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Nearly Roadkill
This novel is a tale of what-appears-to-be boy meets what-appears-to-be girl. Their world is the "Net", where any persona or gender can be created. These two genderless beings, Scratch and Winc, cybersurf into various "Net" worlds, fighting government intervention on this frontier.
382 pages, Paperback
First published June 1, 1996
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Displaying 1 - 19 of 19 reviews
Read
February 25, 2025review coming soon IY"H! This was totally not what I'd expected.
Update: I forgot to link to my review on Reactor, sorry about that! Here it is: https://reactormag.com/quiltbag-specu...
Source of the book: Bought with my own money
Update: I forgot to link to my review on Reactor, sorry about that! Here it is: https://reactormag.com/quiltbag-specu...
Source of the book: Bought with my own money
Did Not Finish
May 1, 2026It would take God's strongest soldier to get through those 90s internet roleplay sex scenes and unfortunately I am not the man for the job.
Read
July 16, 2023This should be on every classic gay/trans literature booklist.
Did Not Finish
January 10, 2026DNF at 20%. I’m just not clicking with this story at all, and I am finding all the cyber sex cringey and clunky instead of hot. And since that’s the primary relationship mechanism at this point in the story, I’m just not interested in continuing.
January 3, 2026
Wild how this talked about algorithms, the government interfering with the internet, and feeding you ads based on demographics.
June 27, 2022
Goofy, naive, messily plotted at best, definitely ~~~problematic. Written in the year of my birth, so it's about an era of the Internet that seems almost unreachably distant to me, but. There are conversations in this book I've had nearly verbatim; there's sex (cyber and otherwise) that I've had and never seen written anywhere else until this book. To be fair I am also goofy, naive, messy and problematic. I felt seen, and I can't help but say thank you to the authors, for being brave enough to write this and publish it, in all its glory.
July 4, 2014
a quirky look at the fluidity of gender through the (at the time) new world of the internet - fan of kate bornstein? don't miss this early work!
October 15, 2025
Since reading, I have pleaded with every single one of my friends to order it once it comes out. It took me a second to ease into the chat log/email format, but once I was invested in the Scratch / Winc's developing romance running tangent to the increasing danger of the oppressive Eye, I ate it all up at once. Interestingly, I thought discovering their "true" identities would blemish their dynamic to me. Instead, the conversations that ensued in regards to Winc's identity, and especially Scratch's initial hesitation and even offense, were incredibly enlightening. Winc is a saint, they always had so much grace and love.
I especially love the idea of gender being friction, this malleable rubbing between two persons, that can change and react depending on the day, hour, mood, lighting etc. I identify as queer, but am currently in a "straight" relationship. Sometimes, I feel very confused about my own gender, and how this relates to my male partner. Does he view me through the lens of how he perceives women? Can I be "more" than a woman to a man, in these times, in these conditions? Can I ever be his "man", his rock, his guide? The lines, im paraphrasing, but where they roughly say, "Do you need me to be your queer boy, or your punk riot girl, or your so on and so forth?" really stuck with me. I never feel like one of these things, but a transcending experience that is morphing to my environment all the time. I think truly "seeing" someone is defying gender in every way; it is becoming pure light, really.
All that to say, this book made me feel better about being a woman. In a strange way, especially when they discuss butch, stones, etc, it made me realize that being a woman is really whatever I want it to be, whatever I design. and there will always be people who invest in that. and that's exciting. I wish i could live in a world in which everyone met everyone else on the pretense that their outside form is simply a veil, and that it is the work of all of us to dissolve that shell into the shimmering, ephemeral sea of what we feel, what we desire, what we dream of....
I especially love the idea of gender being friction, this malleable rubbing between two persons, that can change and react depending on the day, hour, mood, lighting etc. I identify as queer, but am currently in a "straight" relationship. Sometimes, I feel very confused about my own gender, and how this relates to my male partner. Does he view me through the lens of how he perceives women? Can I be "more" than a woman to a man, in these times, in these conditions? Can I ever be his "man", his rock, his guide? The lines, im paraphrasing, but where they roughly say, "Do you need me to be your queer boy, or your punk riot girl, or your so on and so forth?" really stuck with me. I never feel like one of these things, but a transcending experience that is morphing to my environment all the time. I think truly "seeing" someone is defying gender in every way; it is becoming pure light, really.
