Emily St. James’s Literary Debut Woodworking is a Tale of Friendship, Identity, and Community
Erica Skyberg is a trans woman. She’s come out to herself and is ready to live her truth. To the rest of the world, however, she’s still seen as a man, and in Mitchell, a small and tight-knit town in South Dakota, getting out of the closet is easier said than done. Erica’s ex-wife, who he still adores, is now pregnant with someone else’s baby. The Presidential election is just around the corner and red state trans panic isn’t exactly conducive to Erica’s plans. There’s only one out trans person in the entire area and she’s one of Erica’s students: Abigail Hawkes. Abigail isn’t eager to be the trans fairy godmother to a fully grown adult. She’s got her own problems, between being estranged from her parents and secretly dating a popular boy whose mother is a local conservative firebrand. Isolation has brought Erica and Abigail together but comes with a bond that will change both of their lives.
Woodworking is the delightful and sharply told literary debut of Emily St. James, the pop culture critic turned writer for Yellowjackets. If you’re of a certain generation of perennially online nerds, St. James’s work will be familiar to you. As a former writer for The AV Club and Vox, and regular guest on podcasts like Blank Check, she’s one of the key voices in modern criticism. If you love long, exceedingly detailed, and very funny recaps of series both good and bad, you can probably thank St. James for perfecting the form (RIP Frank Fisticuffs.) St. James’ reviews were often dense in terms of genre savvy, but they could also be autobiographical, blending details of her own life into her writing about how fiction remolds reality into something entertaining and relatable. It makes perfect sense that she’d write a novel and one that feels so finely tuned to an experience so specific and yet so familiar.
Flipping between two perspectives—Erica’s third-person view and the first-person narration of Abigail—St. James shows a generational and mental divide. While still only in her mid-30s, Erica’s view of coming out and embracing her transness still has a sort of quaint quality to it. She’s not a pessimist like Abigail, although she’s not naïve about what coming out could mean for her in a place like Mitchell. Presenting as a man means that others talk to her in a certain way, and expect things of her that she can’t always reject or correct. She begrudgingly responds to her dead name, which is redacted on the page, a reminder of who she really is to both the reader and herself. Her ex-wife’s new boyfriend seems like a perfectly nice guy with kind advice and bro-ey camaraderie, and then he talks about how much he loves Donald Trump and you remember that he must view Erica as a kindred spirit based on perceived gender.
Abigail, on the other side, is fully aware of what the world thinks of her and girls like her. Having been kicked out of her house by her parents, she lives with her protective older sister and tries to avoid her mother’s attempts to worm her way back into her life. Her new classmates all know she’s trans and are d*cks about it. Where Erica struggles to find a way to be seen for who she really is, all Abigail craves is a chance to be unseen and not be the center of attention. She’s woodworking, trying to disappear into the walls, “trying to be any other girl, like in that one story with the yellow wallpaper.”
Abigail is often bleakly funny and unsparing in her perspectives, particularly when Erica, who is technically her elder, acts like a wide-eyed Pollyanna about their futures (one moment where she asks Erica if she’s a lesbian elicited more than a few guffaws.) The pair of them don’t seem to have anything in common at first aside from their transness, which Abigail notes on more than one occasion. Her steeliness is perfectly understandable, given that everyone looks at her either as a danger to society or a figure of fetish. In one especially brutal moment, she is deadnamed, and St. James’ savvy use of the literary format conveys that insult with all of its intended violence.
St. James’ portrayal of Mitchell rings true in ways that are sometimes sweet and other times deeply insidious. The decision to set the novel in 2016, the summer of the Clinton-Trump race, opens up the town to the aggravating realities of what we now know as the never-ending scourge of the so-called culture wars. A transphobic preacher is running in a local election and receiving endless financial support from rich locals, and the mere existence of Abigail, who’s just minding her own business, makes for an easy target. Erica volunteers for a Democratic candidate and finds some community with fellow campaigners, but plenty of her longtime friends go from kind to cruel in a heartbeat. The true malignance of transphobia lies in the heart of those who think they’re “good people.” As Trumpian rhetoric and paranoia take over, suspicious eyes fall upon Erica and Abigail. To the outside world, it looks undoubtedly odd for a teacher to be so close to a student. But it’s also a time of easy targets…
Woodworking does not seek to be a comprehensive study of transness (no one novel should have to fulfill that purpose.) Rather, it’s a sensitive but full-hearted portrayal of a community just trying to live freely and honestly without being waylaid by opportunistic hijacking, faux fear, or garden variety hate. St. James said in the novel’s afterword that she didn’t want to write a political book. While it’s unavoidably so because of, you know, the hellscape we live in, Woodworking is also about how much it sucks to have your normalcy become “political.” Finding your people in the midst of fear and uncertainty is a beautiful thing. Emily St. James’s writing shows that with tenderness and humor, and offers a literary debut that deserves to reach as wide an audience as possible.
Woodworking is available now.
Kayleigh Donaldson is a critic and pop culture writer for Pajiba.com. Her work can also be found on IGN, Slashfilm, Uproxx, Little White Lies, Vulture, Roger Ebert, and other publications. She lives in Dundee.