How to Fuck Like a Girl is for everyone

“The truth is you’re a god, a miracle. People daydream of a big woman, a strong woman. They daydream of someone with a deep voice and a loud laugh,” writes Vera Blossom in “Remember You’re a God,” the opening piece of her debut book How to Fuck Like a Girl. 

How to Fuck Like a Girl by Vera Blossom
Dopamine, paperback, 168 pp., $17.95, mitpress.mit.edu/9781635902273/how-to-fuck-like-a-girl

Blossom’s writing about raunchy bathroom sex, Craigslist meetups, and yearning for more, more, more keeps you flipping the pages of the memoir-style book, out December 3 from Dopamine, a new Los Angeles press, in collaboration with Semiotext(e).

It’s unique for writing to make you gasp, tear up, and laugh all in one paragraph. But Blossom does just that. Throughout, Blossom, a trans femme Filipina, weaves in her connection to witchcraft, her thoughts on capitalism, and her desire to get slammed like in an episode of Bridgerton. 

The book is inspired by queer zine culture, displayed in a type of writing that is similar to stream of consciousness and includes experimental formatting (like examples of Craigslist ads). Named after her newsletter and blog, How to Fuck Like a Girl is all original writing but is inspired by her rambling style portrayed online. 

The introduction paints an image of a hulking, mystical anthem of strength—almost like a call to battle, an anthem for change. 

Blossom says the first piece was meant to act as an opening prayer “or a spell that cracks open the narrative on trans people and on girlhood.” She was tired of seeing solely palatable trans women in the media and wanted to invoke “the sort of radical, slightly scary, tone of a zine that I love.” She yearned for a book that said, “It’s not tragic to be transgender. It’s fucking great, it’s fucking sexy, and you’re a god in charge of your own destiny—even when it feels like you’re not.”

Blossom grew up in Las Vegas, among its glitz and glam, but she considers herself a small-town girl. She explains that transplants come and go in Vegas, leaving the streets of Sin City empty and dried up. “I had to leave Vegas before Vegas drained me of everything, and I disappeared like a mirage,” she says.

The writer landed in Chicago in 2022. “Chicago just seemed like this big, fun city with a long history, and I was drawn to that,” she says—though Vegas will always be a part of her. “It’s hard for me to disentangle my personality from Las Vegas.” In a place full of optimism, money, and sex, Blossom says it’s where your greatest delusions can actually come true. “I think almost everything about my personality was forged in a place like that.”

In her book, her ferocious desire to live fast and openly (exposed, sometimes sad, but confident) is on display. She writes, “I’m a girl 24/7. I live my life as a trans woman, feeling all the complicated feelings of being a woman who wants to fuck people and being a sensitive tranny with an ego that has the fortitude of a house of cards.”

Anything seems possible for Blossom in many of these essays, just like the grand dreams of those arriving on the Vegas strip with money in hand, sex on their minds, and dollar signs floating in their pupils. 

Although the reader doesn’t know Blossom, these little fragments of her life, documented as short essays, lead us to believe we do. And in that there’s comfort. We see her deliberate through her own ideas, emotions, and opinions. Is it money she’s craving? Is Zoey from the visual arts department a friendship worth having? Is monogamy the answer, or does she miss being a self-proclaimed slut? 

Blossom works through it in her writing. As readers, we ride along with her, knowing she might not always discover the answer. 

“I believe that the only way you can make it as a writer is if you’re completely obsessed with it,” Blossom says. She is an active observer, which is evident in the details she documents in her prose. “The act of looking around at the room in the party, of talking with friends, walking down the lakeshore can all become acts of writing if your mind is active,” she says. 

She jots down notes in her notebook and builds on the ideas later. She also tries to write in her diary every day, flexing her writing muscles late at night or early in the morning. 

Longhand is her preference, though. She says it puts her in a trance state where ideas and words flow and tumble onto the page. From there, she builds on her loose thoughts and works them into something coherent. 

Blossom says she wrote How to Fuck Like a Girl like this. So much so that when she edited it, she felt like she was reading someone else’s writing. 

She hopes that How to Fuck Like a Girl helps anyone who doesn’t feel like they “fit neatly into this life.” She wants her words to connect to “trans women who don’t feel like they’re woman enough, girls of all kinds who feel like they have a monster inside them, gay boys who feel ostracized from other gay boys, with lesbians who yearn, with cis guys who in some way feel restrained by the world. How to Fuck Like a Girl is for everyone.”

We see references to diary-esque writing where Blossom allows her thoughts to fuse into day-to-day memories and make them into a larger, poetic theme. We see her make jokes, like calling herself a “6’4” gay behemoth” that “owned her shit” and describing sexual encounters like we’re a friend sitting across from her in a coffee shop. We hang on to every word. Her writing is conversational, jarring, raw, and honest. 

“I hope that it calls on the reader to imagine a weirder, less binary, less partitioned, less imperial life with more sex, more friendship, and more magic,” Blossom says.

Vera Blossom in conversation with Jessica Hopper
Wed 12/4, 7 PM, Women & Children First, 5233 N. Clark, womenandchildrenfirst.com/event/person-how-fuck-girl-vera-blossom, free, registration required