Juliet Jacques: My name is Juliet Jacques.
You're looking at Claude Cahun's book Aveux non Avenus, which has been translated variously as "denials" or "disavowals" or "canceled confessions."
It's an autobiographical text that doesn't just refuse the conventions of memoir, it also really refuses to open up to the reader in a clearly understandable way. It's this mixture of photography and aphorisms and longer prose-poetic passages. It doesn't have a formalized narrative. It's rather just exploring the fragmented and somewhat chaotic nature of their own consciousness and what they are able to access.
I've just flipped to page 91. Cahun writes:
Consciousness. The carver. My enthusiasms, my impulses, my little passions were irksome. . . . Come on, then. . . . By a process of elimination, what is necessary about me? . . . The material is badly cut. I want it to be straightened up. A clumsy snip with the scissors. Bach! Let's even it up on the other side. . . . A stain? We'll cover it up. Let's trim it again. I no longer exist. Perfect. Now nothing can come between us.
The affinity I felt with Cahun is because I ended up doing a lot of writing that got bracketed as confessional or sort of first-person autobiographical writing. You can get yourself into a situation where you're constantly expected to give away details about your personal life. And what I have always found really interesting about Cahun is the refusal of that trap, even in the project of putting oneself on the page.
I was always looking for queer and trans writers, and Cahun's work gave me this gender non-conforming take on art that I thought always should have been there.