What I've Been Reading: A Working-Class Family Ages Badly
The first time I met Juno Roche was in a gleaming, state-of-the-art glass building, where I worked at the time.
I was familiar with Juno’s work already. Queer Sex is one of the few truly brilliant books available on the subject, and I’d fallen deep in love with their candid, no-holds-barred way of writing about sex, love, queerness and more. I learned more over the years, and we’ve bonded deeply over our working-class roots – a rarity in publishing, and within journalism more generally.
Meeting Juno in the flesh was every bit as brilliant as I’d hoped. Within a few minutes, we were cracking filthy jokes and laughing constantly as we filmed a short video dispelling mainstream myths about trans people. Since then, we’ve kept in touch and shared a handful of Zoom meetings, during which I usually sit in silence and absorb their wisdom, in awe at their deeply philosophical takes on the world.
When I was sent a copy of A Working-Class Family Ages Badly, Juno’s latest book, released by acclaimed publishing house Dialogue Books, I was nervous. Reading a friend’s work always feels deeply intimate, and a bit nerve-wracking.
What if it’s shit? Will I have to write a really euphemistic, watered-down review?
Luckily, these fears were unfounded. Juno’s at their best when they’re unfiltered, and this book is exactly that. The themes range from domestic violence and drug dependency to HIV stigma and sex work, but no sentence ever feels voyeuristic. It’s a book about difficult, sometimes abusive relationships, especially within our families. There’s a fuck-load of struggle in here, but there’s also an abundance of compassion. Primarily, I see it as a book about forgiveness.
Juno’s story is a wild ride. The book opens with an ancestry search, which sketches the contours of a family tree burdened by “hard work, addiction, violence and poverty.” “I grew up thinking it was normal for family members to beat the shit out of each other,” writes Juno – and it’s important to note that they wrote this book in a beautiful house, nestled away in the picturesque mountains of Andalusia. With distance, clarity and a need to make sense of their past, Juno pieces together a personal history whilst also acknowledging how class has impacted their experiences. When they write about parental fuck-ups, they do so whilst acknowledging the material hardships that led to them.
They don’t gloss over their own mistakes, either. In the past, I’ve read memoirs which are basically glorified press releases, but Juno pulls no punches when writing about their messiness. In a three-part belter of a chapter, they recall swindling drug dealers to pay for a first-class getaway to Egypt with their then-partner. With meticulous attention to detail, they recall chasing a dream of Liz Taylor in Cleopatra – and ending up instead as a sweaty, vomiting mess, withdrawing violently from the drugs they’d somehow managed to stuff up their arse and smuggle into the country.
In one chapter, crabs – yes, pubic lice – become a haunting yet bizarrely beautiful metaphor for the years pre-dating Juno’s HIV diagnosis. Despite being diagnosed with full-blown AIDS at one point – a definitive death sentence at that time – they survived, although the stigma made it almost impossible for them to access gender-affirming surgeries. “I have time,” they write, “which for a life condemned many years ago to die of AIDS, is an irony in of itself, that I am the one who ends up with time I can waste looking at flowers in my fifties.”
My favourite parts of this book are about Juno’s mother, portrayed as a complicated but deeply loving woman whose own traumas loom heavy. In March 2020, she flew to stay with Juno in the Spanish mountains and ended up stranded for months by a global pandemic. The ensuing months were difficult – “being trapped in the mountains with her spiky, complex, gender-everywhere child isn’t easy for her, although she’d never admit it” – but poignant.
In a moment which made me tear up, Juno sees their mum has fallen asleep in the afternoon sun. Despite the blazing heat, they fetch her a blanket and ruminate on the past with the kind of compassion we all deserve. Most of us can pinpoint a moment when we suddenly stopped seeing our parents just as parents, and started seeing them as people. It’s a shock; it jolts us out of our own heads, reminding us that those who raised us are fallible, too. “She may not have had the skills to parent brilliantly,” writes Juno of their mum, “but she’s always loved us like a lioness, a child-like lioness. Brimming with love and utterly protective.”
Class struggle and hardship bleed deep into this book, but they never erase the small moments of joy; if anything, they enhance them. By writing with brutal honesty – and by writing a book which doesn’t deal solely with trans identity, a luxury so rarely afforded to trans and non-binary writers – Juno has created something genuinely beautiful, a testament to the catharsis of writing and the power of forgiveness.