Celebrating the paperback launch of his Stonewall Award-winning novel Some Strange Music Draws Me In, Griffin Hansbury will read and talk with acclaimed author Eileen Myles. Topics may include: trans life across generations, growing up working class, Boston accents, queer pessimism, the 1980s, Patti Smith, escaping the suburbs, queer survival in MAGA families.

To reserve a copy of Some Strange Music Draws Me In (W. W. Norton and Company, April 15, 2025, paperback, $18.99) please write to us at contact@bgsqd.com with “please reserve Some Strange Music for April 10 event” in the subject line.

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About Some Strange Music Draws Me In:

This provocative novel tells an emotionally gripping story about friendship, family, and transgender awakening in a working-class American town. It’s the summer of 1984 in Swaffham, Massachusetts, when Mel (short for Melanie) meets Sylvia, a tough-as-nails trans woman whose shameless swagger inspires Mel’s dawning self-awareness. But Sylvia’s presence sparks fury among her neighbors and throws Mel into conflict with her mother and best friend. Decades later in Trump’s America, Max (formerly Mel) is on probation from his teaching job for, ironically, defying speech codes around trans identity. Back in Swaffham, he must navigate life as part of a fractured family and face his own role in the disasters of the past.

Praise for Some Strange Music Draws Me In:

“One of the best works of literary fiction I’ve read not just this year but in the last several.” – Drew Broussard, Lit Hub

“At once an analysis of gender, sex, and, yes, class, it’s also populated with characters so real you’ll wish you could hang out with them and keep them safe.”  – Rufus Hickock, BUST Magazine

“This gorgeous, propulsive novel is filled with beauty and danger, youth and wisdom and the life-saving lifelines of counterculture. With writing so tense and honest and real, I recognized this place and these people deeply, and felt them all in my heart long after the book was finished.” – Michelle Tea, author of Knocking Myself Up

“I loved this devastating marvel of a book.” – Andrea Lawlor, author of Paul Takes the Form of a Mortal Girl

“From the first brilliant sentence I knew I was going to love this book, and I did. Griffin’s writing is poetic and searching and I felt like I had lived these characters’ lives even though we’re worlds apart.” – Ariel Schrag, author of Adam

“This funny, defiant, and passionate novel will make you want to play Patti Smith’s Horses at full volume as a soundtrack while you’re still reading. Some Strange Music Draws Me In is the coming-of-age, reckoning-with-gender story we have all needed for decades, the kind that can change and save your life.” – James Hannaham, author of Didn’t Nobody Give a Shit What Happened to Carlotta 

https://griffinhansburywriter.com/some-strange-music-draws-me-in/

Griffin Hansbury (he/him) is the author of Vanishing New York and Feral City (as Jeremiah Moss). A Pushcart Prize and Stonewall Book Award winner, his writing has appeared in several publications, including n+1, the New York Times, the New Yorker and Paris Review. He works as a psychoanalyst in Manhattan.

Eileen Myles (they/them) is a poet, novelist, and art journalist whose practice of vernacular first-person writing has made them one of the most recognized writers of their generation. Pathetic Literature, which they edited, came out in Fall of 2022. a “Working Life”, their newest collection of poems, is out now. They live in New York and in Marfa, Texas.