50 pages • 1 hour read
Elliot PagePageboy: A Memoir
Nonfiction | Autobiography / Memoir | Adult | Published in 2023A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Chapters 6-10Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 6 Summary: “Jump Scare”
At age 16, Page was living in Toronto with a friend, Wiebke, in whose movie, Marion Bridge, Page acted the year before. At this time, Page was dealing with a stalker with whom he began talking online at the age of 11. The stalker, a man in his twenties, saw Page in his first professional role, a CBC show called Pit Pony. The two began to exchange secret emails. At first, Page liked having someone to talk to who appeared to understand his loneliness and alienation. Eventually, the man started asking if he could come to Halifax to see Page, but he never did. When Page moved to Toronto at the age of 15, the stalker began sending him sexually explicit messages.
Finally, the stalker began contacting Page’s friends and coworkers. Page had to tell someone about the stalker, so he told Wiebke, who called the police. The police issued a restraining order, but the stalker violated it and accosted Page in public. Page managed to get away and called the police, who arrested the man. Page also told his father, but rather than showing concern or sympathy for his child, Dennis told Page, “I’m going to come to Toronto and kick your ass” (58).
The experience was so stressful and traumatic for Page that he started being unable to eat certain foods. Page was affected by this pattern of food restriction for much of his early adolescence and young adulthood.
Chapter 7 Summary: “Leeches”
In “Leeches,” Page remembers being unable to act with his parents in the room from an early age. When he saw them, he lost the ability to “create an honest emotion with an expressiveness that the adults said translated to the screen” (60). When he was 11, his parents stopped coming to work with him entirely. While filming the second season of Pit Pony, Page lived with the horse wranglers and their teenage daughter on a ranch close to the filming location. Page recalls enjoying the freedom to be himself but acknowledges that this distance from his parents left him vulnerable as a young child in Hollywood. He remembers several instances of being groomed or sexually abused and assaulted by adults on film sets, including directors and crew members.
Turning 18 further complicated Page’s position; he describes reaching adulthood as “an unspoken permission slip [he] didn’t consent to” (64). An older female crew member began to take advantage of him sexually at this time. She was only the second woman Page had ever kissed. She often forced herself sexually on him. Page describes freezing during these situations.
Chapter 8 Summary: “Famous Asshole at Party”
The year is 2014, shortly after Page came out as gay at the Human Rights Campaign “Time to Thrive” conference. Page describes coming out at age 27 as a huge relief, though it felt like less of a choice than a need. He calls the experience “one of the most important and healing moments in [his] life, not all the way there yet, but getting closer” (68).
A few weeks later, he was at a friend’s birthday party, where he saw an acquaintance. This acquaintance, also an actor, is never named, but Page describes the vitriolic homophobic abuse that he directed toward Page. He accused Page of coming out for attention and questioned if he was actually gay or “just afraid of men” (69). He also talked about enacting sexual violence on Page to make him realize he wasn’t gay. Other people at the party defended Page, but he notes that the acquaintance “was, and still is, one of the most famous actors in the world” (70).
Shortly after the party, Page met the man at the gym. He claimed he was not biased against LGBTQ people and claimed not to remember what happened. Page thinks about how Hollywood has continually trivialized his identity, first when he publicly identified as gay and later when he came out as transgender.
Chapter 9 Summary: “Pink Dot”
The narrative flashes forward to 2022, Page’s present. Elliot Page is out as a transgender man and dating a woman named Madisyn. Their relationship makes him feel deeply free and no longer frozen.
Still, he faces anti-LGBTQ bias. He recalls a day when he went to a local convenience store, The Pink Dot. On the way there, a man shouted homophobic slurs at Page and threatened him with violence. Page called Madisyn while this happened and ran into The Pink Dot. The people working in the store barred the man from coming in until he went away and assured Page that they “don’t put up with that here” (76).