All that to say, this book made me feel better about being a woman. In a strange way, especially when they discuss butch, stones, etc, it made me realize that being a woman is really whatever I want it to be, whatever I design. and there will always be people who invest in that. and that's exciting. I wish i could live in a world in which everyone met everyone else on the pretense that their outside form is simply a veil, and that it is the work of all of us to dissolve that shell into the shimmering, ephemeral sea of what we feel, what we desire, what we dream of....
August 5, 2014
A little relic from when we thought this newfangled internet thing would save us from gender. A fun story, it leads to interesting reflections about what has an hasn't changed about how folks interact with the information highway and their sense of self. A time when "online" had to be defined in a glossary in the back! When a broadly defined GSM Coalition only named LGBT identities! When cybering sparked rebellion! Or maybe it still does? Spoiler alert, I doubt it.
(Pairs well with A Mind Apart)
(Pairs well with A Mind Apart)
January 13, 2026
The discussion of gender and sexuality in this book— and the implications of the information age in relation to that— is so ahead of its time that it’s almost hard to believe this was originally written 30 years ago. Though the themes of this book and its discussions are incredible and thoughtfully done, the storytelling method and framing did not work for me. Maybe it’s because I was on AIM back in the day, in the chatroom sequences gave me violent, cringy flashbacks. If you go into reading this book, knowing the framing is an erotic thriller, told in a somewhat epistolary method, you can better enjoy the discussions of gender and identity in a technologically enabled world.
One other note: the audiobook telling of this is particularly challenging as the dialogue often shifts between private messages, journal entries, chat logs, and occasionally narrative. It might be easier to read and print format or e-book, but it would be really interesting if the publishers re-created this as an interactive website where you could walk yourself through the story. Perhaps they’ll do that for the 50th anniversary.
One other note: the audiobook telling of this is particularly challenging as the dialogue often shifts between private messages, journal entries, chat logs, and occasionally narrative. It might be easier to read and print format or e-book, but it would be really interesting if the publishers re-created this as an interactive website where you could walk yourself through the story. Perhaps they’ll do that for the 50th anniversary.
June 3, 2026
I am Kate Bornstein's Silliest Soldier, and so I had to read the novel which is co-authored by Caitlin Sullivan. Nearly Roadkill is sometimes described as cyberpunk, so I was wondering if it'd be a companion to The Fortunate Fall or something like that, but no: for all the world, it's about two gender outlaws on the run from the US 1996 Telecommunications Act.
This tickled me on a deep and existential level: I first learned about ole Telecoms '96 by way of the Clearchannel radio buyout, but it blew my young brain clear out of my skull to learn that the internet was once unregulated and ad-free. Fascinating stuff, and this might be the coolest artifact of that age, yappy "MORE RELEVANT THAN EVER" observations aside. It is true that the then-fictional requirement by the US govt of its citizens to Register Online with their real ID has come back around, at least. Very funny.
If you've read Gender Outlaw, you should already have read this. If you've read Gender Outlaw but have never heard of Nearly Roadkill, *do it.* Bornstein's usual playful approach to writing silly things about gender hasn't aged a day if you ask me, and so Roadkill ends up having very likable protagonists leading fanciful cyberlives. Aside from them both being "on the run from the law" (i.e. using various bypasses to avoid registry, under many pseudonyms) they're both 90s sort of gender-benders experimenting with the fact that *On the internet, nobody knows you're a dog.* They meet over and over under different guises, in different sort of gender "drag" if that makes any sense. The actual story is told, narrated more or less, by Toobe, who is a fifteen year old boy and in contact with both of them through "Jabba", a hacker his dad knows, so it's kind of an epistolary. The 90s charm is laid on very thick. Toobe's job is mostly to ground the reader, and I guess provide a point to relate to, when Scratch and Winc's exchanges get a bit too heavy, in theory terms. It is 1996 and neopronouns are still new to most people.
Oh, and there's a truly bumbling cyber-gumshoe from a newly formed US department whose job it is to track all of them down. He's an asshole, but if he quit the e-force tomorrow he wouldn't be all bad, you know? He's not really a committed ideologue, and much comedy is extracted from his failings.
