A Real Piece of Work by Erin Riley
A Real Piece of Work (2023) is a memoir in essays by social worker turned writer Erin Riley that asks how we create our identities and how we can transcend them. Riley seeks to deconstruct and examine the way they identify in a heteronormative society through their purpose as a social worker, their relationship with their partner, friends and family, and their slow but joyful transition towards a truer, freer queer self.
A Real Piece of Work is comprised of twenty thought-provoking, powerful essays that are full of heart and probing intelligence. In them, Riley takes the reader both on a deeply personal, vulnerable journey that winds itself around the joys and sorrows of a queer life, as well as a wider look at the modern world’s pains and complexities at the intersection of culture, gender, class and race.
The essays are structured around Riley’s own experiences both within a family hierarchy and as part of wider society, and cover such diverse ground as Riley’s enduring love of the world of wrestling, their slow and cautious submersion (both figuratively and literally) into ocean swimming, struggles with standing up for themselves at work, examples from their history as a social worker supporting those on the fringes of society and, most importantly, their precarious, ever-evolving relationship with family.
In some of the essays, Riley struggles to consciously fight against the safe cover of the image of a non-confrontational, quiet if queer “daughter”. They find themselves – especially in their memories – trying to appear smaller, less than what they feel like they deserve in an attempt to earn their parents’ love and respect.
“For years, I'd been trying to be a better daughter and saw my adulthood as an opportunity to make up for all the ways I believed I'd failed as a child. As if in winning them over, the judgements might be dampened – caught in the back of the throat, swallowed and digested, never to be uttered again.”
By their own admission, Riley seeks to eliminate the patterns of the past by nourishing and making space for their own inner life: “patterns of being good, saying yes, people-pleasing in return for the love of my parents, later the love of others; staying small to stay emotionally safe.”
This theme emerges later down the line too, once it comes time for Riley to consider the effects of taking hormones and a possible transition. Like in childhood, they subconsciously put their own needs aside in favour of their family’s comforts.
“I told myself that focusing on the individual who was already privileged enough was unimportant – there were greater injustices that needed my attention. Transition, pronouns, making space for new, re-fashioned and (re) affirming versions of oneself was always something for other people – but never something for me.”
Riley’s writing is strongest in the pieces where they manage to fuse the personal with the collective, honing in on a strong underlying message that is delivered with nuance and subtlety through their experience and their sharp eye for societal details.
In the last essay, ‘The Wedding’, they do this brilliantly, though somewhat heartbreakingly. Recounting their parents’ behaviour on and after their wedding day with candour, Riley digs deep into their family’s complex relationships, as well as the psychosocial reasons both behind their own familial barriers, and in broader terms the challenges faced by queer people everywhere.
When talking about their father’s apparent distaste in regards to their wedding, they posit:
“I was making room for myself, in language and in space. A small word shift that, while not quite right, was all I had to be closer-to. Asking this was as if I was asking for the world. I chose to make an entire day all about me and my partner. A day to be as authentic and as strange as we wished. Maybe for Dad, this was too much.”
Riley reflects on their own experiences of a parent’s conditional love of a queer child – the way their acceptance is limited, often surface-level, to what feels comfortable enough from a heteronormative baseline – all the while digging into the wider implications of these refusals of complete acceptance.
“Dad seemed contemptuous of my pain, as if giving something to queer people was taking something from him, that he was somehow disenfranchised if I took up more room.”
In this essay, Riley’s penchant for connecting their own experiences to unified queer challenges brings the piece to a beautiful if sobering conclusion:
“I thought about how queers ask for so little – a sliver of space, a small linguistic gesture, a few laws to protect us from hate crimes, a bathroom to take a shit in peace – somehow it is too much: it takes something away from those who have everything they need, it's a threat to their power or touches on a vulnerability.”
In an effort to move towards a reparative approach to gender, “one that challenges the crippling and oppressive edges of words and makes space for them to be refashioned anew”, Riley works on reclaiming their identity both through language and by allowing themselves the space to be as complex and authentically themselves as they’ve always wanted to be. In their writing, they do not shy away from the truth of how many years of therapy, reading, and self-work is needed to get to this point – but this makes their memoir all the more empowering.
While for years they had held tight onto the idea that interactions with other people were a way to gauge their own gender expression, in A Real Piece of Work Riley allows themselves the freedom to tell their own story, the way they see and experience it far from the gaze of others, so that language can speak unabashed queer truth into existence.
Fruzsina Gál is an aspiring writer and book reviewer from Hungary, currently residing in Naarm/Melbourne. She has been a reader all her life, and she finds unexplainable joy in forcing literary revelations into the hands of friends, family, and strangers. When she's not reading or writing, she likes to even out her nerdy side by doing martial arts or going for hikes. You can find her online at fruzsinagal.com.