As anyone who observed Laura Jane Grace and the Devouring Mothers at the Sinclair last month knows damn well, the Against Me! frontwoman has been a relentless and razor-witted chronicler of her own life.
Between acoustic renditions of AM! standbys, Grace treated the crowd to selections plucked from her lifetime of journal scribings. Topics included her well-documented struggles with gender dysphoria, somewhat less singular history of rock and roll debauchery, heartbreak in the non-rock and roll real world, and unfortunate encounters with Sire Records executives who had never heard of The Replacements.
If she arranged the VH1 Storytellers aura of the Devouring Mothers tour to court public interest for her upcoming memoir, that plan totally worked! If I may speak on behalf of the public, we are stoked. Entertainment Weekly informs us that as of today, Tranny: Confessions of Punk Rock’s Most Infamous Anarchist Sellout has an official November 15 release date, via Hachette Book Group.
For years, Grace hoped to eventually condense her “boxes and boxes” of journals into a normal-sized book, and tapped longtime Noisey editor Dan Ozzi to oversee and advise her wordsmithery.
“You definitely don’t need to be an Against Me! fan to enjoy [Tranny]” Ozzi tells Vanyaland. “That was one of my tasks on this book. I kept pointing to sections and would say, ‘OK, now explain this again, but so my mom would understand it.’ So hopefully, a general audience will enjoy it, but if nothing else, my mom will.”
Ozzi’s mom can look forward to what may well wind up a definitive opus regarding punk in the 2000s, and perhaps more importantly, some perspective from one of the oft-marginalized transgender community’s most visible representatives.
“This is unlike any rock book I’ve ever read,” Ozzi continues. “All of those books are about sex, drugs, and rock and roll, which, don’t get me wrong, Tranny has, but there’s also this remarkable secret going on underneath it all.”
Tranny is up for pre-order right here.