In Hello, Cruel World: 101 Alternatives to Suicide for Teens, Freaks & Other Outlaws, Kate Bornstein offers a radically tender lifeline to anyone whose identity, desires, or existence falls outside the tight grip of societal norms. With her signature wit, theatrical flair, and fierce compassion, Bornstein builds not just a survival guide, but a testament to deviance as vitality, a handbook for the weird, the outcast, the gender anarchists, and the queers who’ve been pushed to the brink. At its core, the book makes a quiet, powerful promise: you can stay alive without pretending to be someone you’re not.
Published in 2006 and still heartbreakingly relevant, Hello, Cruel World is not your average self-help manual. Instead of a sanitized, clinical approach to suicide prevention, Bornstein takes a messy, raw, and deeply personal route. She doesn’t ask for conformity. She doesn’t ask you to "get better" by becoming palatable to the mainstream. What she offers instead is permission, to explore, to disobey, to dance on the edges, and above all, to stay alive. She compiles 101 alternatives to suicide that span the spectrum from whimsical ("moisturize!") to politically incendiary ("shatter some family values"), from sensual to spiritual to simply strange. It's not about curing your pain, it's about buying yourself time, one harmless act of rebellion at a time. And if all else fails, Bornstein’s advice is clear: "Don’t be mean."
Bornstein’s own life story pulses beneath the surface of every word. A non-binary trans icon and gender outlaw who once served as a high-ranking officer in the Church of Scientology before defecting and being disowned by her daughter, Bornstein knows firsthand the price of choosing authenticity over acceptance. Her transition in 1986 was not the end of a journey, but the start of an even more complex one, into queerness, performance, radical politics, and eventually illness and recovery.
As she explained in her two-part interview for The Heroines blog, she wrote Hello, Cruel World in part because she was tired of losing friends and fans, young trans, queer, or just different folks, to suicide. She knew what it meant to teeter on the edge. "I couldn’t promise anyone that things were going to get better," she admitted, "so I just gave them reasons to stick around until they could find one for themselves."
That honesty, brutal, loving, never patronizing, is what sets Hello, Cruel World apart. Bornstein doesn’t shy away from admitting her own past struggles with mental illness, including anorexia, PTSD, and borderline personality disorder. She doesn’t claim to be cured. But she has built a kind of gentle punk resilience, what she calls “harmless deviance.” For Bornstein, being weird, kinky, flamboyant, fat, gender-nonconforming, spiritual, nerdy, slutty, or even just different are not things to be fixed or hidden. They are survival strategies. They are lifeboats.
Bornstein is not just a writer, she’s a performer, a provocateur, a storyteller. Her theater work, including Hidden: A Gender, and her iconic performance in Straight White Men on Broadway in 2018, have always blurred boundaries between genre, identity, and self. Even in her darkest moments, like her battle with lung cancer or the pain of being cut off from her daughter, Bornstein has refused to be silenced or simplified. She lives with her partner, the sex educator Barbara Carrellas, and their small menagerie of animals, in New York City. In recent years, she’s spoken about aging and the shifting contours of gender, cheekily reflecting on sagging boobs and the shedding of once-urgent beauty standards. “This is where you really need to be letting go of shit,” she said in a 2021 interview. And she has.
What makes Hello, Cruel World endure is that it doesn’t promise a solution, it offers a conversation. A hug. A dare. A joke. A moment of honesty. For many young queer people, it has become a rite of passage, an invitation to life, weird and unruly and half-lit, but life nonetheless. Bornstein doesn’t try to be a saint. She’s a “radical role model,” as some have called her, only because she doesn’t mind getting her hands dirty in the mess of real life.
In the end, Hello, Cruel World is a love letter to every misfit who has ever felt like giving up. Kate Bornstein is there on the page, grinning, defiant, offering you a hundred and one better ideas.
Available via Amazon
Photo via Heroines of My Life
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