Secrets

Abigail Tarttelin’s heartbreaking coming-ofage novel, Golden Boy, addresses the complexities of identity development and its intersection with sexual violence. In her crusade to fill in the blanks of a fragmented life, Tartellin uses a multiple-perspective narrative style to help the reader make sense of Max Walker, the beautiful boy whose entire life has been shaped by secrets. Told from the perspective of Max himself, his parents, his little brother, his new doctor, and the girl he ultimately ends up falling in love with, Golden Boy is a twofold tale about the often unspoken realities of intersexuality and rape.

Tarttelin is an assertive storyteller who ensnares the reader in a web of emotions without much warning. In fact, the reader is suddenly plunged into a whirlwind of vivid imagery that perfectly captures the pain of a fracturing adolescence. Rape is a heinous crime against the body, and Tarttelin makes sure to evoke that by depicting Max’s rape as particularly savage: he was assaulted by Hunter, his best friend from childhood, after Hunter caught him masturbating. This in itself was particularly destabilizing for Max because, as a boy, he had been caught stimulating the part of his genitalia that more closely resembled a vagina—something he seldom did—and would now be potentially off-limits. In a horrific, yet not surprising manner, Hunter then utilizes Max’s previous actions to justify his own by telling Max that he is “more girl than boy,” and hence, “you are supposed to like me.”

By framing the rape in this way, Tarttelin explores several tropes of heteronormative power. Firstly, she feminizes Max by exposing his most fragile vulnerability—his sex—and turns Hunter into the predatory male who uses Max’s biggest secret as a weapon to control and silence him, thereby reinforcing the ideology that violence against women is not only accepted, but ultimately their fault. Secondly, by intruding on Max’s intimate autoerotic act, Tarttelin turns a tender moment into a toxic one, echoing this way the sex-negative views of a society that does not understand nor accept sexual difference.

Tarttelin also explores the panics of internalized homophobia and its dangers. When Max initially rejects Hunter’s advances by claiming that he is not gay, Hunter contends that he is not gay either—that he does not like boys or girls, he just likes Max. For a brief moment, Tarttelin achieves something that is incredibly difficult: she gets the reader to sympathize with the perpetrator by depicting him as a scared teenager who is running away from a social identity he does not want. For Hunter, Max’s non-binary embodiment means that he does not have to be gay because Max is not entirely male, and this means that he can like, and even love him, without having to suffer the negative consequences of homosexual attraction. It is by implicitly criticizing social stigma that Tarttelin brilliantly launches a forceful attack against the impenetrable fortress of normativity.

Even though Tarttelin addresses a vast array of important social issues, Golden Boy is ultimately a novel about secrets and their consequences. The entire narrative centers around the domino effect caused by ignorance and silence. Tarttelin portrays Max’s parents as loving and caring, but their refusal to engage the subject of intersex ultimately leads Max to grow up knowing very little about the capabilities of his body. His parents’ negations, particularly his mother’s, lead Max to grow up thinking that intersexuality was shameful—which in the end gave Hunter, who knew of Max’s intersex “condition,” enough power to subjugate him. This, in turn, estranged Max from what had once been his support system, forcing him to deal with his trauma alone.

Because Max’s parents were so adamant about not speaking about Max’s intersexuality, the medical talk is limited to what Max is allowed to hear. Tarttelin does eventually explain Max’s intersex variation—46, XX/46, XY, or what is known today as chimeric or ovotesticular intersexuality—through the character of Archie, a kind...