LOWEST COMMON DENOMINATOR, first in a fictional series called The Autobiographical Trilogy

LOWEST COMMON DENOMINATOR (The Autobiographical Trilogy #1)
PIRKKO SAISIO (tr. Mia Spangenberg)
Two Lines Press (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$12.00 ebook, available now

Rating: 4.5* of five

The Publisher Says: For readers of Eileen Myles and Patti Smith, Lowest Common Denominator is an ecstatic coming-of-age novel by the Finlandia-prize-winning author of The Red Book of Farewells

Writing in the wake of her father’s death, the narrator of Pirkko Saisio’s autofictional novel (translated from Finnish by Mia Spangenberg) transports us to the 1950s Finland of her youth, where she navigates life as an only child of communist parents. Convinced she will grow up to become a man, a young Saisio keeps trying and failing to meet the expectations of the adults around her. Writing with her trademark wit and style, each formative experience—with the Big Bad Wolf, a bikini-clad circus announcer, and Jesus Christ “who has a beard like a man but a skirt and long hair like a woman”—drives her further and further from her family and others.

Struggling to understand her place in the world around her, it’s in language that she discovers a refuge and a way to be seen at last.

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

My Review: I have to believe Author Pirkko (as distinct from Narrator Pirkko, her stand-in) when she says this is autobiographical fiction, not a memoir; but honestly it reads like a memoir. It's that immediate, it's that intimate, it takes on the core issue of queer life...identity...so fully and so bravely. I suppose the reason for novelizing something that otherwise would get criticized for being invented but passed off as factual. Instead, write it as a novel and tell the truth that way.

I looked triumphantly at Father, who was in his shirtsleeves drinking black coffee and reading the Työkansan Sanomat newspaper.

Mother stood by the entryway mirror spreading a touch of rouge from her lips to her cheeks as has hummed "Harbor Nights."

Neither of them noticed that I had become she, the one always under observation.

I was drawn in, as I'm confident all my queer siblings would be, to the story of knowing you're different, Other, thus feeling like you're a disappointment. Or, more terribly, being told you're a disappointment. Like Author Pirkko I had the experience of viewing myself and my world from the outside as a child. In my case it was my utter certainty there was no god at all and religion was a deliberate lie. My gayness, known to myself from about the same time, was nebulous until adolescence brought the specifics into focus. So my relationship to the central fact of this story was immediate and powerful.

It's a trauma to be required by your sense of yourself to see the Otherness, to experience the selfhoods of your family at too early an age occasioned by that explosion of the idea of community. The family never looks the same, never feels safe and welcoming, when you see yourself as unequivocally an outsider to it. That realization should come in adolescence with more life under one's belt. Author Pirkko stunned me by explaining this fundamental truth of my life to me in terms of her (or her stand-in's) own life; she did it both matter-of-factly and with the greatest emotional honesty.

The story takes us around and about in time, revealing generational traumas that all families carry. In a novel format the time-hopping can logically come at key moments not from an organizing principle like non-fiction imposes. We're never far from another point of change in her family's history that resonates with her Otherness. It wove a net that caught both the reality of solitary experiences of reality being all we have and the often obscure fact that families are made of communities of Otherness. Closeness is hard when the Otherness is pathologized as queerness is...as political unorthodoxy does...by most outside cultural forces.

Author Pirkko writing as she does from personal resonance with this reality makes this read a deeply satisfying one for me. I suspect many, if not most, will find many points of fellow feeling for this story. It's a shame she was only inspired to write it by her father's death.

What opportunities for healing were squandered. Very saddening to me.