Cactus Country: A Boyhood Memoir – by Zoë Bossiere Published by Harry N. Abrams, 2024

As this memoir begins, Zoë has newly arrived in the Sonora Desert with their parents.
They have moved cross country, from a small apartment in Virginia, to live a freer simpler life in a
brand-new Airstream trailer located in Cactus Country RV Park, just outside of Tucson, Arizona. Zoë,
assigned female at birth, presented as a girl when the family lived in Virginia. Now, at eleven-years old,
Zoë is being allowed a fresh start with a new, shorter haircut and boy clothes. Although Zoë doesn’t
have the words to express it, they will experience life in this new untamed desert landscape as a trans boy,
where others at school and at play begin to see Zoë, as a boy, too. Zoë spends hot days chasing shade and
freight trains with an ever-rotating pack of sunburned desert boys, and nights fending off their own
questions about the body underneath their baggy boy clothes.

From the book:
The story of the boy I was – of the person I am – is inextricably tied to the desert surrounding
Cactus Country, and to the hard masculinity, stoicism, and camaraderie of the boys and men I knew in
those years, who regarded me as one of their own...

If I close my eyes and picture it, a memory, or something like one, begins to take shape. I see a lone,
barefooted boy with short blond hair walking along the road in Cactus Country. The soles of his feet
sting against the searing desert asphalt as he wipes away the sweat beading under his uneven bangs.
Still, he presses on, looking for something despite feeling uncertain it could ever be found. Trusting that,
no matter how far he strayed from the path home, he wouldn’t find himself lost.

As Zoë enters adolescence, they must reckon with the sexism, racism, substance abuse, and violence
endemic to the working-class Cactus Country men they have grown close to. In response, Zoë adopts an
androgynous style and new pronouns but still cannot escape what it means to live in a gendered body,
particularly when a fraught first love with a high school girlfriend, Avery, destabilizes their sense of self.
Zoë persists in searching for answers, as they matriculate from City High School, and accept a full
scholarship to attend the University of Arizona, Tucson.

Equal parts harsh and tender, this memoir is an invitation for readers to consider how we find our place
in a world that insists on stark binaries, and a precisely rendered journey of self-determination that will
resonate with anyone who has ever had to fight to be themself.

Zoë Bossiere (they/she) is a writer, editor and teacher from Tucson, Arizona. They are the managing
editor of Brevity: A Journal of Concise Literary Nonfiction and the co-editor of the anthologies The Best of Brevity
and the Lyric Essay as Resistance: Truth from the Margins. An interview with Zoë about the writing of
Cactus Country: A Boyhood Memoir, which chronicles their experiences growing up as a trans boy in a
Tucson, Arizona trailer park, can be found at:
https://americanliteraryreview.com/2024/11/11/interview-zoe-bossiere/

This book review was submitted by Stand with Trans advocate
Barb Shumer, past board member and retired public librarian.