What Roadkill really is, is a romance about identity and, yes, gender. All the times Scratch and Winc meet across various chatrooms, (and there are only chatrooms and PMs) they play at various different identities: they're a pair of butch-and-femme dykes, one's a riot grrl and one's a svelte skater boy, they're both strapping young gay lads, they're doing Vintage Star Trek Erotic Role Play with blood. Today, it's necessary to understand that we're looking at the very dawn of our modern gender-bending, if you'll pardon the phrase. Scratch can be caught saying "I have gone a lot into the male and female roles, for lack of a better model" which resonated pretty hard with me. As a kid I never really got the 'camp' style of playing-with-gender, you know, the thing where gender outside the binary is primarily expressed via messing with traditional gender roles? Never had an interest in it myself, so I liked seeing that even in 1996 (and it has been there since first printing) Scratch and Winc have been looking for more, better, and cooler ways of being. Not that there's anything wrong with playing on or with traditional roles, it's just not my speed and I felt seen to read that even in 1996 people wanted more. On that, you might get more out of their nasty-ass playing-with-trad-roles cybersex than I did, but I feel safe saying that for all the erotica it contains, Nearly Roadkill is never a patch on a Nadia Nova visual novel. Granted, maybe I've just gone too deep as far as erotica is concerned, but Scratch and Winc's intercourse didn't do much for me. They've thrown out the old, heavily-invested-in genders and are wearing them as (sexy) hats.
I think some of Roadkill's considerations around gender and identity can't get through because I'm autistic, though. Yes, really. Much of the word-count is spent carrying on about how your PARTNER defines YOU. Toobe is first to go, with his "But this is where I always get confused. Who does what to who and in what body seems kinda important - doesn't it?" line, but Scratch and Winc do a lot of yammering along the lines of "what are you & what does my attraction to you make me" which, uh, makes you whatever you are, I thought? No bearing???? It just seemed weird to me, as if it substatially changes YOUR SELF to be seen walking down the street with someone. It has implications socially sure, but for YOUR SELF? Sincerely don't think I've ever thought about someone you're attracted to (as in the person specifically) defining your gender identity? Thinking about lesbians, you can be femme4femme but also date femme4butch and that doesn't meaningfully change who you are. Right? Unless you want it to. This made me reflect on how Paul Polydoris from Paul Takes the Form of a Mortal Girl almost always changes himself for his partner. Difference is he's a whimsical naiad who can body morph, and Scratch 'n' Winc are just in chatrooms...
Reading what is almost a "cellphone novel" in form might seem goofy, like why the chatroom, right? The simple answer is that Nearly Roadkill is premised on the intersection of personal identity with the anonymity of chatrooms. Be who you are, however much and many of you there is or are. Duh. The secret, salacious answer is because the way Scratch and Winc (and others) narrate their online interactions tells us as much about them as any form of narration, and frequently their roleplay and exchanges are deeply, achingly sincere. The scene that takes place *in private chat* in a sun-drenched redwood forest is a highlight. I dunno, I just love it. The dorks have to narrate *themselves*, and so it gives you a very direct line into their brains. I thought it was great.
As a romance, Roadkill needs a third-act conflict, and oh boy do Bornstein and Sullivan ever deliver. So if you're brainrotted like I am, you might have heard of Sheila Jeffreys, who writes angry screeds in the mid 2000s about how 'transgression is the privilege of men, so of course thy transgress all they want'. It's very poorly thought out; a throughline of transphobia is that transphobes imagine trans people being lauded for how 'transgressive' they are, which strikes me as a very 1970s Rocky Horror kind of mindset in addition to commonly being biologically essentialist. Sheila Jeffreys does it, assuming part and parcel that one's government-assigned gender is innate because of... reasons? Meanwhile on the other end of the gradient, you have Julia Serano who seemed to believe that trans people are graded on a curve of how transgressive they are, and that people who were assigned female 'breaking the constraints of gender' is held as most transgressive. That doesn't hold up either, because ask any trans man, but to my utter shock this line of thinking is used as a character flaw in Nearly Roadkill. Scratch opines: “Men can do any fucking thing they want to. Now they even want to be women, and sure enough, they’re doing that too! Why the fuck do they have to take every fucking thing in sight?” and lo I was given whiplash. Don't worry, ze gets over it, it's part of hir arc, which I thought was cool actually. Scratch and Winc, vanguard of trans unity. Destroyers of gender essentialism.
