Rae Elle Riley - Just Nod If You Can Hear Me

2025, English, Rae Elle Riley,

Full title: "Just Nod If You Can Hear Me: A Memoir" by Rae Elle Riley.

There are memoirs that explain. There are memoirs that reflect. And then, once in a very long while, there’s a memoir that doesn’t ask for permission, doesn’t wait for understanding, and certainly doesn’t smooth over the jagged parts. Instead, it grabs you by the collar, shoves you into its world, and demands that you feel every splinter of bone-deep truth embedded in its prose.

 

Rae Elle Riley’s Just Nod If You Can Hear Me is that memoir. From the very first page, we meet Chuck Keiran, a steamfitter, a brawler, a man etched from grit and gasoline, your classic blue-collar antihero clinging to life in a rust-soaked world of factories, unions, and dive bars. But Chuck is not who he seems. Beneath the hard exterior and years of camouflage lives Rae, a trans woman buried under the wreckage of a life built to survive everyone else’s expectations. Rae doesn’t step out of the shadows gently. She explodes into them, armed with nothing but her truth, her pain, and her art. Just Nod If You Can Hear Me doesn’t offer a redemptive arc in the traditional sense. There are no clean breaks, no sudden epiphanies, no “and then everything was fine” ribbon to tie it all up. Instead, Riley offers readers a series of emotional detonations, each chapter a blowtorch to shame, silence, and societal erasure. 

 

This is the story of a woman who lived through the kind of inner war that few can imagine: to live authentically meant dismantling the only identity the world had ever accepted from her, and risking everything, family, work, safety, dignity, just to speak her name out loud. Riley’s memoir hums with a furious musicality, a language all its own. It shifts from locker-room jabs to lyrical soliloquies without warning. One moment, she’s detailing the punishing monotony of life on the job site, pipes hissing and welders flaring; the next, she’s plunging into existential philosophy, spinning sentences so delicate and strange they seem to hang suspended in midair. It’s a blend of Denis Johnson’s brutalism, Patti Smith’s poetic rawness, and the gritty surrealism of early Charles Bukowski, but make it trans, make it working-class, and make it now. Rarely do we get trans narratives rooted in the trades. Even more rarely do we get stories like this, where the roughneck culture of a union job site collides violently with the revelation that its most loyal soldier has always been a woman.

 

Riley does not flinch from describing the fear and fallout that followed her coming out. Former friends turned into threats. Colleagues muttered slurs in break rooms. She wasn’t just rejected, she was erased. And yet, she endures. Not just as an act of defiance, but as an act of artistry. The author’s background as a twelve-year union steamfitter informs every line of the book. She doesn’t just describe industrial spaces, she conjures them: the sting of acetylene, the hiss of welding rods, the sweat that soaks through coveralls after ten hours under steel beams. These are not metaphors. This is lived experience, rendered with brutal honesty and furious beauty. It would be a mistake to frame Just Nod If You Can Hear Me solely as a memoir of transition. Yes, gender identity is central to the narrative, but it’s only one piece of a much bigger, messier, more profound journey. This is a story about addiction and recovery. About masculinity and its discontents. About the industrial American dream and the spiritual wasteland it sometimes leaves behind. About how art can be both refuge and weapon. Most importantly, it’s about refusing to disappear. Even when it’s easier. Even when it’s safer. Even when it would spare you the humiliation, the stares, the threats.

 

Rae Elle Riley writes with the urgency of someone who knows what’s at stake: that silence is a slow death, and speaking is the first form of resurrection. What sets Riley apart as a writer isn’t just her story. It’s the way she tells it. Her prose ranges from punchy and clipped, full of job-site jabs and gallows humor, to long, spiraling riffs that read like prayers scrawled in rust. She’s not afraid to experiment. Sometimes she burns the grammar down. Sometimes she lets a sentence run so long it becomes a poem, a scream, a song. There’s something almost musical about the way she builds her chapters, starting with discord, swelling into something symphonic, and then ending on a single, tremulous note. In her own words, her writing is “a blended vernacular of blue-collar slang banter and prosaic singsong,” and that’s exactly right. There’s no pretension here. Just raw craft, forged in lived reality.

 

Now living in Swarthmore, Pennsylvania, with her wife Michelle and their two children, Rae Elle Riley is, in many ways, writing the sequel with her life. After years of hiding behind Chuck Keiran’s name and body, she’s stepped into the world as herself, and she’s not done talking. When not writing, she creates metal art, plays guitar, and continues living in the rich tension between beauty and brutality that defines both her life and her book. And yes, a follow-up is in the works. She promises it will be “as equally soaked in lifeblood as the first.” For readers looking for a polished narrative about overcoming, this book may feel like too much. It’s not sanitized. It doesn’t pander. But for those who want to understand what it really means to claw your way out of a life that was never yours, and to do so with wit, wisdom, and an unrelenting sense of style, Just Nod 

 

If You Can Hear Me is not just a book. It’s a revelation. This isn’t a memoir you read with distance. You live it. You sweat through it. You breathe in the smoke and drink the last dregs of the bottom-shelf whiskey and feel your own ribcage shift as the truth inside tries to push its way out. Rae Elle Riley doesn’t write like someone hoping for literary approval. She writes like someone trying to stay alive. And in doing so, she might just help someone else do the same. Just Nod If You Can Hear Me doesn’t ask you to understand Rae Elle Riley’s journey. It asks if you can hear her. And once you do, you won’t forget it.

Available via Amazon

Photo via Instagram