Role: The story's transsexual heroine

Background: After Myron has his sex-change operation, Myra movies from New York to Hollywood to claim an inheritance from her uncle Buck Loner and to symbolically destroy the American male 

Relationships: Alter ego of Myron; niece of Buck Loner; tormenter of Rusty Godowsky; progresses from laughing at to loving Mary Ann Pringle

Age: 27

Home town: New York (?)

Physical characteristics: "Superbly shaped breasts reminiscent of those sported by Jean Harlow in Hell's Angels," "divine legs" (all per Myra)

Goal: "The destruction of the last vestigial traces of traditional manhood in the race in order to realign the sexes, thus reducing population while increasing human happiness and preparing humanity for its next stage."

In the end:Succeeds in raping Rusty and claiming her inheritance from her uncle Buck Loner; reverts to Myron after hit-and-run car accident; marries Mary Ann; appointed co-director of Buck Loner's acting school

Quotes:

"I am Myra Breckinridge whom no man will ever possess. Clad only in garter belt and one dress shield, I held off the entire elite of the Trobriand Islanders, a race who possess no words for 'why' or 'because.' Wielding a stone axe, I broke the arms, the limbs, the balls of their finest warriors, my beauty blinding them, as it does all men ..."

"Myra Breckinridge is a dish, and never forget it, you motherfuckers, as the children say nowadays."

"... Beneath my window the Strip (Sunset Boulevard in Hollywood, California) is filled with noisy cars, barely moving through air so dark with carbon monoxide that one can almost hear in the drivers' lungs the cancer cells as they gaily proliferate like spermatozoa in a healthy boy's testicles."

"...I find it extraordinarily difficult getting through to them even the simplest thought, but since I am an American brought up during the great age of film, I want to believe that our culture is still alive, still able to create a masterpiece like Since You Went Away, and so I must conclude that what you have assembled here are the national dregs, the misfits, the neurotics, the daydreamers, the unrealists, the -- in short -- fuckups who form a significant minority in our culture, witness what happened November twenty-second, 1963, at Dallas!" (p. 47)

"I preferred to be Greer Garson, a gracious lady whose compassionate breasts were more suited to be last pillow for a dying youth than a baubles for the coarse hands of some horny boy." (p. 58)

"Much of my interest in the capture of Rusty is the thought that he is so entirely involved with Mary Ann. That gives value to what I mean to seize. If it were freely offered, I would reject it. Fortunately he hates me which excites me and so my triumph, when it comes, will be all the sweeter." (p. 94) 

"Although I am not a lesbian, I do share the normal human response to whatever is attractive physically in either sex. I say normal human response, realizing that our culture has resolutely resisted the idea of bisexuality. We insist that there is only one right way of having sex: man and woman joined together to make baby; all else is wrong. Worse, the neo-Freudian rabbis ... believe that what they call heterosexuality is "healthy," that homosexuality is unhealthy, and that bisexuality is a myth despite their master Freud's stated conviction that all human beings are attracted to both sexes." (p. 103)

"I need one man to break down, not twenty to serve." (p. 105)

"Talent is not what Uncle Buck and I deal in, Miss Van Allen. We deal in myths." (p. 121)   

"But to be truly happy, I think you must both begin to think a little bit about changing your sexual attitudes, becoming more open, less limited, abandoning old-fashioned stereotypes of what is manly and what is feminine. As it is, if you, Rusty, should ever find a boy sexually interesting, you might or might not do something about it but whatever you did do or did not do you'd certainly feel guilty because you've been taught that to be a man is to be physically strong, self-reliant, and a lover of girls, one at a time." (p. 148)

"... Modern man is not self-reliant and as for making love to girls, that is only one aspect of his nature ..." (p. 148)

"But in America only women are supposed to worry about their appearance. The real man never looks into a mirror. That's effeminate." (p. 149)

"First, I let you talk me out of giving you the venereal disease examination, and now you're suddenly getting dressed, without permission, just when the subject once more has to do with your penis. Rusty, I am very, very suspicious." (p. 175)

"Now you will find out what it is the girl feels when you play the man with her." (p. 183)

"... Since that night of nights in the infirmary all my desires to dominate the male have been -- if not satisfied -- in abeyance ..." (p. 219)

"Only through a traumatic shock, through terrifying and humiliating him, could I hope to change his view of what is proper masculine behavior. To keep him from breeding, and so adding to the world's overpopulation, I was forced to violate everything he has been taught to regard as sacred, including the sanctity of his tiny back door..." (p. 210)

"... We women are instinctively tender, even when we are achieving total dominion. As a woman, I was touched by Rusty's tears. I even experienced a maternal warmth while tidying up his poor bloody bottom. That is woman's role, to make the wound and then to heal it. (p. 228)

"... Twice I have punished that head. Once by a literal decapitation, killing Myron so that Myra might be born and then, symbolically, by torturing and mocking Rusty's sex in order to avenge Myron for the countless times that he had been made victim by that mitred one-eyed beast, forever battering blindly at any orifice, seeking to scatter wide the dreaded seed that has already so filled up the world with superfluous people that our end is now at hand ..." (p. 234)

" ... I had always believed that between the operation, on the one hand, and the rape of someone like Rusty on the other, I would become Woman Triumphant, exercising total power over men as men once exerted that same power over Myron and still do over the usual woman." (p. 236)

"She's not my girl friend. She has a horror of lesbianism." (p. 258)

"... Happiness, like the proverbial bluebird, is to be found in your own backyard if you just know where to look." (p. 264)

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