The title character, Better Davis, is a drag queen who comes vividly to life in her own story. There is great humor in this account as she portrays Bette Davis going blind in the movie Dark Victory.

            As happens in so many memoirs by gay men, Sharif was bullied as a child. His parents were divorced and he was shuttled from home to home when he was young, from Canada to the Middle East, wherever his family members lived. Still, he came of age in what most would consider a comfortable life.

            The world of The Membranes is familiar to us in 2021 but was quite prescient in 1996. In this version of Earth, the planet has been ravaged by climate change, humans have retreated to domes under the ocean, cyborgs have become cheap labor, and giant media conglomerates control what information we have access to in our day-to-day lives.

            The overall message in ¡Hola Papi! is that each of us is in charge of the narrative we tell ourselves about our lives. Indeed, each story is a variation on the idea that it’s important to unlearn a tendency to be overly critical of oneself, or, as he puts it, to marshal “the courage to express myself in ways I hadn’t allowed myself to before.”