Pageboy: A Memoir

Okay so with this memoir I can properly illustrate my defense against people who don't rate memoirs. I genuinely do not understand this trend even a little bit because every time the person in question says something like “it feels wrong to rate the struggles this person has gone through” as if there are no other considerations or factors that go into a well written, engaging, or moving piece of work. It doesn't reflect on you to rate a book lower if the author has had crazy, highly emotional, or damaging life.

Pageboy is a good book, and there's no question to me that Elliott Page has had a lot of trauma and bad things happen in his life. The journey is well written, emotional at times, disturbing at others, and I could tell the act of writing it was probably very cathartic. All good things.

However, the organization of this book is just straight up a mess. Chapters jump around with seemingly no rhyme or reason. There is no grouping of events or chapters in any contexts I could tell. Sometimes we are dealing with Page's childhood and then we cut to the next random chapter where it's 2022 and there's a transphobic incident and then suddenly we're filming Inception in 2010 and then the next chapter is the first kiss with a girl in high school. Especially considering there is a throughline of Page's journey of acceptance but we are not presented this journey in a linear fashion or given any context why these scattershot fragments are being presented in this way. It doesn't feel artsy, it feels amateurish.

So there you have it:
Elliot Page - unrated
The life Elliot Page has lived - unrated
Pageboy, the book written by an adult and forced to go through editors and publishers and beta readers and many other people who could offer notes and opinions on how to shape this experience - four stars

Thanks for attending my TED talk on rating memoirs.