She said that the "sort of real-life hero's journey" involved in transitioning suited "heightened narratives". Some of the plot and most of the characters are based on Thom's life, but "heightened, surrealized and embroidered upon". Thom stated that the "emotions and sensations" of the book "are all true", though the writing is surrealist.
The author was inspired by Audre Lorde's biomythographies-books which mythologise the author's life. After her publisher Metonymy Press asked if she was working on anything, Thom finished the book by writing late at night. Thom began the novel shortly after a New York publisher rejected a book of her poetry, and wrote a chapter per day for ten days. Fierce Femmes was her first published book and first long-form piece of fiction she did not initially intend for it to be read by others, and aimed to write the book she would have most appreciated reading as a teenager. She came out as a transgender woman as a teenager. It experienced a resurgence of attention when Emma Watson chose it for her feminist book club, Our Shared Shelf, in 2019. The novel garnered critical praise and was a finalist for Transgender Fiction at the 29th Lambda Literary Awards. Two metaphors, those of killer bees living inside her and a Ghost Friend which can make her orgasm, represent after-effects of traumatic abuse. Characters are based on people from her life, as are plot points, but they are exaggerated and made surrealist. Thom aimed not to write a traditional transgender memoir targeted at explaining transgender issues to cisgender people, but to write the book that would have helped her as a transgender teenager. After one of them is killed, others form a gang and begin to attack men on the street. A surrealist novel, it follows an unnamed transgender woman protagonist who leaves home at a young age to live on the Street of Miracles-where various sex work takes place-with other " femmes" (trans women).
Fierce Femmes and Notorious Liars: A Dangerous Trans Girl's Confabulous Memoir is a 2016 Canadian book by Kai Cheng Thom.
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