Publishers Weekly
★ 03/04/2024
Brevity magazine editor Bossiere’s enthralling debut depicts a young adulthood on the margins. Growing up in Arizona, Bossiere felt strongly that they were a boy, especially when running with a feral pack of young men at Cactus Country, the trailer park near Tucson where Bossiere’s parents moved from the Virginia suburbs when the author was 11. Though many of the boys and men in Bossiere’s orbit were violent and troubled, the author mirrored their dress and mannerisms to gain their acceptance. Once puberty struck, Bossiere’s ambiguous gender expression and impoverished circumstances began to make them stand out among their classmates. By high school, they no longer tried to pass as male, and gradually came to admire feminine strength. While volunteering to teach preschool in their senior year of high school, Bossiere marveled at the confident, nurturing dispositions of their female co-teachers. That experience helped situate them in a fluid, nonbinary gender expression, and stoked their ambition to escape the harsh environs of Cactus Country and attend college in Oregon. Bossiere’s concise prose style and gift for scene-setting draws readers in as they unpick the somewhat esoteric nuances of their gender identity. This will resonate with anyone who’s longed for escape—from a hometown or their own body—but lacked an exit plan. Agent: Maggie Cooper, Aevitas Creative Management. (May)
author of The Fact of a Body Alex Marzano-Lesnevich
Cactus Country shimmers with the complexity of becoming. Zoë Bossiere writes their way into a truer story of selfhood, resisting the simpler narratives the world demanded. The result is lush, beautiful, and deeply liberating.
author of Girlhood Melissa Febos
"A captivating tale of trans-kidhood that manages to be both precise and wild, so much like the landscape it describes."
author of Fairest Meredith Talusan
"Cactus Country is a thrilling and utterly unexpected memoir that I hope to be our generation’s This Boy’s Life—an indelible portrait of American boyhood that is at once typical and extraordinary. Zoë Bossiere breaks open both our understanding of gender and the artistic possibilities of nonfiction, and I have no doubt that Cactus Country will be read for decades to come."
author of Endpapers Jennifer Savran Kelly
"Zoë Bossiere’s gripping debut memoir is part coming-of-age tale and part unraveling of gender—set against the backdrop of the Arizona dessert trailer park where Bossiere grew up. In Cactus Country drugs, violence, and suicide were regular features of Bossiere’s childhood, but so were love, friendship, and acceptance. With tender precision, Bossiere paints a riveting portrait of an artist as a young man who’s shaped but not defined by their gender or their past as they come into their own—a hopeful young adult in search of a meaningful life, a teacher, a writer, a survivor. I’ll be thinking about this story for a long time."
author of Son of a Gun Justin St. Germain
"Cactus Country is an enthralling, deeply moving, and beautifully written memoir of escaping a dead-end desert trailer park and finding acceptance, love, and redemption. Bossiere brings a fearless, clear-eyed, and visceral intelligence to bear on questions of gender, identity, queerness, class, belonging, and the power of writing. If you've ever felt trapped—in a place, in your body, or by the weight of others' expectations—you should read this book."
author of Tomboyland Melissa Faliveno
"I felt Zoë Bossiere’s Cactus Country in my whole body: the sun on my skin, the slap of bare feet on hard earth, the desire to climb paloverde trees and chase beetles and hide from javelinas and hop trains, but also the rage and violence of childhood—the liberation and the limits of youth. This is a book about queerness and class, masculinity and femininity and the fluid spaces between, and how the places that raise us leave an indelible mark on us, how we carry those places inside us no matter how far we run. I loved this book, and needed this book, and saw myself in it, and can’t wait to press it into the hands of those who I know will love it, who need it, who will see themselves in it too."
author of The Natural Mother of the Child Krys Malcolm Belc
Zoë Bossiere has written an essential addition to the trans memoir canon—the story of an often-joyous boyhood spent "where lost javelina with quivering snouts searched for their families by moonlight, and ragtag bands of children found signposts under the railroad tracks written just for them." Bossiere's voice shines with curiosity and empathy towards the wild, sunburned desert child they were and the incisive adult they grew into.
