Meredith Talusan: I’m Not Brave

Last I saw Meredith Talusan in person, we shouted lines from the classic sleepover movie Center Stage at each other across her living room and she told me about her survey of trans women’s memoir covers. Her own memoir, Fairest, was set to come out in a few months and it was on her mind, the way trans subjects are treated in art. Talusan has a brain like that: a lightning fast sharpness that connects her own experience to the world around her, past and present. That makes sense—her career as a journalist both requires and shapes an inquisitive worldview, that ability to see both the small details and the big picture at once, in concert. A contributing editor at them, Talusan has had her hand in many different projects, from fiction to reporting. All her varied craft expertise comes to bear on the telling of her own story. Fairest chronicles Talusan’s early life in the Philippines, where she was considered exceptional in many ways—albino, a child television star, and raised as a first-born son. It artfully juxtaposes her childhood with her education at Harvard many years later, where she began asking herself questions about passing as white and what it would mean to deeply consider her gender in her particular racial and economic context.

It is always strange to interview a friend—the circumstances of conversation become structured and formalized. It is even stranger to interview anyone about anything except illness during a pandemic, to interview anyone at all when all our socializing takes place on Zoom. It is the veneer of interaction, something reflected back to us by a strange mirror, Guernica