Paul Takes the Form of a Mortal Girl

Simply put: this is the book I've been waiting for my whole life. Recommended By Kyan F., Powells.com

A loving serenade — with echoes of Jeanette Winterson — to queer sensuality, vulnerability, and freedom in its truest sense. Paul is thrust out onto the smoldering embers of the AIDS epidemic and dances on “flickering feet” from The Village to Boystown to P-Town to San Fran, like some kind of national gay tour of the 90s. He belongs nowhere, yet everywhere — a genderless chameleon dusted in rainbow glitter. He is a sensualist with a soul, a child in a plague, precocious, sui generis, impossible not to fall in love with, impossible to look away from. Read this if you like your characters fluid and label-less, if you like fashion, sex, anonymity, time-travel, bare skin, biting wit, humor despite tragedy, and the mad thrill of locking eyes with a stranger. I've known a few Pauls in my life. This book does them justice. Recommended By Sarah W, Powells.com

“HOT” — Maggie Nelson
“TIGHT” — Eileen Myles
“DEEP” — Michelle Tea

It’s 1993 and Paul Polydoris tends bar at the only gay club in a university town thrumming with politics and partying. He studies queer theory, has a dyke best friend, makes zines, and is a flaneur with a rich dating life. But Paul’s also got a secret: he’s a shapeshifter. Oscillating wildly from Riot Grrrl to leather cub, Paul transforms his body and his gender at will as he crossed the country –– a journey and adventure through the deep queer archives of struggle and pleasure.

Paul Takes the Form of a Mortal Girl is a riotous, razor-sharp bildungsroman whose hero/ine wends his/her way through a world gutted by loss, pulsing with music, and opening into an array of intimacy and connections.

“Paul Takes the Form of a Mortal Girl is playful, sexy, smart, and like nothing else I — or you — have ever read before.” Carmen Maria Machado, author of Her Body and Other Parties

“Restless, muscular, and playful....A tight satisfying masterpiece.” Eileen Myles, author of Evolution

“In these irreverent pages, a shapeshifter gets a crash course in gender and sexuality by inhabiting both sides of the binary and arriving precisely somewhere in the middle. Book jacket blurbs are seldom something to go on, but in this case…just look.” O, The Oprah Magazine

“Mixes pop culture, gender theory, and smut, but [Lawlor’s] greatest achievement is that Paul is no mere symbol but a vibrantly yearning being.“ The New Yorker

In these irreverent pages, a shapeshifter gets a crash course in gender and sexuality by inhabiting both sides of the binary and arriving precisely somewhere in the middle. --O, The Oprah Magazine

"HOT" (Maggie Nelson) - "TIGHT" (Eileen Myles) - "DEEP" (Michelle Tea)

It's 1993 and Paul Polydoris tends bar at the only gay club in a university town thrumming with politics and partying. He studies queer theory, has a dyke best friend, makes zines, and is a flaneur with a rich dating life. But Paul's also got a secret: he's a shapeshifter. Oscillating wildly from Riot Grrrl to leather cub, Paul transforms his body and his gender at will as he crossed the country--a journey and adventure through the deep queer archives of struggle and pleasure.

Paul Takes the Form of a Mortal Girl is a riotous, razor-sharp bildungsroman whose hero/ine wends his/her way through a world gutted by loss, pulsing with music, and opening into an array of intimacy and connections.

Andrea Lawlor teaches writing at Mount Holyoke College and edits fiction for Fence. They live in western Massachusetts. Paul Takes the Form of a Mortal Girl is their first novel.

My first novel, Paul Takes the Form of a Mortal Girl, follows Paul Polydoris, a 23-year-old queer shapeshifter and sometime college student, living in Iowa City in 1993...

Read More»