Something I took away from Roadkill is that, no matter who you are or where you end up, you've probably gotta ask stupid/clumsy questions when it comes to gender. I think being immersed in the imperial core's normative gender stereotypes just does that to us. Scratch asks several very dumb questions of Winc, and Winc shoots back a few at hir in turn. Some of them made me gnash my teeth, but it also occured to me that Hey, I probably said even dumber shit when I was 15. Toobe, who is 15, is substantially smarter than I was at that age and he rocks, at least. He has to play a hand in breaking up that third-act conflict, resolving things. It's a touchy subject, the Gender. Roadkill is fucking old, in relative terms, so it was humbling seeing The Questioning® reflected in such an old tome.
On that, I did scare up the original version of Nearly Roadkill (An Infobahn Erotic Adventure)(?) which is alarmingly difficult to track down. I was expecting the 25th Anniversary edition to be substantially changed, but actually that's generally not the case. I guess in the same way Gender Outlaw holds up but for some dated terminology, very few things have meaningfully changed. Nearly Roadkill is now framed by a "thirty-years-later" story in which Drew writing for They/Them Magazine (lol) is digging up the files and relaying them both to the reader and their father, so there's that. I don't think it adds that much to the story; a lot of it is telling the reader that smartphones didn't exist in 1996, or what floppy disks are, and goddamn you Nearly Roadkill, I've written a BIOS update floppy before. Do not quote the sacred texts to me, novel. If you haven't read Gender Outlaw and transcended the mortal plane, however, some of Drew's observations will be helpful guides in seeing how the text has aged gracefully. Scratch and Winc have some pretty dorky hangups about gender, so it's good (albeit not necessary) to have Drew note them. The other substantial change is the ending. I'll avoid spoiling it in totality, because you haven't read Nearly Roadkill, but it's sort of a continuation of the original, if that makes sense. The story now ends in thirty-years-later time, which I have mixed feelings about. Mixed feelings about both editions' endings, actually. The content does not change massively but the context sure does, plus an idle reference to "training Large Language Models" is gonna date the new edition of the text as fast as the original, if not faster.
As a bonus, the original Infobahn Erotic Adventure features a link on its back: http colon slash-slash nearlyroadkill dot com. It's obviously not online anymore (shame) but the Wayback Machine allows you to see it in all of its February 1997 glory. I think webzones should still have a landing page where you need to click "enter" to proceed. "Queers on the Internet? Now there's a novel about it," reads *Flash, the Zine for Deaf Queers. "This randy, engaging "infobahn erotic adventure" is the latest example of E-mail lit," proclaims Entertainment Weekly. "Nearly Roadkill, has two characters who sign onto the Internet under various screennames AND different genders" crows Lambda. I think this is really cool because my concern is partially historical; Stone Butch Blues by Leslie Feinberg is published in 1992 or 1993, and then a Great Silence happens all the way until Topside Press spins up in 2012. I've always been curious as to what other own-voices fiction with trans leads was published in the interim, though, and Nearly Roadkill is one such example. A pretty splendid artifact. I might recommend reading the original printing before the 25th anniversary edition, so that you can appreciate the differences, but Nearly Roadkill is another cult classic that nobody told me about and I'm happy to have discovered.
This tickled me on a deep and existential level: I first learned about ole Telecoms '96 by way of the Clearchannel radio buyout, but it blew my young brain clear out of my skull to learn that the internet was once unregulated and ad-free. Fascinating stuff, and this might be the coolest artifact of that age, yappy "MORE RELEVANT THAN EVER" observations aside. It is true that the then-fictional requirement by the US govt of its citizens to Register Online with their real ID has come back around, at least. Very funny.
If you've read Gender Outlaw, you should already have read this. If you've read Gender Outlaw but have never heard of Nearly Roadkill, *do it.* Bornstein's usual playful approach to writing silly things about gender hasn't aged a day if you ask me, and so Roadkill ends up having very likable protagonists leading fanciful cyberlives. Aside from them both being "on the run from the law" (i.e. using various bypasses to avoid registry, under many pseudonyms) they're both 90s sort of gender-benders experimenting with the fact that *On the internet, nobody knows you're a dog.* They meet over and over under different guises, in different sort of gender "drag" if that makes any sense. The actual story is told, narrated more or less, by Toobe, who is a fifteen year old boy and in contact with both of them through "Jabba", a hacker his dad knows, so it's kind of an epistolary. The 90s charm is laid on very thick. Toobe's job is mostly to ground the reader, and I guess provide a point to relate to, when Scratch and Winc's exchanges get a bit too heavy, in theory terms. It is 1996 and neopronouns are still new to most people.
