In her sharp, funny and wonderfully observed debut, Katherine Packert Burke captures the ordinary texture of queer and trans life. Still Life is a surprising and layered portrayal of the quotidian, full of biting musings on queer and trans culture, literature, art and, quite poignantly, Sondheim musicals.
Edith is a trans woman in her late 20s, muddling through life without direction. She’s living in Austin, supposedly working on her second book. In reality, she spends her days cruising dating apps, going to parties and attending protests against increasingly violent anti-trans legislation. Grieving the death of her best friend and sometimes-lover, Val, she’s trapped in a melancholic longing for her past in Boston.
When a college friend invites her to speak to his creative writing students, she reluctantly returns to Boston for a week, where she visits her ex-girlfriend, Tessa, whom she dated before she transitioned. The narrative moves between the turbulent present and the turbulent past. In both timelines, Edith’s life revolves around her tangled relationships with both Tessa and Val. The three women’s friendships shift as they age, move and fall in and out of love. Edith transitions and comes out; Val dies. It is these two world-remaking changes that give the novel its emotional heft.
There’s not much plot in these 272 pages, but the novel is all the richer for it. Without external events driving the action forward, Burke is able to focus on the strange and singular details of her protagonist’s interior life. Burke writes about grief, transition, gender identity, desire, and queer and trans love with astonishing expansiveness. Edith’s journey is not straightforward or linear. It’s circuitous, sometimes stagnant. She tries to think her way forward, but finds, again and again, that she cannot escape the material world—her physical body.
Still Life is an ode to both the sweet and thorny parts of queer friendship. Its urgency lies not in what happens to the characters, but in how they feel about what happens to them. Most of all, it’s a novel about navigating that most human of conundrums: change.
