A thoroughly enjoyable hybrid of flashy pictorial, artsy production, and outspoken autobiography.
A singular fixture on the New York City club scene reveals the private details of her gender transition in a photo-heavy memoir.
Buxom performance artist Lepore, 49, boasts having “the most expensive body on earth,” yet her beginnings were humble. She was born Armand to a suburban New Jersey chemical engineer and his elegant, sophisticated “trophy wife.” The author’s early unhappiness, beginning at age 5, stemmed from a passionate yearning to become her truest self: a girl. Dreaming of long blonde hair and excitedly reaching for Barbies (“everything I wanted to be”) instead of Hot Wheels, Lepore frustrated her father and compassionately doted over her mother, who suffered from intermittent paranoid schizophrenia. Though her parents eventually separated, Lepore was determined to master makeup skills, the rules of femininity, the ability to please men with her body, and the wonder of hormones. This all led to the sex change procedure she had been envisioning to make her physically whole. A failed marriage behind her, she went on to conquer the Manhattan party scene in the 1990s with melodramatic appearances and adored performances. Complementing the author’s wonderfully candid, unrushed text are pages of impeccably styled, posed, and provocative photographs—many seminude—showcasing an obvious love of fashion, glamour, and pride in her own expensively enhanced female form. “I associate dressing up with mental stability,” writes the author, who doesn’t skimp on intimate personal details. Scattered throughout the book are sidebars of personal factoids and clever tips as well as snippets on everything from her personal grooming particulars and the dos and don’ts of female hair and nail care. Though confined to just a few pages, Lepore offers some sage advice for transgender youth and those embarking on their own journeys into gender transformation. Through generous photos and a narrative that could stand alone, this is a must-have collector’s item for readers eager for a glimpse into the unique world of a fearless chanteuse.
A thoroughly enjoyable hybrid of flashy pictorial, artsy production, and outspoken autobiography.Pub Date: April 18, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-942872-85-6
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Regan Arts
Review Posted Online: March 6, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2017
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
SEEN & HEARD
© Copyright 2026 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
