Nicole Maines on Her New Memoir and the Trouble With Social Media: “It Sucks That We Can’t Have Nuanced Conversations”
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Yellowjackets actress Nicole Maines has released a new memoir, It Gets Better…Except When It Gets Worse: And Other Unsolicited Truths I Wish Someone Had Told Me.
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Maines, of course, has been written about before. She and her family were the subject of Amy Ellis Nutt’s 2015 book Becoming Nicole: The Transformation of an American Family, which chronicled their journey following Maines coming out as transgender as a child.
But now, Maines, 27, is getting to tell her story in her own words. “This book is the chance for me to sort of tell my side of the story,” Maines says. “It quickly, for me, became like ‘This is going to be the space where I get to air my grievances, and I don’t have to listen to a troll.'”
“The most fun for me was finding opportunities to kind of get up on a soapbox,” Maines says, explaining why she wrote the book and what she was feeling when she did.
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“I love a soapbox opportunity because I think I’ve always been trying to find how I wanted to use voice and find the proper places to use my voice, and I still struggle with that,” she says.
The actress says that social media is just not the place for her to use her voice, despite her wanting it to be. “There’s so much just backlash, and then as we see, retaliation from industry professionals, if you say something that isn’t liked, or hating and the trolls,” she says.
“Twitter, as a platform, has just become a hotbed for racism and misinformation,” the Maine native says, noting it’s become difficult to have an “actual honest conversation” on the platform “because everyone is operating on these different understandings of what the truth is and what a fact is.” She adds: “It’s not a productive space for conversation or education.”
The idea that Becoming Nicole was the “happily ever after” seemingly compelled Maines to tell her story after the book’s conclusion. “It felt like Becoming Nicole ended on such a happily ever after note where, ‘Oh, she got a boyfriend.’ ‘She went to college.’ ‘She got surgery,'” she explains. “It so tremendously went to shit right after that.”
“It just felt, for me, like this was something that I, myself, had built up into my happy ending. And everything is going to be sunshine and rainbows after this, and everything’s going to be perfect, and this is going to solve all my problems, which is an impossible expectation for any procedure [or] surgery anyway,” she says.
The actress adds that she felt like it was her fault and she feared that saying anything would “add fuel to the fire” for naysayers. “It just felt like, yeah, this was not the happy ending that I wanted, and then it got better after that Supergirl happened, and all this amazing stuff happened,” Maines says, explaining she felt there was more to her story to be told after Becoming Nicole. In Supergirl, Maines became TV’s first transgender superhero.
Maines has plenty of hopes for her new book. “This isn’t Trans 101. This is, I think, a really great book for anybody who wants to hopefully laugh, learn a couple of things, but I think specifically for queer people, I really want this to be something that makes them feel seen,” she explains, saying she believes the community tends to “suffer in silence.”
“I don’t know if I have any kernels of wisdom that are going to shake the foundations of your reality, but I hope that queer people, and especially trans people, reading this book, feel seen in our experiences, in our suffering, in our joy, in our anger,” Maines says. “Shit’s hard right now. Shit’s scary. And it feels like so much of the time, we’re screaming into a void and begging people to witness us, hear our stories, see us as human, and I hope that’s what this book does. Because that’s all it is. It’s just my story.”
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