A roving and meditative coming-into-age story about the ways transness intersects with identity, ancestors, and intimate relations

In 2019 in New York, Tamás Marquardt is two years sober, a church goer, and "straight" in a marriage that's falling apart. In a matter of months, they go from exchanging vows in a white dress to lusting after a femme in a leather jacket who reminds them of being a sixteen-year-old runaway in Vancouver: open, kind, fearless. As they seek names for what they feel—transgender, non-binary—they find themself in Hungary, where their great-grandmother was born, walking the streets of Budapest and discovering Eastern European queer history. Later, standing in a rural Saskatchewan graveyard with their Hungarian grandfather, they stretch their fingers across the raised names of their family—chosen and familiar.

Part memoir, part travelogue, part cultural geography, Creature asks: Who are our relations? How do relationships shift as we continue to grow into ourselves? How are we more fluid than we are taught to believe, regardless of our identity? Creature argues that fluidity in the self, in the body, is not a condition unique to trans experience; it is the condition of being human. As many of us are discouraged from examining this, we are denied access to our desires. In reclaiming them, we reclaim the power of our own stories.