A Review by Jeanne Thornton

At the beginning of We Had No Rules, the excellent debut collection from Corinne Manning, one rule is imposed: “don’t fuck my roommates.” The person establishing this rule is Stacy, a queer woman who’s sheltering her sibling, the narrator, a queer teenage runaway from a destructive home. The narrator must follow this rule, Stacy explains, so that the apartment full of queers where Stacy lives can remain a safe harbor: “If you fuck it up, we are both out.”

Yet, as in any story in which a character establishes a rule, the rule is quickly broken. After a day spent together riding the Staten Island Ferry, holding hands, and offering advice on queer codes of living (“Jealousy just can’t exist for you anymore”), Stacy’s roommate, Jill, asks the narrator if they’ll penetrate her, so she can show the narrator where the G-spot is. “This is something I do for people,” Jill says. “This is purely instructional.” When the narrator asks, “Is this sex,” Jill answers no. “I only moved as instructed,” says the narrator.

After, they ask Stacy if they’ve broken the rule. “In the pause I wanted her to see what happened. I wanted her to tell me that it wasn’t sex. But instead, she waited, and I saw the worry spreading across her face, so finally I spoke.” When they do, Stacy is very quick to excuse the transgression, to define it as not a transgression after all. And the safe harbor of the apartment becomes something else.

This title story is a microcosm of We Had No Rules, a haunting and vital collection that traces various efforts by queer people to create worlds for themselves that are more free and more kind than the cis/heterosexual/patriarchal world from which they arose. That freedom, to be meaningful, must be asserted into being with new codes and anxieties: “Brian and I fuck but we aren’t gay yet,” asserts the narrator of one story; “I don’t know if you’re ready for me to use the singular they,” frets the narrator of another. “At this point in the story, I’m still concerned with what you’re ready for.” Manning is excellent at foregrounding the very real anxiety about navigating these ghosts of the pre-queer world. “You stop thinking things like that after a while,” says another character. “Once you feel normal to yourself again, you sort of forget that other people don’t see it that way.” One of the delights of the book is watching its characters wake up to the joys of coming out and coming into their queerness, learning to swim (at least once literally) through the waves of that queer utopian dream.

But along with the waves comes undertow. In “Ninety Days”—which, like many of the stories here, traces a breakup—Dane, a trans guy in the process of coming out, ends his relationship with his femme-presenting partner by sending them a postcard demanding ninety days of no contact. “They said I was being petty—wanting closure, wanting an explanation,” says the partner. When they ask why Dane wants to break up, Dane tells them they’re being capitalist for wanting a reason. During the ninety days—which ends without any intervening word from Dane, who disconnects his phone—and the subsequent year, the narrator gets over it and rebuilds their life while continuing to exist socially with their and Dane’s mutual friends. All these friends regularly ask the narrator how Dane is doing, using his deadname; the narrator is unsure why they keep bringing this up. When one friend finally breaks down and reveals that Dane has transitioned and moved to a farm on the edge of town, we learn with the narrator that Dane has orchestrated the questioning. “They were testing to see what you knew so they didn’t say anything I didn’t want them to,” Dane explains. “They were just trying to be mindful of what I was going through.” After a confrontation that involves the narrator defecating in Dane’s garden, he finally deigns to give them closure: that dating them “was like dating an animal, and for a while that was perfect because it made me feel like an animal, and what does an animal care about gender?”

Manning explicitly ties Dane’s treatment of the narrator to patriarchy—“I’m more into being with someone masculine, like something equal,” Dane tells them—but there’s also something uniquely queer about the culture that enables that treatment: the equation of “capitalist” with “worthless person,” the word “mindful” deployed to justify making friends into accomplices to something that certainly feels like deception. Dane’s actions give him space to seek his transition on his own terms. Surely as a trans woman I have to find that laudable. And the story, as it appears to Dane, is seductive. My sympathies were with Dane’s former partner, the narrator, but I kept wondering what I wasn’t seeing, whether I was a bad queer and perhaps a bad person in trusting that narrator. The narrator, after all, does immediately go to find Dane on learning his location, and they do immediately befoul Dane’s crops, surely proving they’re the unstable animal Dane has asserted they are. When I try to view this story through Dane’s eyes, I can easily understand his desire to protect himself against such preverbal aggression. I can defend every action Dane takes according to a narrative of enlightened queer behavior. So why do his actions still feel bad?

Manning is very, very good at telling stories that feel bad wrapped in stories that sound good, stories that seduce the reader just as they seduce the self who’s tired of feeling guilty all the time, thanks. In “Professor M,” a butch professor systematically preys on their students while presenting as a valuable role model: “I feel it is important to demonstrate to my students other modes of possibility and living. My young queer students always fall in love with me.” Professor M, like Stacy, wants to believe that what happened is better than it was, that a story can exonerate them.

