“Mom, what’s a fag?” asks a five-year-old Rae. The answer from their evangelical Christian mother involves, expectedly, images of sin and hell and then the clincher—“and God made AIDS to punish gay people.” First Spring Grass Fire, Rae Spoon’s debut work of fiction, depicts many such instances of a child’s pain and confusion while growing up queer in a conservative Pentecostal family in Alberta. There is violence, a broken marriage, a schizophrenic father and a healthy dose of angst. Comprised of a series of very short vignettes, the book is anchored by Spoon’s charming narrator, a surrogate for the author, whose voice fluctuates effortlessly from sardonic to lyrical. Rae clashes with their family, moves out—“The next week I told my mother that if she didn’t help me move out, I would jump off the overpass by our house. So she did.”—then falls in love. Scattered throughout are gorgeously pithy moments of tenderness and wisdom.
This article appears in Aug 15-21, 2013.