One of a Perfect Pair

Page 5 March–April 2009 One of a Perfect Pair Jocelyn Bartkevicius When she was nearly thirty years old, Sarah Raz Link became a man. He named himself Aaron. Of the surgery, he writes: “It was a perfectly good body, healthy, and I’m told, quite attractive. It just wasn’t mine.” Hilda Raz, the longtime editor of the University of Nebraska’s Prairie Schooner and Aaron’s mother, discovered that after many years of her cherishing being the mother to her daughter, she no longer had one. Raz writes of her new son Aaron’s visit home: “Each night I tuck him into my Sarah’s bed, perch on the side of the mattress, and let my palm find his rosy cheek, hold it as I kiss Aaron hello, Sarah good-bye.” What Becomes You is a book about these transformations , and yet it is not a truly collaborative memoir. Where a book like Frederick and Steven Barthelme’s Double Down: Reflections on Gambling and Loss (1999) traces a single storyline and combines two voices, alternating between “he” and “we,” What Becomes You (save for a short preface) consists of two separate segments that use “I.” Thus, What Becomes You, although packaged as a single book—one title, one cover—reads more like two separate memoirs. This is at once part of its appeal and part of its problem. Binding the segments together, instead of publishing them as separate books (as were the recent parent/child books on the son’s drug addiction by David Sheff and Nic Sheff), invites, even demands, comparison. It makes it impossible to review the segments separately, and comparison is not advantageous to Link’s portion of the memoir. Aaron Raz Link trained as a scientist and later became a social activist and performer. This is his first book, and like many first books, it is uneven. On the other hand, Hilda Raz has published three collections of poetry before this memoir (Trans [2001], Living on the Margins [2000], and Divine Honors [1997]). It is not surprising, then, that her portion of the memoir is lyrical, precise, and engaging from the opening: Aaron is my son. Sarah was my daughter . They are one and the same person, unlikely as it seems. I miss my Sarah, forever gone; but at the site of her disappearance , here’s Aaron. Sarah was my companion, my connection to my English mother and to her mother, after whom I am named. Raz digs deep into this matter of legacy and gender. When Aaron asks her to consider Sigmund Freud’s question “What does a woman want,” she makes playful reference to Cyndi Lauper’s 1983 top-ten hit, “Girls Just Want to Have Fun,” and then adds, with bitter irony: “Twelve years later, testosterone and surgery reconfigured the body of my younger child; the courts certified the name change. Not fun.” But, in honor of “the contract made in the delivery room,” she tries to answer head on: “For months, even years, I grieved hard for the loss of my daughter. Like Demeter, I searched Hades looking for her. But she was not there.” She uses her knowledge of gender studies and queer theory to try to discover common ground between herself and her son, how they are “members of the same family, heroes, more like each other than different. Now, looking back, I’m amazed that the one thing I wanted—more than anything else—was a daughter to carry on the next generation of my life as a woman.” As Link and Raz write in the collaborative preface, this book is not autobiography, but memoir, because it is not “the full story of Aaron’s life,” nor “a picture of a world the authors know and love. It is a book about pieces that didn’t fit the picture.” The first section of the book (and the longest) is Link’s, and his opening chapter, a series of segments named “About theAuthor,” takes up the preface’s challenge to focus on pieces that don’t fit. Part of the appeal and the problem of What Becomes You is that it reads more like two separate memoirs. Link...