excerpts...

Invisible Monsters, by Chuck Palahniuk

"Princess Princess," she yells after me, "It's not that I really want to be a woman." She yells, "Wait up!" Brandy yells, "I'm only doing this because it's just the biggest mistake I can think to make. It's stupid and destructive, and anybody you ask will tell you I'm wrong. That's why I have to go through with it."

Brandy says, "Don't you see? Because we're so trained to do life the right way. To not make mistakes." Brandy says, "I figure, the bigger the mistake looks, the better chance I'll have to break out and live a real life."

Like Christopher Columbus sailing toward disaster at the edge of the world.

Like Fleming and his bread mold.

"Our real discoveries come from chaos," Brandy yells, "from going to the place that looks wrong and stupid and foolish."

...

"But me," Brandy says, still in the bathroom doorway, still looking at her chipped nail polish, "I'm making the same mistake only so much worse, the pain, the money, the time, and being dumped by my old friends, and in the end my whole body is my story."

A sexual reassignment surgery is a miracle for some people, but if you don't want one, it's the ultimate form of self-mutilation.

She says, "Not that it's bad being a woman. This might be wonderful, if I wanted to be a woman. The point is," Brandy says, "being a woman is the last thing I want. It's just the biggest mistake I could think to make."

So it's the path to the greatest discovery.

It's because we're so trapped in our culture, in the being of being human on this planet with the brains we have, and the same two arms and two legs everybody has. We're so trapped that any way we could imagine to escape would bu just another part of the trap. Anything we want, we're trained to want.

...

She says, "You have to jump into disaster with both feet."

She throws the broken heels into the bathroom trash.

"I'm not straight, and I'm not gay." she says. "I'm not bisexual. I want out of the labels. I don't want my whole life crammed into a single word. A story. I want to find something else, unknowable, some place to be that's not on the map. A real adventure.

A sphinx. A mystery. A blank. Unknown. Undefined. Unknowable. Indefinable. Those were all the words Brandy used to describe me in my veils. Not just a story that goes and then, and then, and then, and then, until you die.