Book Club - Ernest Price’s The Pyramid of Needs

Final Draft - Great Conversations

Ernest Price is a transgender man working as a secondary English teacher in Naarm/Melbourne. His writing has been published by Queerstories and Overland. The Pyramid of Needs is his first novel.

Linda is ready to hit the big time. The fact that there aren’t a lot of seventy year olds going viral just means it will be even more sensational when she does. She’s a young seventy anyway, barely even sixty really and tik tok takes off ten years. The fame is important and viral clicks can't help but lead to more sales of her Supreme Self Supplements.

Yes, Linda is just one livestream away from fame and fortune and nothing can stand in her way.

Jack is living his best life as a teacher in Naarm/Melbourne. Or at least he’s trying to when his older sister Alice gives him a call. Alice and Jack’s mother has taken a fall, apparently she was live streaming at their home in Noosa and tripped over a garden rake?!

Alice insists they fly up to Queensland and look after their parents but Jack hasn’t spoken to Linda since he came out as a trans man more than ten years ago. Alice can talk to him about regret, but why does he have to put himself at risk for the family who rejected him?

The Pyramid of Needs is a dark and insightful comedy about family dynamics that takes an unflinching look at what it means to be trans in a world where your very humanity can be leveraged for clicks and hate online.

The novel throws us immediately into Linda’s delusion that she will make it; fame, fortune the whole shebang is only she can leverage her downline to maximise subscribers before m month end. See Linda is into pyramid schemes (at least that’s what the haters call them).

In Linda we are presented with the triumph of individualism about to breathe its last gasp. Linda has been manifesting success for so long she has not only ignored her son for ten years, she might even be leveraging Jack’s transition for clout.

We are not meant to love Linda, probably not even meant to like her. But we are meant to understand what Jack has gone through to be who he is.

The novel counterpoints Linda’s narrative with Jack’s more balanced, albeit anxious storytelling. Jack knows the trip is a bad idea but like so many a Shakespearean tragic hero before him he must go along for the ride.

The action of The Pyramid of Needs is in the brilliant interplay between the Kelly family as they try, or perhaps fumble towards family unity. Even as Alice tries to negotiate some sort of detente, Linda maneuvers the siblings to become props in her next big livestream event.

The parallels between Linda’s Pyramid scheme fetish and her life as a Noosa influencer in all its smoke and mirrors glory are clear. What the novel also cleverly shows us is how Linda tries to marshall that same level of self delusion to reshape Jack’s reality and his life since his transition.

The novel shows us the personal pain and struggle as Jack faces his mother misgendering and dead naming him. We get to see inside Jack’s world, where he works to be a good person, the sort of teacher he never had, but also must deal with the loneliness and difficulty of the damage from his youth.

I loved The Pyramid of Needs in its darkness and its light. It has an ending I won’t quickly forget and in Jack we have a character who grabs your heart almost as quickly as Linda tries to poison it with vitriol.