Mad Eden

Ro, an autistic, genderqueer patient navigator, attempts to describe an inexplicable summer of joy shared with their partner Liam in a borrowed cabin in rural Florida. The novel resists chronological storytelling: Ro organizes events into "buckets" of feeling and frames causality through light cones from the special theory of relativity, a concept introduced by their colleague Eva. Every event sits at the nexus of a backward-facing cone of possible causes and a forward-facing cone of effects, and the novel's structure follows this logic, looping between timelines and perspectives.

Ro is recently out of a psychiatric hospitalization that led to an adult autism diagnosis. The diagnosis reframes Ro's life, offering new language for experiences previously attributed to hidden trauma: meltdown, stimming (self-stimulatory behavior), burnout. It has also cost Ro their testosterone prescription, as local clinics refuse to prescribe it for an autistic adult. Ro and Liam live frugally on a combined income of roughly thirty-one thousand dollars in a political climate increasingly hostile to queer and trans people. Ro works remotely for St. Cat (the Southern Trans Care Access Taskforce), a nonprofit helping families in states with gender-affirming care bans access treatment.

Quentin, a seventeen-year-old trans boy whom Ro and Liam have informally parented since Liam met him at a youth conference, arrives for a surprise visit on his way to start college at the University of Missouri. He travels with Honeycub, his aging white rat. Ro is absorbed in reading Mad Eden, an anonymous fantasy serial posted on Reddit and constructed entirely from the roughly 1,900 discrete words found in a scientific paper titled "Autism as a Disorder of Prediction." In Mad Eden, Nova, a magician who cannot maintain sameness, is abducted by a dragno (a dragon-like creature) named Cardinaux, who reveals that Nova is actually a "scale," a being bonded to a dragno. Everything Nova believed about their world is wrong. Ro is captivated by the parallel to their own life and recent diagnosis.

During Quentin's visit, Ro continues working client calls, including helping a mother in Kentucky navigate the prohibitive cost of puberty blockers and suggesting Depo-Provera, an injectable contraceptive sometimes used off-label as a cheaper puberty-suppressing alternative, while withholding information about its side effects. Quentin reveals his eagerness to start testosterone and shows off a homemade packer, a prosthetic used to create a penis-shaped bulge, made from a gel-filled condom and pink ribbon. He chose Missouri because it was the only school without a care ban that offered him a scholarship, but Missouri has since signed its own ban. Ro promises Quentin that a continuation clause—a legal provision allowing those who begin treatment before a ban's effective date to keep receiving it—will protect him if he starts testosterone before August 28.

This promise ignites a private argument. Liam insists Ro cannot guarantee a prescription and resents bearing the logistical burden of Ro's commitments. The fight escalates: Liam slaps the floor, Ro stabs their arm with a safety whistle. When spoken language fails Ro, they shift into sign language. The conflict resolves only when Liam wraps tightly around Ro, providing deep pressure that eases sensory overload. Faint tendrils of the joy begin to emerge. When Quentin's bus connection later fails due to flooding and he panics, afraid a woman on the bus has discovered he is trans, Liam and Ro book him a hotel and flight, depleting their savings.

Ro discovers the retention-pond alligator dead, killed by a constricting snake it tried to swallow. Ro wades out, examines the creature's claws and jaw sensors, and drags both bodies into the forest, deepening a lifelong conviction that alligators are dragons. A dinner with colleagues triggers a crisis when outdoor seating moves indoors, violating Ro's sensory rules. Both Ro and Liam melt down on the highway shoulder. At the dinner, Swaati, a colleague who runs a safe house for people traveling for gender-affirming care, slips Ro a recipe for homemade testosterone gel. Later, after a client call, Ro feels a surge of unnamed sensation. Liam plays a naming game, offering words until "joyful" lands. They name the feeling, and it blooms outward, hovering above them.

The novel then shifts perspective to trace the light cone behind that call. The caller is Gabriella (Gabbi) Holt, a self-diagnosed autistic woman who returned to her parents' Florida home to help with her father's dementia. After her top surgery (a chest masculinization procedure), Gabbi's girlfriend refused to house her during recovery, and a hospital social worker connected her to Swaati's safe house. Swaati provided careful care, but Gabbi felt trapped and exposed, resenting Swaati's emotional reserve. Back in Florida, Gabbi fell under the influence of Jennifer Flitok, a detransitioned woman building an anti-trans media presence. Flitok validated Gabbi's autism self-diagnosis, drew her into a support group, and enlisted her in building a map of gender-affirming care providers. When Flitok wanted to target nonprofits serving communities of color, Gabbi thought of Swaati's safe house but gave Flitok Ro's name instead. Flitok assigned each collaborator a fictional trans daughter whose biographical details they memorized for sting calls against patient navigators. On June 28, Gabbi called Ro with recording software running, performing the role of a concerned mother.

The resulting Substack article, titled "1970s Throwback: Southern Nonprofit Chemically Sterilizing Kids," juxtaposes edited clips from the call with the history of coerced sterilization of Black women and Native American women, making Ro appear to endorse prescribing drugs to children without qualification. St. Cat pauses navigation services. Ro receives death threats alongside desperate messages from dropped clients. Two bomb threats target St. Cat, and a delivery arrives at the cabin suggesting someone has found Ro's address. Ro stops speaking for ten days.

Quentin's access to testosterone also collapses when the university hospital stops prescribing hormones to minors. Ro considers making gel using Swaati's recipe, but Liam forbids it, warning Ro not to "kill the bird," invoking a Victoria Chang poem that serves as a warning in their private language. Ro notices that the Substack article's editing techniques mirror Mad Eden's word-splicing methods and becomes convinced that hell0kitkat, the article's author, also wrote Mad Eden. Ro messages hell0kitkat with a threat, then accepts the question does not matter: Dragons have always been Ro's joy.

While Liam is away, Ro secretly orders testosterone powder online. Days later, Honeycub dies. Quentin locks himself in his dorm room, and Liam cannot travel, so Ro drives twelve hours to Missouri carrying the homemade gel. Quentin is furious, blaming Ro for the broken promise about testosterone. They bury Honeycub between two oak trees. Quentin signs "love" repeatedly, then says, "I want parents" (270). Ro holds him tightly.

After saying farewell, the joy pads away from Ro in the opposite direction. Ro chases it through streets and churchyards until it perches in a maple tree outside a church. Ro sits beneath it, overtaken by involuntary stillness, unable to move or speak. A woman approaches and tells Ro about her daughter, who died from laced drugs nine months earlier. In a compressed flash-forward, Ro describes the consequences that follow: The woman calls police, an officer finds the testosterone and arrests Ro on a felony charge, St. Cat folds, and Ro cycles through jobs before eventually settling into contentment with Liam.

Then the narrative reverses. The woman does not call the police. She sets down seaweed snacks and a water bottle and walks away. The joy dives from the tree and floods through Ro's body. Ro experiences a temporal inversion: The joy that visited them all summer was not something that arrived and departed but something that begins here, in this moment of crisis, and radiates backward through time. Ro gazes "ahead into the past" and thinks: "Look! How joyous we will be" (283).