Frankenstein

Here is the exact book with the exact cover which I most identified with in my childhood. I picked it out at the Stone Harbour Book Shop, in the beach town of Stone Harbor in New Jersey when my family was on vacation.

It's a re-written version of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein which I didn't realize had been so heavily edited until I read the original in high school. By then I was incredibly biased against Victor Frankenstein's cruel ambition, because what was wonderful about my childhood abridgment, was that the monster had his own opportunity to speak about his experiences of suffering and alienation, and I remember empathising with that to the point of tears. At such a young age I didn't have a clear explanation for why I felt so strongly, and although I was a very solitary child, the connection between queerness and monstrosity (esp in my childhood, love of those classic, black-and-white monster movies) has been something I've only been able to think about much more recently. 

I could say more but I think I'm saying too much! I didn't come to my queerness through expressly queer literature, more through experience and through a patchwork of literary figures I related to in my own way -- it was only in my early 20s that I started to seek out identifiable LGBT characters in books, and self-identified LGBT authors. 

Brooke Palmieri