Inside the Little Plastic Castle

I love Mallory Ortberg's writing. I miss The Toast like woe. I subscribe to the Shatner Chatner, I listen to the great advice from Slate's Dear Prudence, I reread old Toast posts via this reddit sub

https://www.reddit.com/r/ToastCrumbs

(since the original site is *sob* down.)

...and due to my news fast, I just learned that today is "I'm Daniel Mallory Ortberg!" day. (Found out at Metafilter, here's some linkspam)


In Audrey's piece at Autostraddle, they don't bury the lede:

headline: Mal Ortberg’s Creepy New Book Is Coming Out and Mal Is Too

https://www.autostraddle.com/mal-ortberg-merry-spinster-coming-out-trans-412246/

On his book:

The stories are a natural follow up to The Toast’s “Children’s Stories Made Horrific” series, and Ortberg’s curiosity about religion, gender and human relationships provides themes that run through the stories. Ortberg reimagines Jacob’s fight with the Angel in Genesis as if the Angel were simply taking care of procedural business in “Fear Not: The Incident Log” and turns the Velveteen Rabbit into a sinister monster in “The Rabbit.”

On his transition:

“I’ve spent a lot of time thinking through this and going to support groups, and I started medical transition after an initial ‘trial period’ to see how I felt about it. I’ve been dealing with realizing that the feelings I had before were not the whole story. How do I create a vision for the future that doesn’t negate the past? It was wild to have all of this come up consciously for me in the middle of writing the book. None of this has felt super shocking to me as if I had never thought about these things before, but it was bewildering to be writing this book and think ‘I’m going to be experienced very differently by the time I go on tour,'” says Ortberg.

In this interview with Heather Havrilesky,

https://www.thecut.com/2018/03/daniel-mallory-ortberg-interview-heather-havrilesky.html

I was delighted to see this question raised and addressed, as only DMO can:

HH: Does it sometimes feel like you’re joining the other side, the enemy, MEN?

DMO: Yeah, like, I’m taking my skills and opportunities to Cleveland. Or like “Men are good now.” Or I’m going to fix something. Or what I’m doing is in some way a commentary on ways in which men and women relate to one another, or some kind of statement on the work I’ve done before, the position I inhabited as a woman feminist. Yeah, that’s been anxiety-inducing, especially because: Men as a group? Not fantastic. White men as a group? I don’t have a sense that I will be met with safety and joy on the other side. So there have absolutely been moments when I felt like, “For real? This is it? This is what you want?”

The book is The Merry Spinster