The Best Queer Nonfiction Since 2000, According to Kirkus

After seeing a number from the musical Fun Home on the Tony Awards, I decided I needed to read this book, and it did not disappoint. Bechdel was in college when she came out as lesbian, and soon after discovered that her father was gay as well. A few weeks later, he was dead. She tells of her childhood, her relationship with her father, and her experience of coming out and falling in love. Bechdel’s literary prose and insightful illustrations make this an affecting journey. —Heather Bottoms

It’s hard for me to put my finger on the thing that elevates an essay collection from a handful of individual pieces to a cohesive book. But Chee obviously knows what that thing is, because this book builds on itself. He writes about growing roses and working odd jobs and AIDS activism and drag and writing a novel, and each of these essays is singularly moving. But as a whole they paint a complex portrait of a slice of the writer’s life. They inform and converse with each other, and the result is a book you can revisit again and again, always finding something new. —Laura Sackton

Being Black in the South is difficult. So is being queer in the South. Being Black and queer? Far, far more difficult than it should be. Saeed Jones knows and tells us about it in vignettes about trying to find a place to belong, his difficult relationship with his family, and each fleeting relationship that came and left his life. Transitioning between prose and poetry and full of the biting humor he’s known for on Twitter, he tells the story of how he turned himself into a weapon growing up in the South in the ’90s and 2000s. —Caitlin Hobbs

The Argnonauts is a memoir focused on love, sex, pregnancy, and parenthood. Using philosophy and theory to guide her thinking, Nelson contemplates her experiences of falling in love with the genderfluid artist Harry Dodge, getting married, giving birth, and living through the early days of motherhood. Nelson’s deep engagement with ideas to understand her experience of the world makes this heady, ground-breaking memoir unforgettable. —Rebecca Hussey