I Read Dylan Mulvaney’s Memoir So You Don’t Have To – The American Spectator | USA News and PoliticsThe American Spectator

Bud Light’s calamitous brand partnership with transgender influencer Dylan Mulvaney is two years old this April. A lot has happened since then. Even now, barely two months after the inauguration, Joe Biden’s presidency already feels like ancient history — let alone the Bud Light fallout. 

Mulvaney’s ill-fated commercial, in which he dressed up like Audrey Hepburn to show off the novelty beer can with his face on it, led to a precipitous fall in Bud Light’s stock. Buoyed by the boycott’s success, conservatives embraced a summer of anti-woke boycotts, including a major boycott of Target over the store’s LGBTQ Pride month merchandise. 

In the following months, the national vibe shift unfolded: Donald Trump rolled through as the presumptive presidential candidate and survived a would-be assassination attempt on live TV, Joe Biden dropped out of the presidential race a week later, and Trump won the White House with the promise of a return to normalcy.

It’s odd, then, that Dylan Mulvaney’s memoir Paper Doll: Notes from a Late Bloomer was released this March. Mulvaney’s memoir feels like a time capsule from a different era. Paper Doll is a book that would only really make sense in a world where Kamala won: it’s self-indulgent and completely out of touch. (RELATED: He Enjoys Being a Girl)

Perky diary entries elaborating on the content from Mulvaney’s “Days of Girlhood” TikTok series make up the backbone of the memoir, interspersed with what are apparently supposed to be essays expanding on a handful of significant topics. 

There are wounds that peek through his story — early insecurities, his parents’ divorce at a young age, unwanted sexual experiences, and his mother’s hesitation to embrace her son’s new identity. Mulvaney carries deep wounds, but he touches on them only briefly before pushing them down, adopting the same frenetic, chipper tone from his videos, and trading in girly cliches. The few real moments of self-reflection are quickly overshadowed by his next “it-girl” exploit: doing ayahuasca in Peru, chatting with Paris Hilton, or vacationing on a billionaire’s yacht in the Mediterranean.

From the first diary entry to the last page, one thing is clear: Dylan Mulvaney loves attention. A lifelong actor, he wrestles at several junctures with jealousy of other actors who get better parts or receive more attention. Mulvaney was mainly an ensemble member until the COVID pandemic shut down his touring production, and he found himself alone at home with social media at his fingertips. Suddenly, the ensemble character could play the lead.

“One morning, I opened my TikTok account and wanted to post something,” he writes. “It got eight million views in a matter of forty-eight hours. My musical theater brain couldn’t comprehend this type of exposure, trying to picture eight million people in the audience. Damn, that would have to be a big theater.” 

But the short-lived success of the short-form videos meant that success was always momentary: 

“The high I felt from the likes and comments wasn’t as filling as applause, but at least I was eating. When the notifications went quiet, I felt back to square one. Am I supposed to make another one already?”

Mulvaney created digital content basically nonstop throughout his transition, documenting each day for strangers on the internet. And Paper Doll is just another continuation of his attention-seeking project. The book isn’t well-written. It’s not insightful. It doesn’t even offer poignant perspective on the nuances of his transgender identity or the twin flames of celebrity and notoriety.

Really, none of this comes as a surprise — the book feels superficial because Mulvaney can only engage with femininity at the surface level. He can undergo “facial feminization surgery” to look more like a woman or dress like Jackie O or Marilyn Monroe. He can film staccato monologues filled with campy exaggerations of female sex stereotypes. But Dylan Mulvaney isn’t a woman, and he can never understand what it means to be one. His transgender identity isn’t a different form of womanhood; it’s a skin-deep lie. And, as it turns out, lies aren’t very interesting to read — especially when they’re paraded as fact, not fiction.

Mulvaney says more than he means by titling his memoir Paper Doll. In the queer community, “doll” is a term of endearment for a trans-identifying man who embodies female beauty standards. Paper Doll, then, is a play on the memoir’s physical paper form. More significantly, the title also references the two-dimensional paper dolls with corresponding paper outfits. These dolls are meant only for dress-up — unlike real, three-dimensional dolls, with which a girl can play house, carry around, and pretend to feed in an imitation of how her mother treats her own children. Paper dolls aren’t sturdy enough to be played with the same way real dolls are; they’re just flat mannequins for a series of outfits. 

Paper Doll is a product of its time. The book’s final essay is dated March 2024, practically eons ago in a digital world where each day can hold multiple news cycles. Ironically, the progressive world Mulvaney craves has been unwound in the past two years — in no small part due to the disastrous Bud Light commercial that launched a cultural reckoning. 

America has changed. Whether or not progressives like Mulvaney realize that is another story for a different book. 

READ MORE by Mary Frances Devlin: 

Battleground Michigan Is Up for Grabs Again in 2026

Free Speech Coalition, Inc. v. Paxton: Porn Doesn’t Have to Be ‘Inevitable’

Pope Francis Gets His Man in Washington 

Mary Frances Devlin is a George Neumayr fellow and contributing editor at The American Spectator. She is a graduate of the University of Notre Dame. Follow her on X at @maryfrandevlin.