» Reif Larsen discusses his debut novel, supplemented by marginalia of graphs, maps and more, all which help tell the story of a twelve-year-old genius, cartographer, who travels alone across the American West.

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Reif Larsen, The Selected Works of T. S. Spivet, Podcast

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[Editor's Note: Jennifer Finney Boylan is the author of "Trans," which appears in Love Is a Four-Letter Word]

Nine years ago, I made a big stack of all the clothes I had ever worn and gave them to the homeless.  This included wingtip shoes, three-piece suits, Grateful Dead T-shirts, ties, belts, cotton shirts and boxer shorts.  Pffft, down the chute.  A moment like this is one of the rites of passage for transsexuals in transition, or can be.  It was for me. 

And yet it was not without a bittersweet pang that I hauled the bags of clothing down to Goodwill.  What I realized was that I was saying farewell not only to the Perry Ellis suit and the Timberland jacket, but to the man I had been when I had worn them.  In some twisted way, I was breaking up with myself.

Fifteen years earlier, I'd broken up with Allison (an account of which appears in Love is a Four Letter Word). I was glad to be done with the endless bickering, (like the night after my friend Tim died, and she said, "I'm glad he's dead!  He was so annoying!")  On the other hand, Allison was the person I'd been closest to when my father died, when I lost my first job, when I got my first short story published.