A.D. Nauman’s “Unbound” begins like a ghost story, or perhaps a childhood hallucination brought on by abandonment, when the narrator’s father leaves in 1972 and a piano begins to play by itself in the night. But what unfolds is something much larger: a coming-of-age story that interrogates identity, gender, desire, and the cost of forcing oneself into a shape that never quite fits.
Beryl’s relationship with Masha is especially revealing. The two are drawn together because they are both “strange”—outsiders in a world that rewards sameness. Beryl clings to Masha not just out of friendship but out of recognition, a sense of shared difference. Yet even here, identity proves unstable. Beryl tries to make sense of her feelings using the limited language available to her, wondering if she is “homo,” even as her desires resist easy categorization—split between her fascination with boys and the intimacy she shares with Masha.
There’s an irony in the fact that the Quaker school, ostensibly unconventional, becomes a place of relative acceptance, while the larger social world continues to enforce rigid norms. Over time, that tension sharpens: Masha eventually embraces her identity and, in doing so, becomes legible—almost “normal” within a framework that can now name her. Beryl, however, remains caught much longer in that in-between space, unable to fully inhabit any category offered to her.
As the story moves forward, Beryl tries on versions of herself—performing femininity, shaping herself into something recognizable—while the presence of Albert (a remnant of those earlier years when she and Masha claimed to be inhabited by spirits) persists as a deeper truth she cannot fully articulate. Only decades later does she claim it outright: “I’m a gay man in a female body.” What makes “Unbound” so compelling is not just this realization, but the long, uneven path toward it—where belonging is always provisional, and identity resists even the categories that seem, for others, to offer clarity.
Read the story in the Summer 2026 issue of Northwest Review.
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