Back in Detroit, GD and I went on boat rides in the evening, after they got home from work. One night a neighbor of GD’s, a woman drinking a Miller High Life on her sailboat, pointed at me from afar and said, “Who’s he?”
GD uses “he” for me. I am appalled by how much I love it. The pleasure is such that it must be a dream I’ll wake up from.
He’s learning to drive a stick shift. He’s never been to the Great Lakes before. He lives in California. He picked me up from work today. I’ve been making him eat a hamburger a day. He. He. He. He. The more banal the sentence, the deeper the effect.
The more they use “he,” the more willing I am to submit to them. I lie on my back, spread my legs, and let them have sex with me the way I would have had sex if I’d let a boy take my virginity. I wear lingerie sometimes. Occasionally, when we have sex, I tell them to call me Grace.
Acknowledgments
First and foremost, I want to thank everyone—friends, family, partners, partners turned friends turned family—who consented to appearing, in some form or another, in the pages of this book. I am a young writer and I am still learning about the sacrifices we make when we attempt to translate our experience into language. All of you gave me permission to try, with the knowledge that this book, my first, could never render you in your fullness. I am grateful for the patience and the trust. Above all, I am grateful for the conversations—sometimes painful, but always transformative—that took place throughout this process. Writing through life is necessarily a collaboration, and I know that even more deeply than I did when I started this book.
Thank you to the friends who have supported and inspired me over the past two years, as I moved through writing and the previously unthinkable changes that accompanied it: Shay, my first angel, thanks for holding me in your golden glove early on, before I saw all this on the horizon. Doreen and Alex, thanks for the beautiful meals in your beautiful home that have punctuated the last few years; you both inspire me, together and apart. Hazel, art is much less scary when I get to make it alongside you, and time spent with you is art in and of itself. Liv, thanks for being my best bedmate when I needed it. Palma, something tectonic has us drifting closer and closer toward each other.
Rhiya, thank you for the unexpectedly fast friendship. David, let’s be each other’s foils until the end. Emily S., thanks for being & seeing magenta with me. Geo, I’ve been made wiser by the expansiveness of your outlook.
Carolyn, thank you for a closeness built over correspondence; in particular, thank you for unteaching me potential; it freed me up to be less afraid of failing. Matt, thanks for telling me to stand behind my work, for pragmatic reassurance. Lex, thank you for writing alongside and motivating me, even with one and a half continents and an ocean between us.
Tourmaline, thank you for inviting me not to lie, with such patience and love. Blaine, thanks for coaxing me to Los Angeles, to a life with more space and plasticity. Amelia, thank god you came here too, and thank god I heard your songs when I did. Lessa, I’m so glad that you realized you were already in the club. Carson, thanks for your magical mind and the best panna cotta in California.
anise, thank you for the poem, even though it was stolen; I’m learning to let language leave when it wants to. Jade, thank you for the grain of red rice, the purple fish, the green beetle; thank you for all the spells. Cassils, thank you for teaching me how to be in my body, after twenty-five years of being elsewhere.
Hannah, what we have continues to push me and then, somehow, to protect me. I’m still riveted. Skye, thanks for waking me up; you made writing seem worth doing and I’m still feeling the ripples of that. And Aviva, patron saint of the naughty and the nice, this book and my world are ripe with symbols you gifted me.
Thank you to Al, Margie, and the orange and blue house on the hill (and the black walnut and guava trees, the red-tailed hawks, the mangy coyotes in the canyon) for giving me the first place that ever really felt like home. Al, you let me grow up and calm down. Sam, so glad you joined us. And, Elias: thank you for teaching me to release instead of resist. Hayden, it’s your home too. Thank you for giving me angels and the credence to receive them. You’ve been a portal.
An immense and inexhaustible thank-you to everyone in CCWP-LA, especially everyone surviving and organizing inside CIW, for giving me a political and spiritual home in Southern California, for making me understand what it means to stay and believe and try. Working alongside and learning from all of you has been an unimaginable honor.
Willa, thank you for pushing me off the cliff, then and now, for what I expect to be a lifetime of mutual cliff pushing. You changed everything.
Alok, your thinking has shaped my work these past few years, as well as the way I understand the world. Your loyalty has shaped me too. By the end of this project, I’d somehow grown to cherish your incredibly unenthusiastic Google doc suggestions.
Lynne, thank you for your uncanny copyedits, your generosity of wisdom, and the new, right beginning.
Bobbi, I’m grateful for every version you’ve been thus far and every version you’ll be. Thanks for getting me to stick my fingers in the dirt and my toes in cold water. You make infinite births and deaths seem beautiful.
Jerry and Ro, the first writers in my life, thank you for always respecting me enough to give me the adult version of things. Aunt Bonnie and Aunt Susan, I’m so lucky to have your love and your laughter.
Laurie, Tip, and Lee, the fates threw us together in this configuration called a “family.” I opt in—not out of obligation, but because I want to do the work. Laurie, I can never tell if you have the soul of a one-day-old baby or a hundred-million-year-old sorceress. Tip, your willingness to relearn and be retaught is remarkable. Laurie and Tip together, thank you for wanting to know me. You could have stayed attached to an idea and you didn’t. Lee, we’re made of the same material, and when we’re able to meet it’s the opposite of loneliness. Thank you for continuing to try with me. And thank you to the three of you for always telling me to write, to keep writing, no matter what.
Mary and Danielle, you’re family, too. Thank you for everything you do, for all of us.
Paul…I can’t say I expected you. But here you are, and it makes sense.
Rosie, thank you for showing me the way to honesty, in writing and in life, for accepting that it’s a work in progress. Thank you for your Neptune, for the ditch, for suns, and sons, and sonnets.
Em, twenty years of friendship and counting. Thank you for being my coach and my soccer mom, my CEO and my executive assistant, my Lebensgefährte. Zan, you’re my only brother. My brilliant, beautiful brother. Boozer and Brother, together, my constants. And thank you, of course, to Birdie and Jynx, for taking care of B&B when they needed it most.
Thank you to the whole team at Little, Brown, for the guidance and the support, which cut through my doubt.
Finally, I want to thank Bill and Jean. Bill, you believed in this project at its nascency, told me it was legitimate, even valuable, to write through not knowing. Jean, thank you for being a nurturing friend and a harsh editor, somehow simultaneously. I didn’t previously know the two went together. You finally got me to accept that I love writing, that I may, after all, be a writer.
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About the Author
Cyrus Grace Dunham is a writer and organizer living in Los Angeles. This is their first book.
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A Year Without a Name Page 13
