Son

William Keohane

Review by Éadaoín Lynch

‘For thousands of years people had lived around Lough Gur,’ William Keohane tells us in his essay pamphlet, Son. ‘Archaeologists excavated the lakebed and found remnants from every age of humankind.’ The horseshoe-shaped lake in rural Ireland marks a significant place in Keohane’s story; here, he is surrounded by millennia of tradition, and through Son, he begins to carve out a new image for his place in that history.

I grew up not far from Lough Gur, just over the border in the Burren, which itself features early in Keohane’s story—a serendipitous tribute showcasing his abiding love for and kinship with nature and landscapes. To read a story like this, a delicate and deep reflection that not only describes coming out but coming into one’s own in that landscape, despite so many setbacks, was a joy.

The word ‘trans’ does not occur in this piece, and its absence allows for a story that vehemently emphasises the humanity of Keohane’s experience. In sharing vignettes of childhood and teen years, Keohane describes the abstract fear of puberty, the feeling that ‘I can’t ignore it, how my shape is changing and it’s never going back to how it was.’ In speaking to these hard-to-categorise experiences, Son powerfully shares the impression of namelessness that can come with growing up feeling so different and other, but makes it expansive and true beyond labels.

Names, of course, are significant to this story: just over half-way through, Keohane describes a moving exchange with his parents, where he asks them to help choose his name as part of his transition: ‘My future is a long, black cloth, stretching out into the distance, and this could be the name I stitch into it. This could be the binding thread.’ They do help choose, and they handle it with such grace, this reviewer was moved to tears.

Trans literature has a strong history of autobiography/memoir, but what really sets Son apart is something atypical to many trans stories: overt familial love and care, before, during, and after transition. At every stage of this story, the love from his parents sings through the pages. It finds its crescendo in a trip to an ancient stone circle by Lough Gur, where, in the dim and quiet light, Keohane waves to his Dad. They share this time together every summer and winter solstice—a continual homecoming.

Published by The Lifeboat Press