How much of gender is a construct? How much is what we’re born with? And what if we’re born with both? Paul Takes the Form of a Mortal Girl astutely blends fact, fairy tale, and magical realism in this recent historical set in 90s Iowa and San Francisco to address just this.
This book follows Paul, a young man who is languishing in life. At 22, he’s just barely making it through his sophomore year of college, far more concerned with prowling for sexual prey. Paul is, indeed, a predator, a hunter, and like a chameleon (or, as the story suggests at one point, a moray eel), he can change his shape – and sex – at will.
Paul is painted as gay throughout the book, and so his sexual preferences morph with his gender-swapping. While always using masculine pronouns, Paul spends much of the book as a girl, Polly, and in these moments, our third-person narrator informs us, Paul explores not just the physicality of his new body but the emotions entwined with it. To be girl, to be boy, to be both, is a question of so very much – a question wrought particularly deftly during Paul’s one foray into heterosexual behavior.
I do have a few qualms with this book, notably that its core double conflicts do not truly make themselves known until the final act, an issue that could have perhaps been addressed by tightening up the lengthy middle section. But all in all, Paul’s journey is one well worth exploring, and Andrea Lawlor’s exquisite prose more than makes up for any flabbiness in the narrative arc of this truly original personification of punk and the mid-20s identity crisis.