Ponyboy / Eliot

Ponyboy is the main character of the novel. The entire story is written from his first-person perspective as he hops from place to place and struggles with questions of identity and his addiction to various substances. He is a twenty-something trans man who begins the novel living in Paris after having grown up in Iowa. Flashbacks fill in details of his adolescence there, where he grew up as a girl, encountering all of the awful things that society pushes upon young girls from the very beginning of their lives. A foundational moment in his life comes when he is raped by a man at a party at the age of fourteen or fifteen.

In Paris, he finds himself embroiled in a somewhat tumultuous relationship with Baby, a woman that he bonds with over drugs. She sees herself as a lesbian, which hurts Ponyboy. As a result of...