Well, now I know what it’s like being the full-time psychiatrist of a hyper-narcissistic celebrity. No, I haven’t gone to med school, been a psychiatric resident, and hung out a shingle. I’ve just read Elliot (formerly Ellen) Page’s memoir, Pageboy, which, indeed, of all the books I’ve ever encountered, comes the closest to reading like a transcript of the overwrought ramblings, on some shrink’s couch, of an extraordinarily neurotic and self-absorbed movie star.
Page, who began acting in Canadian movies — she’s from Nova Scotia — in her early teens, became famous at the age of 20 for the 2007 movie Juno. I’d never seen her in anything (except Woody Allen’s To Rome with Love, in which she made no impression on me one way or the other), so after reading her book, I watched Juno. Directed by Jason Reitman and written by Diablo Cody (who won an Oscar), it’s about a quirky, feisty teenage girl who gets knocked up, goes to get an abortion but changes her mind, then arranges to have her baby adopted by a couple, who split up when she’s in her ninth month.
During the first two-thirds or so of this film, neither Juno nor any other character bears any resemblance whatsoever to a recognizable human being. Nothing terribly serious seems to be on the line. Virtually every bit of dialogue is a quip, a wisecrack. You’re constantly aware that these are actors who’ve memorized a screenplay. But then it all turns. Tears flow. Juno exhibits sensitivity. There’s tenderness. And, damn it, by the time it’s over, it’s actually a very sweet movie. It got terrific reviews and snagged Page, with her winning, bright-eyed combination of innocence, intelligence, snarkiness, and waifish allure, an Academy Award nomination for Best Actress. (Marion Cotillard beat her for playing Edith Piaf.)
Page went on to make several more movies, but in recent years she’s gotten less attention for her work than for her personal life. In 2014, she came out publicly as a lesbian in a cliché-ridden speech delivered at — where else? — a Human Rights Campaign (HRC) event. (Excerpt: “If we took just five minutes to recognize each other’s beauty instead of attacking each other for our differences.”) In 2020, she came out as trans — later going on Oprah, of course — and changed her first name to Elliot. (I will accept Elliot — name changes being a time-honored Tinseltown tradition — but I won’t call Page a dude.) Ironically, although a major theme of Page’s book is her supposed role as an outlier in the “[p]lastic, empty, homophobic” film industry — she marches, you see, to a different drummer, and in order to discover and assert her true self she’s had to fight the system valiantly at every turn — her appearances at HRC and on Oprah make clear her readiness to follow the usual Hollywood script when it comes to exploiting one’s personal life for maximum PR impact. Naturally, Page’s announcement of her lesbianism and, later, of her transgenderism won her plaudits across the left. Even Justin Trudeau cheered. But none of this praise finds its way into Pageboy, which on every page tells us how abused, ignored, insulted, and unloved she’s been all her life.
First of all, Page’s parents divorced when she was very young, and Page, now 36, still bears grudges against both of them — and against her stepmother, too. Then there’s the sexual abuse. While she was in Los Angeles making Hard Candy (2005), a movie about a girl plagued by a stalker, a male director “groomed” her on the set. So did a male crew member. Another male crew member took her home and had his way with her. Then a woman working on the movie did the same thing. (At one point, I wondered if the reason why she ended up having her body mutilated was that she simply couldn’t bring herself to fend off sexual assailants.)
Two weeks after coming out as a lesbian, she was accosted at a Hollywood party by a man who told her: “You aren’t gay. You are just afraid of men.” He told her he’d have sex with her to prove it. “I don’t know why I didn’t demand he leave,” she writes. But she seems never to have told anyone to leave. When her father found out that she’d befriended some older man online who ended up stalking her, he was so upset that he said he’d “kick [her] ass” for having communicated with the creep in the first place — and to this day she’s madder at her dad for saying that than she is at the stalker.
Indeed, Pageboy is full of stories about people abusing Page, stalking her, or — last but not least — repeatedly yelling “faggot” at her and threatening to kill her. This last episode supposedly took place at the corner of Sunset and La Cienega in the very heart of the gayest city in the world, West Hollywood. It seems to me that anyone who started yelling “faggot” at gay people in that location would soon either lose his voice or get beaten to a pulp. For me, the “faggot” story was one tale of victimhood too many and made me wonder just how much of Page’s book I should believe. Looking into this “faggot” anecdote, I discovered that I wasn’t the first reader to have trouble buying it: Dave Rubin, it turned out, had questioned it on his podcast back in June.