“I consider fiction dangerous,” Manning says in a piece for Autostraddle about writing these stories. “Not readily because it is raw and pushes boundaries, but because it so often doesn’t. It is, more often than not, an opportunity to lie about what isn’t there or to manipulate the reader into thinking the world is more hopeful than it is.” Manning goes on to talk about their insistence to an early editor that the encounter with Jill in the title story is sexy and liberated rather than abusive, as well as their slow realization that the queerness of that story in its original form masked the dynamics working beneath the surface. “I cannot put more stories out into the world that might confirm for someone that what is happening in their lives is better than it is,” Manning says. “I revised every story in the collection from this lens.”

The power of that approach becomes clearest in “Seeing in the Dark,” and “The Only Pain You Feel,” two stories in which Manning explicitly separates wave and undertow by working with narrators on opposite sides of something irrevocable. The narrator of “Seeing in the Dark” is a woman whose marriage ended when she came out as a lesbian; now alone, she resents her daughter for not calling when she’s supposed to. She spends her time in yoga, staring approvingly at a photo of her daughter and her new girlfriend on Facebook: “If she could see how I love her, even though she speaks to me like this,” she frets. Then, in “The Only Pain You Feel,” the daughter becomes narrator: we see her mother aggressively question her about her sexuality; we see her mother silently start to massage the narrator’s breast while the two watch TV, then lie about it when confronted. Later, during her first sexual encounter with a woman, the daughter experiences an intrusive thought about her mother and feels ashamed; her relationship begins to sour. “I keep up with my spiritual practices,” says her mother, “because they help me when I wake up at night and I’m staring into the long tunnel of the dark, afraid that the way I see myself is not how the world will ever see me.”

This approach—starting with joy and mechanically deconstructing it to find, beneath it, destruction—wouldn’t work without Manning’s skill at evoking that real, felt joy above the waterline. Lovers dress themselves in leopard-print bustiers, sequin masks, and Chewbacca costumes; they imagine themselves raising children or accepting their existing ones; they swim to one another through oceans; they care for one another, grieve with one another, make one another warm and support one another with their bodies, which are “the appropriate weight.” That very felt revolutionary promise of queerness and queer lives exists as a melody even in a dark mode: “Maybe I could move into this room and quote poems and eat wasabi peas and do this with Jess under the eyes of the revolutionary and learn how not to be to blame.”

And the fact that the promise is real is what hurts so much, because revolutions don’t erase history: any revolution is built on the ruins of the society that preceded it. “The rules of heterosexuality draped over us like a shroud,” asserts a character in “Chewbacca and Clyde,” and then: “I wish we could fix this with a baby or something.” In “The Wallaby,” we reconnect with the narrator of the title story years later. Their sister Stacy has recently died, and they now live in a shipping container on the land Stacy left them in the Pacific Northwest, which the siblings had planned to turn into “a camp for queer and trans youth.” “After she died,” the narrator says, “I took what I inherited from her life insurance, left my job, headed west, like European invaders do, and started building where a house had once stood and then burned down, which was why I could so easily plug in most of the modern conveniences.” In the course of “The Wallaby”—which does include a wallaby, because Manning is a writer who keeps their promises—the narrator seduces a much younger farmhand. When the two have sex, the narrator thinks about Jill, wonders whether what they’re having with the farmhand is sex, wishes the farmhand, like Stacy, had the power to “see what Jill had done.” And when the farmhand suggests new dreams—suppose they both work together to bring more shipping containers full of queers to live on this land?—the narrator dumps her, but first insists on walking her home. “If she were older, she might have told me to fuck off,” they say. “I don’t know what we can ever have control over when the wiring is already there and my sister is not.”

Despair is also a comforting story that exonerates us; Manning resists this comfort too. The mother in “Seeing in the Dark” says: “Late at night, I feel like there was some opportunity, some other way to be, and I missed it.” Her daughter says: “I just don’t ever want to be sad in the way that my dad is sad, and I don’t ever want to do things the way my mom did them.” This hurts so much because both these women are expressing the same desire. Yet Manning also leads us to ask: well, what prevents them from building the world they want? And just what are we doing to build it?

We made an assumption, before, that in any story in which a character establishes a rule, that rule is quickly broken. Why? This is what We Had No Rules asks us, again and again, in ways that are funny and warm even as they are intense, clear-eyed, and above all, urgent. “Let it make you angry,” Stacy tells the narrator. “All these systems are waiting right underneath you, and if you aren’t paying attention, you become complicit.” And yet Stacy also tells the narrator this: “I’m gonna take care of you…you won’t go through what I went through. Okay?” That’s a beautiful promise, one Stacy doesn’t keep. We should do the uncomfortable work of keeping it. Manning’s fiction is a real contribution to that work.

Jeanne Thornton is the author of The Dream of Doctor Bantam and The Black Emerald, as well as the coeditor of We're Still Here: An All-Trans Comics Anthology, all three finalists for the Lambda Literary Award. She is the recipient of the Judith A. Markowitz Emerging Writers Award, and her work has appeared in n+1, Wired, Evergreen Review, WSQ, and other places. She is the copublisher of Instar Books, and her next novel, Summer Fun, is forthcoming from Soho Press in 2021. More information is available through her website at http://fictioncircus.com/Jeanne.