Trans writer Juno Dawson 'The Spice Girls were my female awakening!'
about 4 years in The guardian
The ‘Queen of Teen’ has written a trans Alice in Wonderland, full of cocaine, cosmetics and the sexually abusive Tweedle twins. She talks about taboos, tattoos – and dating terrible men
Alice dyes her hair blue and has an “active, app-based sex life with married men from outlying commuter towns”. This is not how heroines in young adult novels usually describe themselves, but then Alice is no ordinary heroine. She’s a 17-year-old pupil at an elite girls’ school, “an angry child’s crayon sketch of a human girl” whose self-harming is a cry of rage against what she perceives as a cosmic injustice: “Some lazy angel, desperate for a fag break, scribbled the wrong gender on my destiny forms.”
Before long, author Juno Dawson has whisked her heroine down a rabbit hole for an adventure that is both a retelling of Alice in Wonderland and an investigation of what might constitute reality in a society where money, power and celebrity are swept up in an ever crazier whirl of gossip, cocaine and cosmetics. But the central question of Wonderland is sane and sober, echoing that of Lewis Carroll’s original: “Who in the world am I? Ah, that’s the great puzzle.” Continue reading...
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