Review: "Imogen, Obviously" by Becky Albertalli

Imogen, Obviously by Becky Albertalli
Published May 2023 via Balzer + Bray
★★★★

Imogen isn't sure of much, but a few things are certain: the idea of moving away to college is terrifying. Her friend Gretchen, who is a walking definition of outspoken and queer and informed, has it all figured out. Her friend Lili has found her place in college in a way that Imogen is sure won't be possible for herself. And Imogen is straight—textbook straight, in fact. Until, of course, she finds herself in a situation in which everyone is primed to think that Imogen is bisexual...and suddenly she's no longer sure what is fact and what is false.

I admit to some uncertainty at the beginning of the book. I've read so many coming-out stories and am always looking for the elusive YA novels in which the characters are queer, they know they're queer, and it's just...not really a big deal, and they can get on with the rest of the story. (So...Edith's story? Ooh, can we have Edith's story as a sequel? Okay, wait, I'm focusing, I swear.) It's also very apparent very early on which friend Imogen will eventually clash with, who the love interest is, et cetera. No surprises there.

But...then it registered that there's something much more complex going on here than a straightforward coming-out story. Imogen lives in a time and place where she's always known it's okay to come out—Penn Yan might not be a hotbed of queer culture, sure, but she has queer friends and queer family, and nobody's blinked. What she hasn't ever had is the space to question: there are few things of which she's certain, and one of them is that if she were queer, she would just...know. She'd slot neatly into a box, and that would be that.

There's a character—I'll keep it vague—who is really insistent on this narrative, that there's not really room to question, and it struck me that I knew that character once, or a version of her. The one and only time I set foot in the LGBTQ center at my college, another student, who I knew vaguely, all but interrogated me—to see, as far as I could tell, if I was intruding on her safe space. If I was "gay enough" to be there. (All this did, of course, was make it a patently unsafe space for me.) I went to one or two events that the primary LGBTQ org (...who dominated that LGBTQ center...) put on, and the first question was always "What are you, anyway?"—the assumption being that you'd figured it out and were ready to label yourself publicly and posthaste. And then I stopped going to those events, because it was very clear that I needed to be far more certain (of everything) than I actually was to feel comfortable there. Once Imogen starts consciously questioning, she figures it out at warp speed (the book spans nine days), but it took me years (starting, let's be clear, well and truly before little miss this-is-my-safe-space-so-I-get-to-decide-if-it-can-be-yours-too), I think in part because it was clear that I was going to have to keep my questioning internal in order not to raise lots of questions and doubt with others.

That part of Imogen's story, then, resonates in a very specific way that—for all that I still want more books about people who are out already, and it's fine, and here's a story where coming out isn't the point—I don't often see and didn't realize how valuable it is to see. It clicks faster for her, but she has that same odd gray area of needing to slot neatly into a box to be fully accepted. The romance here is adorable, and as (yay) drama-free as it can be under the circumstances, but I'm here for the gray area.

Now. Back to Edith. There's room for a sequel, right? One in which Imogen has gone to college and Edith (who already knows who she is in many ways) is figuring out who she is without her big sister around and maybe just maybe she'll be able to have an offline girlfriend...?

Thanks to the author and publisher for providing a free review copy through NetGalley.