Yellow jackets Actress Nicole Maines has released a new memoir, It's better. . . Except When Things Get Worse: And Other Unsolicited Truths I Wish Someone Had Told Me.
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 familywhich chronicled their journey following Maines who came out as transgender as a child.
But now Maines, 27, can tell his story in his own words. “This book is an opportunity for me to tell my side of the story,” Maines says. “For me it quickly became like, 'This is going to be the space where I can air my complaints and not have to listen to a troll.'”
“The most fun thing for me was finding the opportunity to get up on a soapbox,” Maines says, explaining why she wrote the book and what she felt when she did so.
“I love the soapbox opportunity because I think I've always been trying to find how I wanted to use my voice and finding the right places to use my voice, and I still struggle with that,” she says.
The actress says social media is not the place to use her voice, even though she wants to. “There's so much backlash and then, as we see, retaliation from industry professionals if you say something they don't like, or hate and trolls,” he says.
“Twitter, as a platform, has just become a hotbed of racism and misinformation,” says the Maine native, noting that it has become difficult to have a “real, honest conversation” on the platform “because everyone is operating on these different interpretations of what the the truth is and what is a fact.” He adds: “It is not a productive space for conversation or education.”
The idea that Becoming Nicole it was the “happily ever after” that apparently forced Maines to tell his story after the book concluded. “It seemed Becoming Nicole it ended on such a happily ever after note where, 'Oh, she has a boyfriend.' “She went to college.” 'She had surgery,'” he explains. “It went to hell right after that.”
“It seemed to me that this was something that I myself had built into my happy ending. And everything will be rosy and rainbow after this, and everything will be perfect, and this will solve all my problems, which is an impossible expectation for any procedure [or] surgery anyway,” he says.
The actress adds that she felt it was her fault and feared that saying something would “add fuel to the fire” for naysayers. “I felt like, yeah, this wasn't the happy ending I wanted, and then things got better Supergirl happened, and all these incredible things happened,” Maines says, explaining that he felt there would be more to tell in his story after Becoming Nicole. In SupergirlMaines became TV's first transgender superhero.
Maines has high hopes for his new book. “This is not Trans 101. This is, I think, a really great book for anyone who wants to hopefully laugh, learn a thing or two, but I think specifically for queer people, I really want it to be something that makes them feel seen” , he explains, saying he believes the community tends to “suffer in silence.”
“I don't know if I have any kernel of wisdom that can 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 is hard right now. Shit is scary. And it seems like a lot of the time we're screaming into the void and begging for people to bear witness to us, to listen to our stories, to see us as human, and I hope that's what this book does. Because it's all here. It's just my story.”