RaveThe Boston GlobeAn Ivy League-educated scholar of literature, Talusan deftly evokes the themes and motifs of \'traditional\' trans narratives, all the while refusing to settle for easy answers to the questions raised by a life lived beyond the conventions of gender, race, and class identity ... pays homage in both style and structure to Talusan’s predecessors in the trans memoir genre. Shades of Janet Mock’s Redefining Realness and Jennifer Finney Boylan’s She’s Not There: A Life in Two Genders, as well as others, come through in the sharp, journalistic voice with which Talusan captures and studies her own life ... Crisp, lucid prose belies the fairy-tale quality of Talusan’s lived experiences ... like the best of trans memoirists, Talusan refuses the call to sensationalism and political proselytizing that so often characterizes writing about \'different\' or \'exceptional\' people. Instead, Talusan spends much of the book focusing on the sensory, emotional, and relationship details that give texture to any life ... Talusan’s spare, journalistic prose blossoms into a lyrical poeticism that further distinguishes Fairest as a work of literary nonfiction ... By painting her life in such exquisite detail, Talusan breathes new life into the well-worn body of the transgender life story, showing the reader deep wells of complexity where, in a less truthful or less talented writer’s hands, oversimplification and cliché might reign. Talusan leans into the pain and heartbreak — as well as the beauty and hope — that have emerged from each of her choices, allowing her full humanity to shine through ... while Talusan is certainly politically aware, she is neither pedagogue nor polemicist. In Fairest, she grants herself the freedom to tell her story on her terms, which is a kind of magic all its own.