From the Publisher
Zoë Bossiere has written an essential addition to the trans memoir canon—the story of an often-joyous boyhood spent "where lost javelina with quivering snouts searched for their families by moonlight, and ragtag bands of children found signposts under the railroad tracks written just for them." Bossiere's voice shines with curiosity and empathy towards the wild, sunburned desert child they were and the incisive adult they grew into.” —Krys Malcolm Belc, author of The Natural Mother of the Child
"Cactus Country is an enthralling, deeply moving, and beautifully written memoir of escaping a dead-end desert trailer park and finding acceptance, love, and redemption. Bossiere brings a fearless, clear-eyed, and visceral intelligence to bear on questions of gender, identity, queerness, class, belonging, and the power of writing. If you've ever felt trapped—in a place, in your body, or by the weight of others' expectations—you should read this book."—Justin St. Germain, author of Son of a Gun
"I felt Zoë Bossiere’s Cactus Country in my whole body: the sun on my skin, the slap of bare feet on hard earth, the desire to climb paloverde trees and chase beetles and hide from javelinas and hop trains, but also the rage and violence of childhood—the liberation and the limits of youth. This is a book about queerness and class, masculinity and femininity and the fluid spaces between, and how the places that raise us leave an indelible mark on us, how we carry those places inside us no matter how far we run. I loved this book, and needed this book, and saw myself in it, and can’t wait to press it into the hands of those who I know will love it, who need it, who will see themselves in it too."—Melissa Faliveno, author of Tomboyland
"Zoë Bossiere’s gripping debut memoir is part coming-of-age tale and part unraveling of gender—set against the backdrop of the Arizona dessert trailer park where Bossiere grew up. In Cactus Country drugs, violence, and suicide were regular features of Bossiere’s childhood, but so were love, friendship, and acceptance. With tender precision, Bossiere paints a riveting portrait of an artist as a young man who’s shaped but not defined by their gender or their past as they come into their own—a hopeful young adult in search of a meaningful life, a teacher, a writer, a survivor. I’ll be thinking about this story for a long time."—Jennifer Savran Kelly, author of Endpapers
"Cactus Country is a thrilling and utterly unexpected memoir that I hope to be our generation’s This Boy’s Life—an indelible portrait of American boyhood that is at once typical and extraordinary. Zoë Bossiere breaks open both our understanding of gender and the artistic possibilities of nonfiction, and I have no doubt that Cactus Country will be read for decades to come."—Meredith Talusan, author of Fairest
“Cactus Country shimmers with the complexity of becoming. Zoë Bossiere writes their way into a truer story of selfhood, resisting the simpler narratives the world demanded. The result is lush, beautiful, and deeply liberating.”—Alex Marzano-Lesnevich, author of The Fact of a Body
"A captivating tale of trans-kidhood that manages to be both precise and wild, so much like the landscape it describes."—Melissa Febos, author of Girlhood
Kirkus Reviews
★ 2024-02-02
A memoir about gender, the Sonoran Desert, and how stories can save.
When Bossiere’s family packed themselves into an Airstream and moved to Cactus Country, an RV park situated in the desolate landscape outside of Tucson, the author was an 11-year-old boy. Bossiere was assigned female at birth, but with a cropped haircut, an affinity for dirt, and the “hard masculinity, stoicism, and camaraderie of the boys and men I knew in those years,” the author found friendship within Cactus Country’s pack of boys, as wild as the park’s roving herds of javelina. The boys chased trains, tarantulas, and troubled neighbors, honing their masculinity among the creosote bushes and prickly pears. As puberty began—and with it, romantic confusions, experiences of body issues, and probing questions from peers—Bossiere found themself in a “mixed-up, turned-around, in-between gender story.” They turned to online queer communities for answers about their gender. “I wanted to read a story like mine,” Bossiere writes of their young, searching self, “because I wanted to know how that story would end.” In these tightly connected essays, the author creates such a story, asserting that within the letters LGBTQ+, there are “so many ways a person could find themself in that ever-expanding acronym, its ‘+’ containing multitudes.” Bossiere returns to images and ideas from their childhood and adolescence in new landscapes and identities, haunting the memoir to prove that, “[i]n the end, we’re left with what the body knows. Its memory runs deep, rooting us to our past no matter how far away or long ago.” In that way, though Bossiere’s life has taken them far from Cactus Country, “the ghost of the boy I was is still running somewhere out in the desert.”
Bossiere’s hopeful, powerful life story also serves as a memorable study of gender and home.
