the dry climate, I usually avoided drinking water at school.
                             Sometimes this helped me hold off on going to the bathroom until I got
                             home. But other days, like today, I couldn’t wait. I watched the teacher
                             disappear into a classroom on the other side of the school. All clear. Eyes
                             still fixed on the courtyard, I slipped behind one of the bathroom door
                             —and ran smack into a girl.

                             “What are you doing in here, you sicko?” she demanded, pushing me
                             back outside. “This is the girl’s room.” The teacher reappeared from the
                             far classroom, looking curiously in our direction.

This kind of conflict infuses much of the book; the most heartbreaking scenes are when the narrator believes something is happening but, because of perceptions of gender being reflected as if through a prism, that belief is upended. Bossiere’s first sexual relationship turns ugly when Avery, the person Zoë trusted with their evolving sense of gender, confesses she had been sexually assaulted. Instead of discussing the assault, Avery seems to channel her own assailant’s actions:

                             Avery’s body settled beside mine in the dark. Her hands ran through my
                             hair, roughly massaging the back of my neck. I tensed under them. Her
                             fingers were so cold, her grip too tight, my scalp stinging in their wake.

                             ‘Wow,’ her voice whispered through the darkness, coarse and stilted
                             and so unlike the Avery I thought I knew. “You’re gorgeous.”

But as in other scenes, Bossiere doesn’t extrapolate. They stick with dialogue, the body movements, the pain: “raw and gaping like a wound. Wider, wider, until all I know is pain. All I see are stars.” They resist essaying here that maybe Avery only knew painful sex, so that’s the only kind she could make happen. In this moment, Bossiere doesn’t say the word ‘rape.’ They don’t ponder what it means to have their body betrayed by a girl’s body. But readers get to know all of that by the sharp, intense, image-whipping scenes.

Though the book focuses on the challenges of living as a boy, Bossiere’s vision is vast. Cactus Country as a title might be a metaphor for the prickliness of childhood, but it’s also a very literal place and that place is filled with characters we get to know fully. The trailer park provides front-row seating to the infinite ways masculinity is performed. Except for three main female characters—the mom, Sage, and Avery—Bossiere interacts with mostly men, from her window-washing dad to a group of boys who run wild and make up schemes around the trailer park. In one scene, Bossiere clearly show how these gender dynamics and group dynamics worked:

                             What started as a rumor, sweeping from one end of Cactus Country to
                             the other like a tumbleweed, had become fact: the pigs were back. From
                             the playground, we boys surveyed the evidence, marking what we knew
                             on a crude map of the park drawn in the dirt with a stick.

                             Later, we hear about Nazi-leaning Dave, who introduces himself as:

                             David Davis—“the third,” he said. “But just call me David.” I’d thought
                             only kings went by titles like the third. His formality suggested pride in a
                             familial legacy that the dusty camper trailer behind him seemed at odds
                             with.

                             “Zoë Bossiere,” I said dryly, extending a hand. “The first.”

In that chapter, Bossiere explores class and politics deftly with Dave. We also encounter Mark, who later dies in the trailer park, and Gavin, who declares his love for Bossiere. Bossiere situates these men in the context of place—mainly the trailer park but also in the houses and apartments she lives in during college—which has the effect of individualizing each character. Bossiere resists generalizations. There’s no such thing as men so much as singular men in singular situations in particular places, getting by to varying levels of success. As Bossiere draws their own gender definitions in relationship to place, she realizes how elastic gender can be.

In scene after scene, we see how the narrator’s understanding of gender grows— not by exegesis or exposition, but by recounting stories. The narrative builds to a realization that place may be as restrictive as gender norms. When Bossiere depicts a man they date, they describe Rhys as having “a feral quality I like, a wayward streak that reminded me of the boys I’d grown up with in the desert—of the kind of man I might have once grown into.” Bossiere explains about their experience with gender:

                             . . . I told him stories about growing up in Cactus Country. About
                             cutting my hair short and living as a boy, my unwelcome puberty and
                             uneasy androgyny.

                             “And then one day,” I said, “I just . . . stopped trying with all the gender
                             stuff. I didn’t feel like I was anything anymore. Or maybe It’s more like
                             I didn’t want to be anything anymore.”

Bossiere doesn’t settle here, but they do explain to Rhys how gender questions have shaped who they are now.

Although narrative is what makes this book a page-turner, the prose captivates. While the form may not be lyric, Bossiere hasn’t abandoned lyricism. Bossiere orients the relationship with Rhys again in terms of place, but, as I hope I’ve shown in the previous examples, with exquisite writing. She continues,

                             Rhys and I fell for each other in a week. Shared a bed within two. Split
                             the rent just shy of six. In our new duplex, the stifling summer days
                             seeped through the windows like a fog, lingering into the night.
                             Cockroaches larger than human thumbs emerged from the kitchen sink
                             and settled between our bedsheets, crawling over our legs as we slept.
                             Winter evenings blew freezing winds under the front door. Our yard was
                             littered with trash the wind brushed into the rows of prickly pears that
                             served as our garden, chip bags and candy wrappers sticking to their
                             needles like ornaments on the world’s shittiest Christmas tree. The
                             duplex was more a hovel than a home, but it was affordable and close
                             enough for me to walk to school. We settled in, made it our own.

Heat as fog. Cockroaches as thumbs. The writing here is vivid and visceral. Those “s” sounds: “stifling summer days seeped.” The fragmented sentences: “Shared a bed,” “Split the rent.” The image of trash stuck in prickly pears. But, in a voice that’s unique to Bossiere, that “world’s shittiest Christmas tree” pairs story with insight with stark image with humor. If there’s an argument to this book it is this: there are as many ways of writing memoir as there are of experiencing childhood. And while Bossiere’s narrative is one of the best I’ve read, this book feels like an invitation to tell our stories in any way we can.

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Nicole Walker is the author of Processed Meats: Essays on Food, Flesh and Navigating Disaster; The After-Normal: Brief, Alphabetical Essays on a Changing Planet; Sustainability: A Love Story; Where the Tiny Things Are; Egg; Micrograms; and Quench Your Thirst with Salt. She edited for Bloomsbury the essay collections Science of Story with Sean Prentiss and, with Margot Singer, Bending Genre: Essays on Creative Nonfiction.