I am a huge fan of Andrew Joseph White's books, and this one was no exception. This is the fifth of his works that I've read and he continues to excel at writing autistic + trans guys dealing with unimaginable horrors through scrappy, messy violence.
You're No Better is also the first of his books to have exactly zero speculative elements. No fleshy zombies, no ghosts, no worm hiveminds; this time, the horror is family, society, near-unimaginable violence, and the persistence of being watched.
Like a lot of trans guys, I think a lot about being observed. Ever-present in the discourse of our lives is the idea of invisibility, an assumption that no one sees us for who we are. Like a lot of people generally, I think a lot about how much of myself is seen as a result of social media. At its core, You're No Better is about the sheer, unending horror of people seeing an idea of Morgan that never comes close to who he is. He obsessively catalogues each misrepresentation of himself, infinitely looping a traumatic event not how he experienced it but as Daddy's girl.mov. The moments in the narrative where he's most persistently misgendered, the moments when he has to misgender himself, are rendered not as his personal narration but through transcripts and threads.
I spent my teenage years closeted for fear of losing access to financial support. It's this horrible, corrosive thing: no one is allowed to see you, because everyone who does is a risk. People caring enough to get it right is terrifying where it should be invigorating. People caring so little that they persist in getting it wrong is draining.
It's easy for Morgan to hate his father; it's a done thing, sealed in stone years before the book begins. What he wrestles with, struggles with endlessly, is how easily he hates his mother.
To Morgan, hatred of women looks like one thing in particular: violence. If his mother was anyone else at all, perhaps there wouldn't be too much of an issue, but there's a sense throughout the novel that Morgan's violence - part imagined, part real - is something she's persistently characterised as a cross she has to bear rather than a symptom of his struggles. His childhood meltdowns have become evidence of his violence towards her. Autism, too, was a violent affliction upon her life. His transness? More violence, aimed at her finances. She's tied Morgan so thoroughly up in her own self-image that everything he does is an attack on her own sense of self. She's awful, but he feels terrible about having any feelings about it.
(I think, perhaps, she is slightly too evil-abusive-losing-her-mind for my tastes in fiction. When she dresses as Morgan and stalks around a hospital at the end of the book, it felt near to a caricature. But maybe that's the point; maybe she's spent so long making herself into a picture on someone else's screen that she's lost touch. Andrew Joseph White has rarely touched on the topic of AI in his contemporary work, but the concepts of AI hallucination and social media/impersonal digital interaction cutting people off from their sense of reality feel rather apt here.)
Something I've always really valued about White's work is on full display in this book: the way that misogyny is also a form of violence enacted on trans men. Hell Followed With Us is partially about religious misogyny, The Spirit Bares Its Teeth is heavy on medical misogyny, Compound Fracture plays off inter-relationship misogyny, You Weren't Meant to be Human is about reproductive rights, and You're No Better is about the expectations placed upon girls and the ways society fails them.
No one ever says it, not exactly, but you can count it backwards; Slaughter's final victim was probably nineteen when she died, very close in age to Morgan, Felicity, and Alyssa. All three of them spend portions of the novel in varying levels of danger from the same monster that killed her: a society that views them as young and desirable, full of a sexual-social potential that leads to their being objectified. For all three of them, this is associated very specifically with their relation to womanhood: Morgan as a closeted trans boy creeped on and raped by an adult man, Felicity as a nonbinary person punished by their adoptive parents into greater conformity with idealised Christian womanhood, and Alyssa as a trans girl targeted by a chaser. And again, no one ever says it in full, but the reason Cornelia died isn't because of Morgan. It's because she was targeted by a man with all the societal power in the world, and she had none; she was looking for a job and she walked into sketchy circumstances because there was no real protection available to her and her sibling from her abusive parents.
(A little tangent, here, but I was convinced partway through the novel that the Keatings' biological child, who's mentioned as a man in a photo and nowhere else, was actually the final victim. Until the moment Morgan figures it out, I really thought that the reason the final victim went unidentified was that she was a trans woman whose parents refused to claim her. I kinda like my version better for the themes I was stewing on at the time but the version with Cornelia makes more sense for what Felicity has going on.)