Oh, and there's a truly bumbling cyber-gumshoe from a newly formed US department whose job it is to track all of them down. He's an asshole, but if he quit the e-force tomorrow he wouldn't be all bad, you know? He's not really a committed ideologue, and much comedy is extracted from his failings.
What Roadkill really is, is a romance about identity and, yes, gender. All the times Scratch and Winc meet across various chatrooms, (and there are only chatrooms and PMs) they play at various different identities: they're a pair of butch-and-femme dykes, one's a riot grrl and one's a svelte skater boy, they're both strapping young gay lads, they're doing Vintage Star Trek Erotic Role Play with blood. Today, it's necessary to understand that we're looking at the very dawn of our modern gender-bending, if you'll pardon the phrase. Scratch can be caught saying "I have gone a lot into the male and female roles, for lack of a better model" which resonated pretty hard with me. As a kid I never really got the 'camp' style of playing-with-gender, you know, the thing where gender outside the binary is primarily expressed via messing with traditional gender roles? Never had an interest in it myself, so I liked seeing that even in 1996 (and it has been there since first printing) Scratch and Winc have been looking for more, better, and cooler ways of being. Not that there's anything wrong with playing on or with traditional roles, it's just not my speed and I felt seen to read that even in 1996 people wanted more. On that, you might get more out of their nasty-ass playing-with-trad-roles cybersex than I did, but I feel safe saying that for all the erotica it contains, Nearly Roadkill is never a patch on a Nadia Nova visual novel. Granted, maybe I've just gone too deep as far as erotica is concerned, but Scratch and Winc's intercourse didn't do much for me. They've thrown out the old, heavily-invested-in genders and are wearing them as (sexy) hats.
I think some of Roadkill's considerations around gender and identity can't get through because I'm autistic, though. Yes, really. Much of the word-count is spent carrying on about how your PARTNER defines YOU. Toobe is first to go, with his "But this is where I always get confused. Who does what to who and in what body seems kinda important - doesn't it?" line, but Scratch and Winc do a lot of yammering along the lines of "what are you & what does my attraction to you make me" which, uh, makes you whatever you are, I thought? No bearing???? It just seemed weird to me, as if it substatially changes YOUR SELF to be seen walking down the street with someone. It has implications socially sure, but for YOUR SELF? Sincerely don't think I've ever thought about someone you're attracted to (as in the person specifically) defining your gender identity? Thinking about lesbians, you can be femme4femme but also date femme4butch and that doesn't meaningfully change who you are. Right? Unless you want it to. This made me reflect on how Paul Polydoris from Paul Takes the Form of a Mortal Girl almost always changes himself for his partner. Difference is he's a whimsical naiad who can body morph, and Scratch 'n' Winc are just in chatrooms...
Reading what is almost a "cellphone novel" in form might seem goofy, like why the chatroom, right? The simple answer is that Nearly Roadkill is premised on the intersection of personal identity with the anonymity of chatrooms. Be who you are, however much and many of you there is or are. Duh. The secret, salacious answer is because the way Scratch and Winc (and others) narrate their online interactions tells us as much about them as any form of narration, and frequently their roleplay and exchanges are deeply, achingly sincere. The scene that takes place *in private chat* in a sun-drenched redwood forest is a highlight. I dunno, I just love it. The dorks have to narrate *themselves*, and so it gives you a very direct line into their brains. I thought it was great.
As a romance, Roadkill needs a third-act conflict, and oh boy do Bornstein and Sullivan ever deliver. So if you're brainrotted like I am, you might have heard of Sheila Jeffreys, who writes angry screeds in the mid 2000s about how 'transgression is the privilege of men, so of course thy transgress all they want'. It's very poorly thought out; a throughline of transphobia is that transphobes imagine trans people being lauded for how 'transgressive' they are, which strikes me as a very 1970s Rocky Horror kind of mindset in addition to commonly being biologically essentialist. Sheila Jeffreys does it, assuming part and parcel that one's government-assigned gender is innate because of... reasons? Meanwhile on the other end of the gradient, you have Julia Serano who seemed to believe that trans people are graded on a curve of how transgressive they are, and that people who were assigned female 'breaking the constraints of gender' is held as most transgressive. That doesn't hold up either, because ask any trans man, but to my utter shock this line of thinking is used as a character flaw in Nearly Roadkill. Scratch opines: “Men can do any fucking thing they want to. Now they even want to be women, and sure enough, they’re doing that too! Why the fuck do they have to take every fucking thing in sight?” and lo I was given whiplash. Don't worry, ze gets over it, it's part of hir arc, which I thought was cool actually. Scratch and Winc, vanguard of trans unity. Destroyers of gender essentialism.
