Griffin Hansbury

media release: Get ready for one of our most anticipated events of the summer! A Room of One's Own is thrilled to welcome Griffin Hansbury and Cooper Lee Bombardier for discussion on Griffin's new book Some Strange Music Draws Me In. Join us for a conversation on transness, class, family, and more in this staff picked favorite.

This is a virtual event on Crowdcast.

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About the Book

From an award-winning author, this provocative novel tells an emotionally gripping story about friendship, family, and transgender awakening in a working-class American town.

It’s the summer of 1984 in Swaffham, Massachusetts, when Mel (short for Melanie) meets Sylvia, a tough-as-nails trans woman whose shameless swagger inspires Mel’s dawning self-awareness. But Sylvia’s presence sparks fury among her neighbors and throws Mel into conflict with her mother and best friend. Decades later in 2019, Max (formerly Mel) is on probation from his teaching job for, ironically, defying speech codes around trans identity. Back in Swaffham, he must navigate life as part of a fractured family and face his own role in the disasters of the past.

Populated by a cast of unforgettable characters, Some Strange Music Draws Me In is a propulsive page turner about multiple electrifying relationships—between a working-class mother and her queer child, between a trans man and his right-wing sister, and between a teenager and her troubled best friend. Griffin Hansbury’s elegant, arresting, and fearless prose dares to explore taboos around gender and class as he offers a deeply moving portrait of friendship, family, and a girlhood lived sideways. A timely and captivating narrative of self-realization amid the everyday violence of small-town intolerance, Some Strange Music Draws Me In builds to an explosive conclusion, illuminating the unexpected ways that difference can provide a ticket to liberation.

Griffin Hansbury is the author of Vanishing New York and Feral City (as Jeremiah Moss). A Pushcart Prize winner and Lambda Literary Award finalist, his writing has appeared in several publications, including n+1, the New York Times, and the New Yorker and Paris Review online. A trailblazer in the field of psychoanalysis, he was the first analyst to practice and publish as openly transgender. He lives in Manhattan.

Cooper Lee Bombardier is a queer, trans American writer living in Canada. His first book, Pass With Care: Memoirs, was a finalist for the Firecracker Award in Creative Nonfiction. His work appears in many publications and in 18 anthologies. He teaches in the MFA in Creative Nonfiction program at University of King's College.