Thinking more on violence, I appreciate the way this book refuses to categorise most of its characters as uncomplicatedly victims or perpetrators. Morgan performed acts of violence and continues to fight people, hurt people, and want to hurt people (or think he wants to hurt people). Much of his violence is performed in self-defence, some is not, and I really valued that he wasn't a victim who happens to snap one time. (That said, I do like it when White's characters are victims who snap one time. It just didn't work as well for this particular set of characters.) It really stuck with me that while Morgan frequently thinks about how he hurt Alyssa, when Alyssa talks about that moment, she doesn't say "I should have cut you off when you tried to choke me;" she says that she should have cut him off when he said he wanted to. I left the novel with more doubt about whether Morgan actually hurt her than I did when it was first mentioned.
Alyssa generally is fantastic. I flip-flopped around on how I felt about her portion of Morgan's arc over the course of the book - there was a section where I felt a little bit like White was trying to communicate that Morgan needed to be punished for being a bad friend. By the end, I'd come to the conclusion that I have to trust an author who's written some of my favourite books, and I think I've settled on the idea that Morgan thought he was being punished unfairly for being a bad friend. She's trying and she cares and she's pretty damn clear that she's getting sick of his shit; she's turning eighteen and looking for a fresh start somewhere new where she's not looking out for someone who's learned somewhere along the line that he doesn't have to look out for her. I really, really like that the narrative respects that she's ended her friendship with Morgan.
The thing I like most about what Alyssa does in this book, though, are the handful of little moments at the end which set everything on fire.
Alyssa correctly genders Morgan in front of his mother. She doesn't know that Morgan can hear, but it's important to her that she does this. Completely accidentally, she sets Morgan off in a way that results in the violence at the end of the novel, and then she doesn't back down: she insists on gendering Morgan correctly in the police interview. Morgan is unable to speak for himself in those moments. From everything else we see him do in the book, however, he probably wouldn't have told anyone he was a man while his life was blowing up. Standard discourse on this kind of action, I think, would condemn Alyssa here: she's outed Morgan against his consent. I really, really love that this is what was written here.
Morgan spends the whole book swallowing everything down for the sake of something else. He destroys everything he has, including any fragments of his mental health and friendships, for the chance at some kind of atonement; and then he gives that up too. Alyssa knows, I think, that Morgan will never stop hurting himself. He will never give himself permission to be seen as a man; he's waiting for the perfect circumstances, but while he's waited, he's torn apart everything that could help him get there. She looks at the boy she no longer wants to be close with, the boy she's watched struggle with violence and people's observations and his gender, and says no. No more of that. This is Morgan, he's a boy, and he wouldn't have wanted to kill his mother. She does something that would commonly be seen as an act of violence to prevent Morgan from doing further violence to himself. In a book that's all about what kinds of violence go unchecked, it's a profoundly affecting way to close the novel out.
White's work continues to speak to me on a level that a lot of work written with a neurotypical audience in mind does not. I'll admit that there were times in this book where it felt like the magic was wearing off; I'm nearly a decade removed from the age White's protagonists tend to sit, and some beats hit like a moral lesson I learned five years ago. It doesn't lessen the book in any way - I am not the target audience - but it softened the experience for me. And then, in true Andrew Joseph White fashion, something goes horribly wrong and a trans boy snaps and I'm riveted once again. He got me good.
From my experience of reading this book, I suspect that I'm coming to the end of the time that his YA books will really capture me in the way they used to. Teenage logic like Morgan and Felicity's begins to elude me, for example; I occasionally had to reread a page or two to understand which assumptions they'd leapt to that made the plot necessary. Again, this isn't a flaw, and the books continue to be excellent and I'm always endlessly happy to know he has something else on the horizon.
There's enough going on in this book that even though I'm at the end of the thoughts I want to touch on, there are some other highlights I want to pick out: Alyssa's family being interesting background characters, adults who were genuinely trying their best, a strong sense of setting only elevated by Morgan having trains autism, and every moment White decided not to gloss over the ways sexual assault and speculation over sexual assault fucked Morgan up.
White doesn't have a book coming out next year, it seems, but I'm eyeing up The Kids Came Back Wrong, where he has a short story. Whenever I pick up one of his works again, I'm sure it'll be fantastic.