With ‘Paper Doll,’ Dylan Mulvaney Wrote the Book on Girlhood. Now What?

It was early February, and Dylan Mulvaney was floating on the high seas — somewhere in the Caribbean, perhaps near St. Martin — on a cruise ship filled with nearly 5,000 gay men. Ms. Mulvaney, the 28-year-old performer, trans video diarist and cultural lighting rod at the center of an infamous Bud Light boycott in 2023, reported with a bright voice and wide smile that she was one of about “three women total” on the ship.

She was there to perform musical comedy for the cruisers; four cast members from the onboard production of “Mamma Mia!” served as her backup dancers. In a video interview from her cabin, Ms. Mulvaney identified the “one central question” that has lately been her North Star: “Does this decision help me become a Broadway diva?”

Ms. Mulvaney was playing a chipper missionary in the national tour of “Book of Mormon” in early 2020 when the coronavirus pandemic brought all theater to a halt. She redirected her boundless energy to making videos on TikTok, often adding melody to her intimate straight-to-the-camera addresses.

Her subject matter was varied at first: “Bridgerton” riffs, theater world fodder, a series interviewing animals at the San Diego Zoo. But in isolation, she began acknowledging some personal truths she had known since she was 4. In March of 2022, she recorded the first video in “100 Days of Girlhood,” a series of confessional TikTok check-ins about the beginning of her transition. The likes and comments rolled in. Ms. Mulvaney writes about the shock of jumping to a million followers in under a month. By 2023, she would have over 10 million.

Her online persona, as a friend describes it in Ms. Mulvaney’s forthcoming memoir, “Paper Doll: Notes From a Late Bloomer,” was a “very palatable” trans Ellen DeGeneres. “Ellen was one of my greatest role models — she made gay people seem not only normal but fun and relatable,” Ms. Mulvaney writes. But for her book, Ms. Mulvaney showed a bawdier side. (Hookups are recounted, sometimes in detail.) Some of her fans, she said, will probably find this book “a little raunchier than expected.”

At half past noon on the second day of the cruise, she hadn’t eaten yet, so she ordered Diet Coke and French fries. She wore white oval sunglasses as if they were a headband, a prim cardigan with gold buttons, pink Juicy sweatpants and, she said, a spritz of Baccarat Rouge. “This is the duality of my ’fits,” she said. “You’re either going to get Y2K Paris Hilton or you’re getting Audrey Hepburn.”

After two years of being a blonde, Ms. Mulvaney dyed her hair back to brown the week before setting sail. She had some reservations about what she described as “a big pivot.”

“I’m about to go promote this book now as a brunette, which at first I thought was a huge problem,” she said. Ever conscious of her image after three years as an influencer, Ms. Mulvaney was hesitant to modify her personal brand so close to the book’s release. Ultimately, she decided the change was a perfect bookend for the distinct period of her life that the memoir covers.

“It feels like a character in this romance novel that’s a part of me, but isn’t all of me,” she said.

Around 2022, with Ms. Mulvaney’s fame on the ascent, her agents asked her for a list of “dream brands” she would want to promote. Ms. Mulvaney had her answer ready: “Tiffany’s and beer.” She didn’t care what beer; Ms. Mulvaney loves all beer. She loves it particularly, she writes in her memoir, because “it seems so contradictory to my overall aesthetic and I love to surprise people.”

In April 2023, Ms. Mulvaney posted a sponsored video for Bud Light in which she showed off a personalized can featuring her face sent to her by Bud Light — a gift celebrating a year of her documented girlhood. The video touched off what researchers at Harvard Business School called “one of the biggest boycotts in American history.” Angry protesters denounced the brand on TikTok, ultimately leading to bomb threats, a country musician banning sales of the beer on his tour and a Twitter video of Kid Rock firing at cases of Bud Light with a submachine gun.

In the month following Ms. Mulvaney’s sponsored post, Bud Light sales fell an estimated 17 percent. In the memoir, with a brave sense of humor that doesn’t gloss over fear, Ms. Mulvaney recounts fending off paparazzi, arming herself with a kitchen knife for fear of a stalker, navigating death threats and thoughts of suicide.

Seeing the debacle as just a few chapters in a book allowed Ms. Mulvaney to contextualize the fiasco as an important incident in her life, but not a defining one — something she was able to do only after using the experience as an opportunity for self-reflection. She has since repurposed the episode as fodder for cultural critique, stand-up comedy and a one-woman musical. Ms. Mulvaney loves to perform and she loves a good story — and the Bud Light controversy is a good story.

The episode, she said, “isn’t going to be in the next book if I do write another book. What’s really exciting is that I still, hopefully, have so much time in my life to show everyone else the other sides of me.”

Ms. Mulvaney’s cultural cachet during this time reached a level she hopes to never see again. She pointed to her phone’s wallpaper: a photo of Alan Cumming and Kristin Chenoweth. “That’s my ideal level of success,” she said. “They are doing Broadway shows, they’re hosting, they’re performing on cruise ships, and they have a really healthy level of personal downtime and relationships and privacy.”

There’s an irony to Ms. Mulvaney’s glorification of privacy after years of courting views and sponsorships by broadcasting daily updates about her personal life. It’s a tension present within some of her content: In one TikTok video recorded at the 2023 Grammy Awards, Ms. Mulvaney approaches the trans actress Laverne Cox, whom she brightly informs was “on my 2023 vision board.”

Ms. Cox semi-faces Ms. Mulvaney and semi-faces the camera as she says: “It’s insane that you’re, like, documenting so much of your life. Make sure you keep things for yourself. Everything cannot be for the public.” Viewers can see Ms. Mulvaney’s face, in real time, trying to absorb this advice.

Alok Vaid-Menon, a comedian and poet who lives in New York and uses they/them pronouns, formed a friendship with Ms. Mulvaney after seeing her video posts and then inviting her to one of their shows. “This woman is an artist!” Vaid-Menon wrote in an email from Namibia, where they are on a comedy tour. “It became immediately clear to me that social media was only a means to an end, she belonged onstage.”

Ms. Mulvaney’s gutsy humor about thorny circumstances is a quality her friend Jonathan Van Ness, a “Queer Eye” co-host, especially loves. “She’s spunky!” Van Ness said. “She’s a theater girl and very fun.”

Ms. Mulvaney, who has since moved from her West Hollywood studio into a house in Laurel Canyon, says she genuinely loves documenting the minutiae of her life. In college, she would sometimes post dozens of Snapchats a day to her hundred or so friends on the app. She still loves recording herself and often thinks of her life decisions as things to debut on a platform. (Exhibit A: her recently dyed hair.)

But the memoir ends with a declaration of intention to protect, if not necessarily her privacy, then perhaps her interiority. “I’m trying this new thing where I keep certain things to myself,” Ms. Mulvaney writes. “Little yummy womanly moments just for me.”