Book: Paper Doll
Author: Dylan Mulvaney
Publisher: Abrams Image
Year: 2025
Rating: 3 out of 5 stars

Synopsis : “When Dylan Mulvaney came out as a woman online, she went viral overnight, emerging as a trailblazing voice on social media. Dylan’s personal coming-out story blossomed into a platform for advocacy and empowerment for trans people all over the world. With her “Days of Girlhood” series, she connected with followers by exploring what it means to be a girl, from experimenting with makeup to story times to spilling the tea, while never shying away from discussing the transphobia she faced online. Nevertheless, she was determined to be a beacon of positivity.
But shortly after she celebrated day 365 of being a girl, it all came screeching to a halt when an innocuous post sparked a media firestorm and right-wing backlash she couldn’t have expected. Despite the vitriolic press, Dylan was determined to rediscover the light, even in the darkest of situations.
In Paper Doll, Dylan pulls back the curtain with a witty and intimate reflection on her life pre- and post-transition. She covers everything from her first big break in theater to the first time her dad recognized her as a girl to how she handled scandals, cancelations, and…tucking. It’s both laugh-out-loud funny and powerfully honest, and is a love letter to her younger self, who didn’t experience the queer joy she now lives daily.”

Review : Dylan Mulvaney’s breakout book Paper Doll is an exploration into girlhood, bouncing back and forth between her first 365 days immediately after coming out as a girl, told through journal-ish entries, and her life during what she refers to as “post-beergate”, a reference to the wildly public, months long, right-wing backlash to her Bud Light partnership on TikTok. Dylan prefaces the book with the note that she writes how she talks, and while I appreciate the candor, I think the style in which she’s written this book felt stilted and, at times, a bit inauthentic. I don’t want to be misunderstood here – Dylan does delve into a lot of personal and intimate topics on an authentic level, but the delivery leaves something to be desired. Paper Dolls reads less like how someone’s talking to you as a friend, and more like how someone might be talking in a viral video which became a bit of a challenge. I think it will find it’s perfect audience, but stylistically, it wasn’t my favorite writing.

But that brings me to the first point I’d like to make before we really get into this review : content warnings. Dylan is open and honest about the mental health struggles she’s endured through her life, both before transitioning and while navigating beergate. She discusses body dysmorphia (but also bodily joy!), suicidal ideology, disassociation, depression, people pleasing, and anxiety. If any of the above topics feel difficult for you, please approach this book with gentleness. Dylan has a positive and upbeat way of conveying her experiences, but she also doesn’t shy away from the very real struggles that many queer and trans people experience, she speaks about her own struggles with frankness and it’s important to say so up front. She does include a small content warning, but doesn’t specify what the content might be, so please be kind to yourself if you choose to read this book.

Aside from the challenges this book faces with writing style, I found Dylan’s use of tense to be loose, at best. I think it’s an ambitious move to jump from present to past tense between two different writing styles (as discussed above), and perhaps that was a bit overly ambitious here for a first book? I was left wondering what was happening with the editing process as her journal entries bounced from tense to tense – most glaringly at the start of the book. I did find that her voice and style and tense all smoothed out a bit as the book went on, but the tense jumping was hard to get past as I was reading. While this is still an uncorrected proof, I did feel that there were additional editorial corrections needed and I’m not sure how much of that will happen prior to the initial printing. Either way, tense and tone alone were enough to warrant this book 3 rather than 5 stars, for me.

I appreciated how much Dylan spoke about both the good and the bad, with Paper Dolls traversing intense moments of public outcry – I wonder if anyone in the US was able to navigate the last few years without seeing some highly public right-wing figure shooting cases of Bud Light in protest over a small partnership with a trans girl living her life on social media. It’s important to see how our actions impact the people we see as celebrities, particularly those whose fame has happened seemingly overnight thanks to apps like TikTok. No one is immune from the harmful actions and words of internet trolls and bullies and it’s commendable that Dylan opened her world up to us, not only as a content creator, but as an author, sharing her grief, her disappointment, and her darkest moments from within these spaces. There’s a great strength that arises from this book, and while a lot of what Dylan’s written comes across as pink and poppy and bubblegum-flavored (or maybe Dominos pan pizza flavored), she allows herself to be witnessed as something more.

Finally, my last critique. While Dylan at times makes mention of her absolutely enormous privilege, both as a content creator and as a passing trans girl, they are brief and occasionally feel a bit performative. She mentions her privilege but doesn’t necessarily mention what she’s doing to amplify those around her who have less privilege – she acknowledges, but brushes past. I felt at first as though maybe it’s asking too much for someone who’s been thrust into the spotlight to use their precious resources to be an activist, but ultimately I came to the conclusion that those with platforms as large as Dylan’s have a responsibility to do the work. And I think Dylan might be, or at least is trying to, but I also think it’s addressed in a way, in her book, that feel glib and passive. It comes across as performative, and that rubbed me the wrong way.

I think Paper Dolls offers and important insight into so many people’s favorite content creator, into coming out, and into the perception of girlhood, something each girl in the world gets to define for herself. It might not be the perfect book, but it was fun and enjoyable to witness the queer joy Dylan cultivates in her life. It’s a quick read, it’s compelling, and it felt approachable, most of all.

Advice : If you love Dylan Mulvaney, if you enjoy a queer book, if you like a memoir, or even if you simply followed along as beergate unfolded, I think you’ll enjoy this book. If you don’t enjoy social media jargon, you might not like how this book was written, but it’s a quick read so maybe that’ll make up for it!