Still, while I may not buy all of Page’s anecdotes, I’m prepared to accept her central contention. We live in a time when the number of young people claiming to be trans has exploded. Most of them are plainly victims of a toxic adolescent trend. But I’m willing to believe that Page is one of the tiny fraction of trans-identified persons who actually do have gender dysphoria. After all, she says that she “knew” she was a boy when she was 4. She looked and acted like one. “At ten,” she writes, “people started addressing me as a boy.” She hated girls clothes. She loved action figures. She envied the “cis boys” who were friends with her older stepbrother. (Of course, none of them ever asked to be called “cis boys”; Page puts this label on them — and on other people throughout the book — even as she demands that we honor her “trans” label and use her pronouns of choice.) When she was a kid, she wanted to be Elliott in E.T. (Is this why she picked the name Elliot?). At 11, she “sensed a shift from boy to girl without my consent. As an adult, I would say, ‘I just want to be a ten-year-old boy’…. Eleven was when I last felt present in my flesh.” While her mother wanted to see her “fitting neatly into our society’s expectations,” her own dream was “to look like River Phoenix in a white t-shirt.”
Her hostility to female clothing continued into adulthood. She’s still steamed about being “forced” to wear “dress and heels” to the Juno premiere. “Wardrobe fittings for films,” she writes, “ripped at my insides, talons gashing my organs.” And then there were the torturous “fittings for photo shoots and premieres.” Immediately after Juno, she decided she couldn’t take an acting job because it would’ve involved wearing “a woman’s costume from the mid-nineteenth century” — which would’ve made her “want to kill myself.”
Pageboy is full of this kind of overheated rhetoric. Emotionally, Page seems always to be dialed up to 10. In her “Author’s Note,” she explains that, for a long time, she was far too anxious and stressed out to write a book, but she can do it now because she’s found “contentment” thanks to “gender-affirming care” — yet, she adds, she’s still “terrified.” A couple of pages later, there’s “terrified” again: She tells us that she’s “spent much of my life chipping away toward the truth, while terrified to cause a collapse.” We read of “depression” and of endless “panic attacks,” some of them “so bad I would collapse.” During one period in her life, absolutely everything was “stressful”; on a particular movie set, she was “delirious.” Her weight down to 84 pounds at one point, and she felt “[f]ragile and erratic.” Throughout the “awards season” of 2007–08, when she was showered with prizes, she was “petrified” of being alone and was, indeed, “haunted” by “aloneness … a smidgen of the feeling that could stir panic.” Acting in the movie Inception (2010), she felt so “out of place” in “a cast full of cis men” that she developed shingles. At one photo shoot, she found himself unable to speak to the photographer; shortly afterward, she had a fender bender that made her “utterly distraught.” And, after deciding to distance herself from her father: “I was on the brink, my mental health plummeting. I didn’t want to be in this world anymore. I didn’t know how to be.” All in all, it makes the Book of Job look like Airplane!
Page may identify as a man, but no man ever wrote a book like this. Every page of Pageboy is quintessentially female. I lost track of the number of times she “fell in love” with this or that person. Chapter 21 begins with the words, “The first girl I kissed…,” and one thinks: haven’t we already been here? Oh well, guess not. Eventually, reading this book, you feel as if you’re trapped in something akin to that 2019 horror film Vivarium, where a couple drives to a suburb and can’t find their way out — ever.
In short, Pageboy is a riot of self-absorption, self-dramatization, and often (as Page puts it herself) “self-disdain.” But although she professes to have undergone a remarkable journey of self-discovery and to have attained profound self-knowledge, there’s really very little here in the way of actual self-understanding. Instead of following an arc of increasing self-insight, Page leaps around chronologically, taking us from one frenetic episode to another without ever connecting the dots. Apparently, by way of explaining this discontinuity, she states early on that “[q]ueerness is intrinsically nonlinear, journeys that bend and wind.” My own take is that she’s not really interested in putting the pieces of her life together and figuring out the big picture: No, she prefers, like any world-class narcissist, simply to put her most intense personal moments on display. I suffer, therefore I am.
