Golden Boy: A Novel

"I read this book when it first came out in 2013. I had not been clued up enough about the intersex community at the time. I’ve subsequently gotten to know Abigail a bit and have asked her for writing advice, because I love the way she structures her fiction. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter I found it really interesting how this tells the story of an intersex teenager who hides this secret. The book unfolds a bit like a thriller. You’re really tense about Max’s secret and whether people are going to discover it, and what’s going to happen to him. He presents as a boy, goes to school as a boy, but very early on—in quite a shocking chapter written in Max’s own voice—he is sexually assaulted by a slightly older boy, a family friend, who is one of the few people that knows Max’s secret. It’s such a startling way of demonstrating how vulnerable somebody who is different in some very intimate and personal way can feel. Max also worries that he can get pregnant, because he doesn’t know the biology. It all unfolds in a very compelling way. You just want to care for Max and give them a hug and help them through this. Abigail’s book has been published around the world in 70 different languages, and she gets so many wonderful messages from intersex people and the families of intersex people saying how important her book has been. Abigail has spoken about wanting to put Max in a very average family, on a very average street, rather than depicting intersex people on the margins. Oh gosh, definitely. You know, it’s not all that long ago, historically, that babies born intersex would have corrective surgery at birth—if you obviously had both genitalia, then a decision would be made before the baby had grown up how they would present in the world. Which is very shocking. It’s incredibly shocking that we still have this idea that if someone doesn’t have, you know, the expected set of genitalia that something has to be done, they have to be ‘fixed’. What’s difficult for us to grasp about intersex is that there are so many different ways it can present—hormonally, biologically, physiologically. We need to be a lot more aware than we are. Abigail’s book did a great job of setting this story in the everyday street, family, school, and making us realise that there are probably intersex people around us, and we just haven’t realised. We’ve all just been given a wake up call about racial representation with Black Lives Matter. We’ve realised how much white culture we have always consumed and how much we are enriched by opening our eyes to TV shows like I May Destroy You . This is a very similar issue. As a gay woman, I’ve watched so many straight stories and tried to transpose myself into that narrative. When I was a teenager, I used to love this TV show called Moonlighting , and I remember thinking… am I supposed to be the Bruce Willis character or the Cybill Shepherd character? As queer people, we have tried to transpose ourselves into heteronormative stories for so long. So we would absolutely love for our straight friends and allies to read our stories, understand them, and hear our voices. That would mean so much and would be so important."