NONBINARY, being a memoir via call-to-arms of Genesis P-Orridge...famous if you know who they are

NONBINARY: A Memoir
GENESIS P-ORRIDGE
Abrams Press
$9.99 Kindle edition, available now

Rating: ?? five, three, sixteen? how does one rate this sort of story?

A 2021 NPR BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR!

The Publisher Says: A revealing and beautifully open memoir from pioneering industrial music artist, visual artist, and transgender icon Genesis P-Orridge

In this groundbreaking book spanning decades of artistic risk-taking, the inventor of “industrial music,” founder of Throbbing Gristle and Psychic TV, and world-renowned fine artist with COUM Transmissions Genesis P-Orridge (1950–2020) takes us on a journey searching for identity and their true self. It is the story of a life of creation and destruction, where Genesis P-Orridge reveals their unwillingness to be stuck—stuck in one place, in one genre, or in one gender. Nonbinary is Genesis’s final work and is shared with hopes of being an inspiration to the newest generation of trailblazers and nonconformists.

Nonbinary is the intimate story of Genesis’s life, weaving the narrative of their history in COUM Transmissions, Throbbing Gristle, and Psychic TV. It also covers growing up in World War II’s fallout in Britain, contributing to the explosion of new music and radical art in the 1960s, and destroying visual and artistic norms throughout their entire life.

In addition to being a captivating memoir of a singular artist and musician, Nonbinary is also an inside look at one of our most remarkable cultural lives that will be an inspiration to fans of industrial music, performance art, the occult, and a life in the arts.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.

My Review: There are no words for Genesis P-Orridge. Trans, genderqueer, non-binary; artist, musician, creator...or Creator. Not one of them can hope to do more than capture a slice of this astonishing being's self.

William S. Burroughs met them when they were twenty...he immediately posed them a life-long quest in a question:

"How do we short-circuit control?"

When William S. Burroughs asks you to solve a problem the first day you meet him, all of 20 to his rising-60, you have to know you are Someone. And Someone Genesis was, and became, and remained until their death from leukemia at seventy. Central to their identity was re-making a world in their irreplaceable self-image. From childhood, they found no pleasure in eating:

This struggle with food and eating has never ended. Even now, if I could absorb enough nourishment and vitamins by simply swallowing one pill with some water, I'd be thrilled. I have never been able to muster even the slightest interest in tastes, flavours, textures, or combinations of food. It has always struck me as a demeaning and primitive requirement of my body. A necessity that I totally resent.

It seems to me that, from a parenting perspective, this person would've been a bloody nightmare. And that was then, at the time and in a place where invasions of home life were significantly fewer and milder than they are now. Raising Genesis if born in 2000? Ye gawds, the spirit shies from such a travail.

Though Genesis born now would've found their QUILTBAGgery much less troublesome. Their life in a British "public school" (that's "expensive private school for the Ruling Class" to us in the US, think Choate or Boston Latin School) was a litany of torture and torment, unsurprisingly. These breeding grounds for Tory Government flunkies (Skull and Bones, to us in the US, breeding CIA and IMF fascists) were never going to be a congenial environment for a complete wanker like Genesis.

I think the problems of being Other, truly and genuinely Other, are never more clear than when Genesis tells (in clear and well-written English, when one expects something that sounds like their lyrics from Throbbing Gristle...translations from a future language via Akkadian texts) of their journey to the truly bizarre fame they found in the 1970s and 1980s. It reads a bit like a daVinci notebook does when one doesn't know that the writing's meant to be read in a mirror. The concepts are all there...the sheer panicky "what is happening to me" sense of it all, suavely undersold, makes the story into a truly unsettling read.

I think, in fact, that there is no better way to sum up Genesis P-Orridge's life's affect and effect than that: a lifelong sense of "what is happening to me," from birth to death; a need to surf on the curls of waves that one knows with great certainty are killers ready to end one's thin thread of a life.

Genesis discusses the sense they have always had of a non-linear self. An early description of their memories as glittering shards without connection or organizing principle explains everything, I think. How else but in those terms could a person sing so eerily about the awfulness...rape, cannibalism...that they did? When nothing connects to anything else, when experience and memory are frag-bombs of disorganized imagery, it is impossible to see the world as anything but sensory shrapnel as ready to rend and pierce as to please.

Don't pick this up as a celebrity bio; don't think the artsy-fartsy bits are going to be posh and the livin' be easy. No indeed. There's total hand-to-mouthery from beginning to end. The struggle that is their life could, in retrospect, never have been otherwise if they were to come out of it themself. For example, the name "Genesis P-Orridge" came out of their deep need to say "FUCK YOU" to bureaucrats at the dole office. And their mother was more upset about that than their decision to leave uni! So, of course, it was made legal and remained the cornerstone of their identity for their next fifty years.

I said before: Parenting this person *had* to be a seriously difficult and stressful experience.

I do not know if this reading experience will be for everyone; like Genesis, the audience is really down to self-selection. Their co-author on this extraordinary journey of a read said it best, I think:

These encounters were intimate and intense. Challenging, but not in the way that engaging with a strong personality like {Timothy} Leary challenged one's ego and assumptions with the power of his own. It was more a feeling of being taken in and invaded at the same time, where the boundary of my own individuality was immediately suspect. It was like making love or, better, being possessed. It was a nondual way of relating to people.

Does this give you the heebie-jeebies? Horseman, pass by. Does it give you a frisson? Buy, read, experience a corner of the strange, glorious, unique Other that was Genesis P-Orridge.