"An achingly tender and very sexy faux-memoir, kinda Kathy Acker, kinda late-night sleepover conversation with someone with whom you are cultivating a very special feeling that, once you two fall asleep beneath her band posters, you'll never quite feel again.

It is hard to describe this book –� at base, it's a two-phase autobiography-in-letters by a trans musician who comes under the tutelage of a mysterious, compelling performance artist, falls in and out of love with herself and others, and later finds herself navigating the pressures of fame and public trans identity while dealing with the fallout of many dalliances with queer, kinky, Mad, traumatized kin. Intimate enough to pass at times for a nonfictional memoir and deeply invested in independent music culture, it at times felt like an ethnography of a creative world I am not part of: I feel I understand better how songwriting works, how bands locate and maintain chemistry.

This book was also, of course, an invitation into the complex psyche of its narrator, and in this case, what goes unsaid and unseen is as interesting as what made it onto the page. Framed as a skyscraper whose elevator only stops on two of its many floors, the "two-phase" element of this memoir refers to the snapshots of the narrator's life it chooses to capture: first, the year she's twenty, and second, a year in her forties. In doing this, Any Other City disrupts not only trans memoir conventions, but any memoir conventions: we receive only passing references to ages 0-20, and to the crucial intervening years between 20 and 40+, in the latter period of which our narrator discovers she's trans and begins living as a woman.

We as readers are deliciously, brilliantly cut off from major chunks of life –� Big Trans Events, Big Fame Events –� to instead hone in on the micro-moments of music, sex, heartbreak, loss, friendship, pleasure. This structural decision was an excellent one on Plante's part (and for added meta-fuckery, Plante is described in-text as the person helping her fictional narrator write the memoir) and creates the generative dissonance inherent to this book: on one hand, it is the story of a famous trans woman. On the other, we know only what she herself chooses to share."