Chapter 10 Summary: “That Little Indie”
Page acted in the film An American Crime when he was 19. He talks about his bond with his costar, Catherine Keener, whom he already admired from her previous work. The movie is a true story about Sylvia Likens, played by Page, a teen from Indiana “who in 1965 suffered the most amount of abuse on a single victim in Indiana state history” (78). The role was particularly brutal for Page. He was unable to shake Likens’s character, and portraying her and the suffering she experienced fed into his eating disorder and patterns of self-harm.
When Page returned home after filming was complete, his mother was very concerned about his low weight. He tried to eat to make her happy but had panic attacks and became physically unable to swallow food. He started seeing a therapist, who encouraged him to take a break from acting to recover from the eating disorder.
Page made a substantial but incomplete recovery and traveled to Los Angeles to do a final audition for Juno. He met Michael Cera, his costar, and immediately liked him; the two got along very well. While filming, Page met his other costar, Olivia Thirlby, and the two began a secret relationship. Filming Juno reinvigorated, inspired, and strengthened Page, though he did not expect the wild success that the “little indie” movie became.
Chapters 6-10 Analysis
These chapters discuss some of the most traumatic moments in Page’s life, including stalking, sexual assault, self-harm, and a serious eating disorder. Page connects some of these experiences to his ongoing journey of Self-Discovery and Self-Acceptance, though not always in a positive way. His experience of self-harm, for instance, is connected to his experience of gender dysphoria, as well as other traumatic events. His eating disorder develops in part out of a desire to control some aspects of his life when many other things, like how other people perceive and gender him, are so far out of his control.
Page offers a glimpse into his present life, showing that for all his difficulties, he has made it to a place where he feels “no longer frozen, that undercurrent, the wanting to flee” (73), in profound contrast to other experiences he describes in these chapters. His present life is fulfilling and free in a way that he could not access when he was younger, but it is not perfect; he still experiences verbal abuse and threats of violence because of how people perceive his gender and sexuality. Although coming out is a major positive step for many LGBTQ people, there is still danger that comes with being visible. At the same time, Page uses moments like this to emphasize the power of queer joy and community; his self-love and supportive community are life-affirming.
Chapter 8 outlines one of the book’s most striking examples of Anti-LGBTQ Sentiments in Hollywood. The man at the party who says that he does not believe that Page is really gay and accuses him of coming out for attention is a famous actor with a successful career. Page notes that “people were telling him to stop, but he didn’t, and they gave up” instead of insisting that the man leave the party (69). The unnamed actor is emblematic of how power works in Hollywood. People who are sufficiently famous and well-connected might say that they are progressive and compassionate, but few people are willing or able to hold them to a normal standard of decency toward others. Members of marginalized groups suffer the consequences of these powerful people’s abuse.
The Complex Interpersonal Relationships in Page’s life deepen in these chapters. As a young actor, he relies on his parents to protect and support him, but he also asks them not to watch him work. He forms a powerful friendship with Catherine Keener, even though she plays the part of the woman who murdered Sylvia Likens in the deeply traumatizing shoot for An American Crime. He starts a romantic relationship with Olivia Thirlby even though he still has not told anyone in his life about his sexuality. Even when Page is lacking support from his parents, he often has friends around him who are able to help him through difficult experiences.
These chapters show one of several times when Page’s mental health goes downhill before he makes at least a partial recovery. In this case, it starts with Page’s stalker, which escalates to calling the police, which in turn triggers the start of Page’s eating disorder. An American Crime further exacerbates Page’s eating disorder and difficulty managing his mental health. Page says that with time and consideration, he has ultimately been able to forgive the man who stalked him, understanding that he was dealing with his own untreated mental illness at the time. He has not found it so easy to forgive his father for blaming him for being stalked. A long-standing lack of parental support and kindness goes far beyond Dennis’s reaction to hearing about the stalker, but that comment is emblematic of the problems in their relationship. Instead of his father, Page relies on his mother and a therapist to help him toward recovery.
