Cactus Country by Zoë Bossiere

DESCRIPTION

A striking memoir of genderfluidity, class, and the American Southwest.

Newly arrived in the Sonoran Desert, eleven-year-old Zoë enters a world of giant beetles, thundering javelinas, and gnarled palo verde trees. In Cactus Country RV Park, Zoë has been given a fresh start and a new, shorter haircut. Although Zoë doesn't have the words to express it, he experiences life as a trans boy—and here, others begin to see him as a boy, too. Zoë spends hot days chasing shade and freight trains with an ever-rotating pack of sunburned desert kids, and nights fending off his own questions about the body underneath the baggy clothes.

As Zoë enters adolescence, he must reckon with the sexism, racism, substance abuse, and violence endemic to the working-class men he's grown close to, whose hard masculinity seems as embedded in the desert landscape as the cacti sprouting from parched earth. In response, Zoë adopts an androgynous style and new pronouns, but still cannot escape what it means to live in a gendered body, particularly when a fraught first love destabilizes their sense of self. But beauty flowers in this desert, too. Zoë persists in searching for answers, dreaming of a day they might leave the park behind to embrace whatever awaits beyond. 

Equal parts harsh and tender, Cactus Country is a precisely rendered journey of self-determination that will resonate with anyone who's ever had to fight to be themself.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

ZOË BOSSIERE (they/she) is a writer, editor, and teacher from Tucson, Arizona. They are managing editor of Brevity: A Journal of Concise Literary Nonfiction and coeditor of the anthologies The Best of Brevity and The Lyric Essay as Resistance: Truth from the Margins. Bossiere currently lives in Oregon with her partner and child.

PRAISE

"Enthralling, fearless, viscerally intelligent, and deeply moving." — Justin St. Germain, author of Son of a Gun

"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

DETAILS

Hardcover | 257 pages