Me As Her Again

In this memoir, Nancy Agabian tells stories of growing pains, family tensions, and buried pasts. In a narrative that braids together different times and places and shifts between comic and dramatic registers, Agabian tells us how, as a child, she learns to juggle roles in response to competing pressures to fit in as an American while maintaining her Armenian heritage. At home, she struggles with her grandmother's old ideologies, arguments between her parents, and heated discussions about race and sexuality. In her twenties, Agabian moves to Hollywood and becomes a performance artist and begins to discover herself sexually, dating both men and women. After hiding her autobiographical shows from her relatives, she finally decides to confront her family history and takes a trip to Turkey with her artist aunt, during which she finds she must reckon with painful family histories involving displacement and genocide. Author of Princess Freak, a collection of poems and performance art texts, Nancy Agabian has created and produced several one-woman shows and also collaborated with Ann Perich to form the folk-punk duo Guitar Boy; their CD, Freaks Like Me, was released in 2000. She received a three-year fellowship to attend Columbia University School of the Arts Writing Division in Nonfiction, where she worked on Me as her again, and graduated in 2003. After going to Armenia in 2006 on a Fulbright Scholarship, Agabian now continues to live in New York City and teaches at Queens College.