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A Novel
by Griffin Hansbury
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, in 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.
"This is a touchstone LGBTQIA+ coming of age novel containing superbly drawn characters, a brilliant story, and knowing prose that constantly seeks to complicate simplistic narratives around gender, sexuality, and class."
―Booklist (starred review)
"The 1984 plot builds to an explosive climax involving a violent attack on Sylvia, and Hansbury details its lingering impact on Max in sharp, perceptive prose...There are no easy answers in Hansbury's bracing narrative." ―Publishers Weekly
"This gorgeous, propulsive novel is filled with beauty and danger, youth and wisdom, and the lifesaving lifelines of counterculture. With writing so tense and honest and real, I recognized this place and these people deeply, and felt them all in my heart long after the book was finished."
―Michelle Tea, author of Knocking Myself Up
"Some Strange Music Draws Me In is luminous, propulsive, tender.… Griffin Hansbury's prose is both scathing and soulful, delivered with care and grace and aplomb. This novel's warmth is palpable, and Hansbury has crafted a truly rare thing―a gift and a guide."
―Bryan Washington, author of Family Meal, Memorial, and Lot
"Some Strange Music Draws Me In is a story of how latent queerness can point toward the exit from poverty and despair. It's about intergenerational queer care, about how even with a clean getaway we nurse our wounded pasts.… [A] book filled with compassion."
―McKenzie Wark, author of Love and Money, Sex and Death
This information about Some Strange Music Draws Me In was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
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.
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