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Please Miss: An evening with Grace Lavery


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Grace Lavery


This event will begin a couple minutes after 7 as people settle in

‘This is the queer memoir you’ve been waiting for; a dizzying mix of theory and pastiche, metafiction and memory . . . hilarious and sexy and terrifying in its brilliance. But don’t worry – Lavery is an avalanche you’ll be glad to be buried under.’ Carmen Maria Machado, author of In the Dream House

We could not be MORE thrilled to launch into spring with a real banger of an event: Grace Lavery is coming to Lighthouse to celebrate her memoir Please Miss: A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Penis!

A memoir of gender transition and recovery from addiction; a dance across genres; a ripping-up of the rulebook, Please Miss is unlike anything you’ve ever read before - like The Argonauts caught in a hall of mirrors, with a lot more sex and humour.

Grace Lavery is a reformed druggie, an unreformed omnisexual chaos Muppet, and a 100 percent, all-natural, synthetic female hormone monster. How could her story be straightforward when she is anything but?

The telling of her tale is kaleidoscopic, wild and audacious: Grace performs in a David Lynch remake of Sunset Boulevard and is reprogrammed as a 1960s femmebot; she is targeted with anonymous letters from a mysterious cabal of clowns; she writes a socialist manifesto disguised as a porn parody of QI (or is it vice versa?).

As Grace fumbles toward a new trans identity, she tries on dozens of different voices, creating a coat of many colours. The result is dazzling, unique and unforgettable. Startlingly funny and ruthlessly smart, Please Miss gives us what we came for, then slaps us in the face and orders us to come again.

‘Reframes the question of transition from the familiar journey from A to B, and replaces that journey with a can’t-look-away performance of wit, language, irreverence, and delight so compelling that a reader forgets about destinations all together.Torrey Peters, author of Detransition, Baby

‘Magnetic, erudite, fierce, a raw nerve in a reverie, amped-up on desire and doubt, making trouble as if dared, dazzling like flames.Jeremy Atherton Lin, author of Gay Bar

This event is now happening in collaboration with University of Edinburgh Staff Pride Network for LGBT+ Staff and Allies, who are providing us with a much bigger space which is fully wheelchair accesible.

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