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When the award-winning journalist Meredith Talusan published her memoir, Fairest, in 2020, it was widely praised for the unflinching honesty with which Talusan told a complex story of gender and identity in her own terms. It’s no surprise, then, to find a similar animating spirit -- at once vulnerable and forthright -- at the heart  of the two novels Talusan has picked as favorites for Shelf Life: Jamaica Kincaid’s modern classic, Lucy, published in 1990, and Susan Choi’s My Education, published in 2013. In both stories the reader is presented with assertive protagonists, alive to their passions and desires, people for whom identity is sometimes messy, often urgent, and always singular.  For Talusan, who made her name as a journalist exploring transgender identity, the personal and the political are never far apart.  “So many of us have to be Swiss Army knives,” she has said. “I can't just be an author. Trans people can't just be models or actors or doctors. We also have to perform the political and emotional labor of being activists.”