SOMETHING THAT MAY SHOCK AND DISCREDIT YOU

By Daniel Mallory Ortberg

At last, we have the work of transgender bathos we didn’t know we needed, but very much do.

No, I don’t mean pathos. I mean the term coined by Alexander Pope to signify “the art of sinking in poetry,” as does Daniel Mallory Ortberg. In the essay collection “Something That May Shock and Discredit You,” he uses the 18th-century term for “anticlimax” as an excellent, if surprising, vehicle for writing that he calls, in the acknowledgments, “memoir-adjacent.”

“I used to have the hardest time remembering the difference between bathos and pathos,” Ortberg — who, since the book’s publication, has changed his name to Daniel M. Lavery — winks, in a clue to his book’s method, of lampooning the self-seriousness of masculinity. In contrast to the mock chapter titles he lists in “the On the Nose, Po-Faced Transmasculine Memoir I Am Trying Not to Write,” his chapters will include no “Forced Poetic Description of My Hormone Delivery System,” nor an “Exhaustive Recounting of Every Crush I Have Ever Had.” Rejecting the suffering bildung often demanded of transgender writers, Ortberg’s narrative is anything but linear: It skips back in time to mythic Greece, traipses across the landscape of contemporary pop culture and, in one wonderfully fabulist entry that would make Carmen Maria Machado proud, slips outside of time altogether.

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[Read an excerpt from “Something That May Shock and Discredit You.” ]

Such temporal vertigo makes “Something That May Shock and Discredit You” addictively strange and delightful, as when Ortberg recollects his youthful efforts to attract a crush by “toasting every waffle in the house, trying to alchemize Eggos into a kiss.” In the hands of another author this image could lead somewhere treacly, but Ortberg détournes his own pubescent angst by way of Apollo and Hyacinthus’ doomed romance, putting the “ultima” back in Ultimate Frisbee: “I saw you noticed me taking my shirt off. You probably recognize me — you know, from statues?” Ortberg imagines Apollo saying to the young Spartan prince. Hyacinthus replies, “are you up” and then “if so do you want to play frisbee and die for each other.”