“You don’t know anything about queer femme intimacy,” a character screams at their brother in Personal Attention Roleplay, Helen Chau Bradley’s debut short story collection. “You’re a basic mainstream gay and you need to get over yourself!” 

Personal Attention Roleplay, published by Metonymy Press, takes on the nuanced intricacies of community and identity. Whether they be in leftist organizing circles or the DIY music scene, the stories in this collection expose the pains of late-stage capitalism and queer politics with an honest and witty point-of-view.

Starring young Asian misfits in Montreal, Toronto, and beyond, Chau Bradley’s characters are outcasts on the margins craving intimacy. The collection’s first story, “Maverick,” sets the tone with this theme, featuring an awkward pre-teen who obsesses over the most talented girl in her gymnastics class. The idea of unnamed queer desire among children returns in “The End of Gods and Heroes”—a story about the friendship between two five-year-olds who adore Greek mythology but fall out over perceived personal wrongs in their relationship.

This struggle for closeness often results in alienation, with the characters in the stories grappling with how to live in a white supremacist, heteronormative, and capitalist world. Some of Chau Bradley’s characters fall victim to this isolation due to their own actions. In “New Horizons,” an Asian-Canadian woman gets plastic surgery to look white only to end up with a face so drastically changed that her own sister no longer recognizes her. Similarly, in the book’s title story, the main character’s friendship break-up with their roommate results in an obsession with autonomous sensory meridian response (ASMR) videos on YouTube to cope, replacing the bond of their relationship with an extreme attempt to self-soothe.

However, a minority of Chau Bradley’s characters are able to unite together to resist these forces. In “The Queue,” a story about a line-up during the COVID-19 pandemic told entirely in dialogue, two characters manage to momentarily triumph with an outdoor hook-up. “This is so gay, here in the bushes, with the moon,” Chau Bradley writes. Likewise, the ending story, “Soft Shoulder”—which follows a punk band made up of queer women of colour and their white male manager on tour—is a collection highlight, with an ending that made me cheer out loud.

The only story that falls short of the high standards set by the collection is “Sheila,” a story about a young piano prodigy who becomes pregnant. I felt this story ended abruptly, leaving a potentially fascinating narrative incomplete and me wanting more of the depth and playful disruption I’d come to expect from Chau Bradley’s writing. Overall, however, Personal Attention Roleplay is an original and intricate collection, and one that is likely only the beginning for Chau Bradley.

Alanna Why is a Montreal-based culture and fiction writer. Her culture writing has appeared in In The Mood, Also Cool, and Canthius. She writes a biweekly newsletter about books and pop culture called Why’s World. Alanna is currently working on Bridge Burner, a novel about a one-hit-wonder from the ’90s, and Amy of Suburbia, a novella about a 12-year-old obsessed with Green Day.