Something I took away from Roadkill is that, no matter who you are or where you end up, you've probably gotta ask stupid/clumsy questions when it comes to gender. I think being immersed in the imperial core's normative gender stereotypes just does that to us. Scratch asks several very dumb questions of Winc, and Winc shoots back a few at hir in turn. Some of them made me gnash my teeth, but it also occured to me that Hey, I probably said even dumber shit when I was 15. Toobe, who is 15, is substantially smarter than I was at that age and he rocks, at least. He has to play a hand in breaking up that third-act conflict, resolving things. It's a touchy subject, the Gender. Roadkill is fucking old, in relative terms, so it was humbling seeing The Questioning® reflected in such an old tome.
On that, I did scare up the original version of Nearly Roadkill (An Infobahn Erotic Adventure)(?) which is alarmingly difficult to track down. I was expecting the 25th Anniversary edition to be substantially changed, but actually that's generally not the case. I guess in the same way Gender Outlaw holds up but for some dated terminology, very few things have meaningfully changed. Nearly Roadkill is now framed by a "thirty-years-later" story in which Drew writing for They/Them Magazine (lol) is digging up the files and relaying them both to the reader and their father, so there's that. I don't think it adds that much to the story; a lot of it is telling the reader that smartphones didn't exist in 1996, or what floppy disks are, and goddamn you Nearly Roadkill, I've written a BIOS update floppy before. Do not quote the sacred texts to me, novel. If you haven't read Gender Outlaw and transcended the mortal plane, however, some of Drew's observations will be helpful guides in seeing how the text has aged gracefully. Scratch and Winc have some pretty dorky hangups about gender, so it's good (albeit not necessary) to have Drew note them. The other substantial change is the ending. I'll avoid spoiling it in totality, because you haven't read Nearly Roadkill, but it's sort of a continuation of the original, if that makes sense. The story now ends in thirty-years-later time, which I have mixed feelings about. Mixed feelings about both editions' endings, actually. The content does not change massively but the context sure does, plus an idle reference to "training Large Language Models" is gonna date the new edition of the text as fast as the original, if not faster.
As a bonus, the original Infobahn Erotic Adventure features a link on its back: http colon slash-slash nearlyroadkill dot com. It's obviously not online anymore (shame) but the Wayback Machine allows you to see it in all of its February 1997 glory. I think webzones should still have a landing page where you need to click "enter" to proceed. "Queers on the Internet? Now there's a novel about it," reads *Flash, the Zine for Deaf Queers. "This randy, engaging "infobahn erotic adventure" is the latest example of E-mail lit," proclaims Entertainment Weekly. "Nearly Roadkill, has two characters who sign onto the Internet under various screennames AND different genders" crows Lambda. I think this is really cool because my concern is partially historical; Stone Butch Blues by Leslie Feinberg is published in 1992 or 1993, and then a Great Silence happens all the way until Topside Press spins up in 2012. I've always been curious as to what other own-voices fiction with trans leads was published in the interim, though, and Nearly Roadkill is one such example. A pretty splendid artifact. I might recommend reading the original printing before the 25th anniversary edition, so that you can appreciate the differences, but Nearly Roadkill is another cult classic that nobody told me about and I'm happy to have discovered.
November 25, 2020
I thought I would enjoy this book that was based on the early chatrooms of the 90's and the 2000's, but this book is INSANELY dull. The plot (whatever semblance of a plot there is) is secondary to the two main characters who refuse to conform to gender, which is quite novel for a book written in 1996. I couldn't stand any of the characters, plus reading the style the book was written in just gave me really bad flashbacks to when I used to frequent chatrooms. It was a bit cringey. I also thought the copious amounts of cybersex were really unnecessary. It was all so repetitive. I just couldn't get into this one.
September 25, 2007
Though a little dated in 2007, this book absolutly changed my life!
August 6, 2010
I thought this book was an exciting way to explore gender identity issues, and the romance in it was very adorable. It was repetitive at times due to its form, but it was still an interesting read.
