Rejecting the suffering bildung often demanded of transgender writers, Ortberg’s narrative is anything but linear: It skips back in time to mythic Greece, traipses across the landscape of contemporary pop culture and, in one wonderfully fabulist entry that would make Carmen Maria Machado proud, slips outside of time altogether.

Daniel Mallory Ortberg’s Something That May Shock And Discredit You is three eloquent books in one: memoir, essay collection, and treasure trove of cultural analysis, all coming in under 250 pages. Ortberg is as nimble a storyteller as they come, so the shifts from painful personal revelations to pithy observations about Lord Byron turn on a dime while still mostly feeling part of the same whole.

A...kind of glee animates Ortberg’s writing, and it rushes all the way through this thoughtful, joyous book. Even when Something That May Shock and Discredit You delves into difficult material...Ortberg always writes with a sense of profound and honest delight: What luck, it’s another day where he gets to be a man. And reading, you can’t help but be delighted with him.

... a fusion of old and new Ortberg work. It’s a collection of chapters and fragments, pieces that refuse single identities.

The co-founder of The Toast and Slate advice columnist demonstrates his impressive range in this new collection.

Slate advice columnist Ortberg ...brings the full force of his wit and literary depth to this genre-bending essay collection. Describing it as 'memoir-adjacent,' Ortberg intersperses searingly honest passages about his journey as a transgender man with laugh-out-loud funny literary pastiche.