A Study in Our Selves
Winner of the OutWrite 2022 Chapbook Competition in Nonfiction
Growing up the queer child of a late Thai immigrant to Singapore, Max Pasakorn has always felt out of place, never quite fitting in with Singapore’s expectations of them. How can Max come into their own in a home that’s seemingly hostile to everything they are? In a lyrically inventive retelling of Max’s life story, A Study in Our Selves is a powerful coming-of-age memoir that presents and represents a queer selfhood as the author reconstructs their life through language.
Praise for A Study in Our Selves
A Study in Our Selves is creative nonfiction at its finest. It transcends boundaries, including those defining nations, gender, and personhood, performance and language, even the boundaries of the page itself. This book is a queer coming-of-age in all its nonlinearity, and builds itself from language, as we follow along and live with the writer. The sections looking inward are as stunning as those facing the world, and the intersection where the inside and outside meet – our skin and flesh – feels urgent, necessary, and profound. We are lucky to have this book, and would be wise to let it teach us much about the world, other people, and ourselves.
— Joseph Osmundson, OutWrite 2022 Chapbook Competition Judge and author of Virology
A Study in Our Selves is confident. It’s brash. It’s very willing to offend and very willing to please at the same time. It keeps you in the kind of company where you cannot and should not be still. In other words, it keeps your mind awake.
— Lawrence Lacambria Ypil, author of The Experiment of the Tropics
Reading Max Pasakorn’s micro-memoir of questioning selfhood is like sinking your teeth into sticky toffee, as every line spills over with decadent images that tell of a deliciously complex mode of being in between worlds.
The voice here is at once assured and unruly, and the writer is one to watch out for in Singapore literature.