September 29, 2024
Amazing, just amazing
March 9, 2026
I read the 30th anniversary re-release of Nearly Roadkill, and I understand why this book has regained its relevance in this contemporary moment. Set in the early days of chat rooms, Nearly Roadkill follows two people (Winc and Scratch) who are exploring and playing with their gender online. At the same time as they're playing with gender and other identities, the government is trying to impose Registration, where every Internet user must register and give up a lot of personal information so that advertising agencies can better target theirs ads. In our contemporary moment, the surveillance of the Internet is perhaps more sinister, but ultimately still about serving capitalism and profit -- and rooting out those who oppose power. The novel is unconventional, told through a series of digital journal entires and chat room talk, by Winc and Scratch; by Toobe, a younger internet user who knows Winc in real life and is friends with Winc and Scratch online; by Jabba the Hut, a hacker; and by Gwynyth, another hacker who helps Winc, Scratch, and Toobe IRL when they need to escape the federal investigators who try and arrest them.
This 30th anniversary edition also brings in a new part of the story, a non-binary investigate journalist named Drew who puts together these various logs. While I loved being in the past stories, I felt the additional of Drew didn't add a lot to the story. I'll talk a bit more about them in the spoilers section of the review, but it seemed liked Drew was more of a proxy to say "see, this is still relevant now" than anything that necessarily helped augment the story. Their inclusion was mostly relevant only in the epilogues; otherwise, the sections with Drew felt clunky. I found that the playfulness of gender in the past and even in the present was interesting to read, and the book's cypersex was both wild and exciting. This was a memorable book, and while it sometimes felt didactic, it was an interesting enough narrative to keep me engaged. I'm happy I read it, and would recommend it as a book that pushes back against fixed ideas of identity and gender to offer otherwise.
***spoilers below***
Two parts of this book stood out to me. The first was the way that surveillance and capitalism butt up against queerness. In this novel, Winc and Scratch are each exploring their queer identities through different personas in chat rooms. They're targeted by the government because they refuse to register and give over their information, but their refusal is also because the registration goes against their online queerness. They have different personas because they take on different identities, acting and trying on different ways of living. Because capitalism wants to profit off the Internet, people are forced to Register, to be fixed into a single identity. Moreover, registering means giving away information, including about one's biological sex. Those who refuse are made to appear as dangerous people who want to traffic or abuse children, rhetoric that continues into this present moment, where drag queens and trans people in sports are portrayed as predators. In the book, Winc and Scratch offer care to Internet users and keep sex out of the conversation when around Toobe. Instead of being able to live their responsible but countercultural lives, Winc and Scratch are targeted for their difference, for their desire to be queer, with technologies being places of simultaneous freedom (for what they offer) and danger/control (for how others try and regulate them) -- something that continues to be the case for queer people today.
The second thing I though was interesting was the new ending. The original narrative ends ambiguously, with Winc being shot and Scratch trying to save hir life. The two queer lovers have been made into such figures of fear that they might not survive Registration. After being shot, Winc and Scratch's love is true: no matter what happens, they reconciled their IRL differences around gender and became like the versions of themselves online, free of gender prejudice and embracing all kinds of identities and relationships to themselves and to each other.
In the new ending, readers see that Winc has survived. In addition, Winc and Scratch become part of Drew's queer family, since Drew's dad turns out to be Toobe. This happy ending is fascinating to consider. In re-thinking the book, Bornstein and Sullivan decided to take away the ambiguity of the ending and show queer elders, queer love, and queer survival. I think this is an intentional choice at a time when queer people are under attack. The fact that Winc and Scratch survive, together, suggests that queerness persists and lives on. Despite attacks on queerness, queer people will continue find ways to be together and help fight back against power. While the ending makes things a bit narratively clunky (there's three epilogues to the novel), it's an important message, and I can understand why it was added to this edition.
This 30th anniversary edition also brings in a new part of the story, a non-binary investigate journalist named Drew who puts together these various logs. While I loved being in the past stories, I felt the additional of Drew didn't add a lot to the story. I'll talk a bit more about them in the spoilers section of the review, but it seemed liked Drew was more of a proxy to say "see, this is still relevant now" than anything that necessarily helped augment the story. Their inclusion was mostly relevant only in the epilogues; otherwise, the sections with Drew felt clunky. I found that the playfulness of gender in the past and even in the present was interesting to read, and the book's cypersex was both wild and exciting. This was a memorable book, and while it sometimes felt didactic, it was an interesting enough narrative to keep me engaged. I'm happy I read it, and would recommend it as a book that pushes back against fixed ideas of identity and gender to offer otherwise.
