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INTRODUCTION

LIKE A BOY BUT NOT A BOY is a book that I began writing on the bus and SkyTrain between Surrey and Vancouver, British Columbia. My first notes were mostly about the process of returning to work in an office after having a baby, and then leaving that baby at home with my partner. At the time, we were referring to ourselves as the milk parent and the beard parent; my role was to provide the milk, and between working, commuting, and pumping, I was exhausted. My favourite SkyTrain seat—one I often managed to snag because I boarded at the terminus station—was at the very rear of the train, facing backward, with more than enough legroom and space to spread out and write in my notebook or work on my laptop. All the new essays in the book owe their initial pacing to the SkyTrain.

Like a Boy but Not a Boy contains thirteen more or less personal essays, covering a range of topics from queer pregnancy and parenting to nonbinary identity, bike mechanics, mortality, anxiety, class, and mental illness. It also contains a sixteen-part essay titled “Everyone Is Sober and No One Can Drive,” which is drawn from interviews with queer millennials who grew up in small communities across Canada. My intention with “Everyone Is Sober” is to give snapshots of what it was like to come of age right around the time that same-sex marriage was legalized in this country—a cultural crux point that may be looked back on as a definitive marker between “before” and “after” but that is perhaps better seen as one red push-pin on a transitional arc. The segments resulting from these interviews are listed by the subjects’ first names (“Jane” is a pseudonym) in the table of contents and seeded throughout the book.

Like a Boy but Not a Boy is ultimately about the simultaneously banal but engrossing task of living in a body. Although most of the essays are about living in my body, I’m very grateful to the sixteen other queer millennials who shared their stories so that we might become a type of chorus.