Polina Zverev’s Transgender's Diary: Дневники Трансгендера is not so much a novel as it is an extended breath, tender, uncertain, lyrical, and raw. It floats somewhere between visual art and poetry, between confession and meditation. Part diary, part illustrated memoir, Zverev’s book is a striking contribution to transgender literature, and an unexpected lens into the emotional life of a Russian-born artist navigating gender, love, and identity in France.
Zverev, known for her evocative figurative and surrealist paintings, brings to her writing the same sense of abstraction and intimacy that defines her canvas. Her prose pulses with feeling. Transgender’s Diary is not about political slogans or rigid identity categories. It is a book about texture: the texture of skin in the wrong shape, the texture of language when it fails you, the texture of memory when it won’t let go.
Though France is often portrayed as a haven of tolerance compared to Zverev’s native Russia, the novel makes it clear that being transgender is never easy, no matter the postal code. Zverev's struggle with self-perception and internalized doubt echoes across her pages. Acceptance from others, she suggests, can feel meaningless if your own reflection continues to betray you. And yet, there is great love in this book: love for a partner, for art, for fleeting glances in the mirror that feel almost right.
The novel unfolds like a diary not bound by strict chronology. Some entries are fragments, unfinished thoughts, dreams, observations, and lingering doubts. Others are fully fleshed narratives: about a childhood in Russia where queerness was never named; about a move to France that promised freedom but delivered loneliness; about the quiet, complicated relationship with a lover who sees her more clearly than she sees herself. In the spaces between words, illustrations emerge, line drawings, surreal abstractions, and figural silhouettes, that don’t so much explain the text as deepen its emotional tone.
Zverev’s dual identity as a painter and a writer is palpable throughout the book. Each passage reads as if it were composed while holding a brush, not a pen. Her visual imagination shapes every sentence. She doesn’t write about being trans so much as draw what it feels like, with words and ink alike.
The result is something ethereal yet grounded, poetic yet painfully real.
There are no grand political declarations in Transgender’s Diary. What the reader finds instead are the soft, persistent tremors of personal truth. What happens when the body becomes a battlefield, and the only weapon you have is language? What does femininity mean when it’s filtered through exile, twice removed, from both country and gender? And how do you live a life not just defined by survival, but touched by beauty?
Zverev doesn't pretend to have the answers. What she offers instead is her own vulnerability, shared without apology. She writes about misgendering in everyday French bureaucracy, about moments of shame in dressing rooms, about fleeting euphoria when the world pauses and her inner and outer selves seem momentarily aligned. These pages are never loud, but they never flinch.
Readers who are familiar with Zverev’s painting will find this book a natural extension of her aesthetic. Her visual art often straddles realism and dream logic, showing bodies that stretch and dissolve, faces that blur, and colors that whisper. Her writing does the same. The diary form allows for intimate digressions, sudden emotional detours, and poetic reflections on time, place, and identity.
But perhaps the most striking feature of Transgender's Diary is its unguarded softness. In a world where trans people are often forced into the role of fighter or symbol, Zverev insists on vulnerability. She writes about longing and beauty, about confusion and stillness. She reminds us that a transgender life, like any other, is shaped not only by suffering, but also by art, romance, silence, and grace.
Ultimately, Transgender’s Diary is not a cry for recognition, nor a manifesto. It is something quieter and, in many ways, more powerful: a record of one woman’s interior world, illustrated from within. It is an offering, a private sketchbook made public, a portrait of transition in ink and light.
For anyone drawn to introspective writing, poetic prose, or the delicate intersection of gender and art, Polina Zverev’s Transgender's Diary is a work of rare beauty and emotional precision. It leaves the reader not with answers, but with the profound sense that something deeply human has been shared. And in that sharing, something is healed.
Available via barnesandnoble.com
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