***spoilers below***
Two parts of this book stood out to me. The first was the way that surveillance and capitalism butt up against queerness. In this novel, Winc and Scratch are each exploring their queer identities through different personas in chat rooms. They're targeted by the government because they refuse to register and give over their information, but their refusal is also because the registration goes against their online queerness. They have different personas because they take on different identities, acting and trying on different ways of living. Because capitalism wants to profit off the Internet, people are forced to Register, to be fixed into a single identity. Moreover, registering means giving away information, including about one's biological sex. Those who refuse are made to appear as dangerous people who want to traffic or abuse children, rhetoric that continues into this present moment, where drag queens and trans people in sports are portrayed as predators. In the book, Winc and Scratch offer care to Internet users and keep sex out of the conversation when around Toobe. Instead of being able to live their responsible but countercultural lives, Winc and Scratch are targeted for their difference, for their desire to be queer, with technologies being places of simultaneous freedom (for what they offer) and danger/control (for how others try and regulate them) -- something that continues to be the case for queer people today.
The second thing I though was interesting was the new ending. The original narrative ends ambiguously, with Winc being shot and Scratch trying to save hir life. The two queer lovers have been made into such figures of fear that they might not survive Registration. After being shot, Winc and Scratch's love is true: no matter what happens, they reconciled their IRL differences around gender and became like the versions of themselves online, free of gender prejudice and embracing all kinds of identities and relationships to themselves and to each other.
In the new ending, readers see that Winc has survived. In addition, Winc and Scratch become part of Drew's queer family, since Drew's dad turns out to be Toobe. This happy ending is fascinating to consider. In re-thinking the book, Bornstein and Sullivan decided to take away the ambiguity of the ending and show queer elders, queer love, and queer survival. I think this is an intentional choice at a time when queer people are under attack. The fact that Winc and Scratch survive, together, suggests that queerness persists and lives on. Despite attacks on queerness, queer people will continue find ways to be together and help fight back against power. While the ending makes things a bit narratively clunky (there's three epilogues to the novel), it's an important message, and I can understand why it was added to this edition.
November 29, 2025
Update : Just put up a new post on Instagram @nearlyroadkillontherun
Hey folks!
Kate Kate Bornstein and Caitlin have tried repeatedly to create an author page on Goodreads but the response has been like something, well, straight out of our book. There are four reasons why you are rejected - your task is to guess which one. If you ask for clarification you are sent the same four reasons in a different order with a different salutation. We give up. And we're pretty tech-y. (We found that many authors faced the same barriers, with requests that are years old.)
Good times!
So please join us for actual fun on our Instagram account if you want to ask questions, make comments, and generally keep up with the world of Scratch and Winc (+ goats +outlaws + idiocy + ...)
Insta: @nearlyroadkillontherun
Direct link: https://www.instagram.com/nearlyroadk...
The Fabulous Generous Press: https://www.generous.press/nearly-roa...
See you there!
And thanks so much for reading!
Hey folks!
Kate Kate Bornstein and Caitlin have tried repeatedly to create an author page on Goodreads but the response has been like something, well, straight out of our book. There are four reasons why you are rejected - your task is to guess which one. If you ask for clarification you are sent the same four reasons in a different order with a different salutation. We give up. And we're pretty tech-y. (We found that many authors faced the same barriers, with requests that are years old.)
Good times!
So please join us for actual fun on our Instagram account if you want to ask questions, make comments, and generally keep up with the world of Scratch and Winc (+ goats +outlaws + idiocy + ...)
Insta: @nearlyroadkillontherun
Direct link: https://www.instagram.com/nearlyroadk...
The Fabulous Generous Press: https://www.generous.press/nearly-roa...
See you there!
And thanks so much for reading!
January 14, 2026
This was interesting, and also tough to read. I don't know that I fully grasped all of it, but the conversations about gender identity and government surveillance are still very relevant today. I sort of wish the they/them magazine framing & Drew wasn't part of the 30th anniversary edition though.
May 4, 2026
Had some good parts and the exploration of gender in the context of early internet was fun, but overall the story was too messy and unbelievable to be engaging. The ending was god awful.
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