I’ve noted that Page, earlier in her career, supposedly kept her mouth shut while being molested. Later, however, having won fame and clout, she found her voice and started ripping into well-meaning people for making harmless remarks that she took as insults. While — as Ellen, not Elliott — she was acting in the 2017 remake of Flatliners, a producer tried, in the most delicate possible way, to suggest that she be a little bit more feminine. She exploded at him, then went into a studio executive’s office and exploded at him, too. On another film, a producer wanted her to wear hair extensions to give her a “softer” look. “That sounds like code to me,” she growled, then stalked off the set and phoned her agent. (To read this book, you’d think Page’s Hollywood career had taken place during the Lavender Scare of the 1950s — not in a post-Philadelphia, Boys Don’t Cry, and Brokeback Mountain era when production executives are openly, flamboyantly gay and when every producer nervously consults with GLAAD to make sure nothing in his current project could conceivably be interpreted as offensive.) Ellen’s attitude seems to have been that unless she was allowed to play every character as a butch lesbian, she was being subjected to the cruelest kind of bigotry. It’s as if she’s lost touch with the idea of what her chosen profession is supposed to be about. Even in woke Hollywood, interestingly, some of her colleagues got enough of her self-absorbed nonsense after a certain point. A talent agent, for example, finally said to her in exasperation, “We get it, you’re gay!” She finds this insulting; I find it hilarious.
While Page has told off her share of agents, producers, and executives, it hasn’t always been easy to be one of her buddies, either. After she came out as trans, she attended “an awards-show afterparty” at which a pal made the mistake of telling her she looked “adorable.” She was furious: She didn’t want to look adorable — she wanted to look “dashing.” She lists other things that friends have done to make her cut them loose: They asked honest questions, made innocent jokes to try to overcome awkwardness, and offered what they thought (correctly) was wise advice. But she doesn’t see any of it that way. All she sees is anti-gay or anti-trans hate. Then there’s her preoccupation with the “climate crisis,” which led her to spend some time composting at an Oregon “learning center” for “people who cared about Earth.” (Page’s favorite authors include the eco-scolds, Bill McKibben and Naomi Klein.) Even her politically correct LA social circle thought she was taking her climate fixation too far, but instead of entertaining the possibility that she might indeed have gone a tad overboard, Page pronounces herself “dispirited” by their “lack of concern and empathy.” Of course, she thinks of herself as supremely empathic. Acting, she declares elsewhere in the book, is “a never-ending exercise in empathy.” Never mind that time and again — as she herself has described — her responses to well-intentioned chums’ all-too-human missteps have been anything but empathic.
What else to say? Well, there’s this: Page calls actress Marcia Gay Harden, who recently made headlines by saying that her three children are all “queer” (“My eldest child is nonbinary. My son is gay. My youngest is fluid.”), a “genius.” Also, Page thinks that the West Village is “on the other side of Manhattan” from SoHo. One further point: Innumerable actors have written tell-alls about bedding other celebrities, but this is the first such book whose author pretends that peddling these sensational tidbits is a necessary part of the noble act of sharing her “truth.” (RELATED: ‘My Children Are All Queer’)
Oh, and then there’s Jordan Peterson. He was temporarily banned from social media for suggesting that Page’s promotion of “gender-affirming surgery” had possibly led one or more of her young fans down the dangerous road of transgenderism. Page admits that her father liked what Peterson had to say. But does she take Peterson’s criticism to heart? Of course not. Her world revolves around her own fascinating self, and by deciding to put being trans at the center of her public identity, she’s apparently granted herself lifelong carte blanche to whine tirelessly about how “[t]he world tells us that we aren’t trans but mentally ill. That I’m too ashamed to be a lesbian, that I mutilated my body, that I will always be a woman, comparing my body to Nazi experiments.”
Well, gender dysphoria is a mental disorder. What surgeons did to her was mutilation. She will always have XX chromosomes. And not all too many years ago, her transformation from a woman to a “trans man” would’ve been considered by almost everyone on the planet to be, yes, something cooked up by Josef Mengele. As for her insistence that she’s found “a new sense of calm” and is “happier than ever” — I’m sorry, but I’ve watched several of her talk-show interviews online, and the older they are, the more she seems genuinely vibrant, funny, and charming; after the HRC announcement, and especially since her big Oprah reveal, she’s come off as a grim, strident, angry, contentious, tightly wound little shrew. I hate to say it, but it’s hard not to feel that this poor girl is destined to spend the rest of her life being one hot mess.