A fierce, unsparing memoir.
A transgender actress and businesswoman tells the no-holds-barred story of her transition from male to female.
DuBois experienced her transgender awakening at age 4. Her parents put her in a dress—the only dry garment available—after they rescued her from drowning, and she realized, “I was a girl and the dress would always be part of me.” Over time, she also became aware that she was an exhibitionist who craved punishment from dominant females. Dressing up in women’s clothes in secret and taking her sister’s birth control pills to help her look more feminine, she hid her sexuality from her parents, especially her cruel, alcoholic father. In college, DuBois did drugs and stole women’s clothes instead of going to class; she also developed a taste for submissive role-playing. Her life became increasingly erratic when she moved to San Diego. Now a drug addict, she started selling and was eventually arrested for dealing. At the same time, she began efforts to transition, but her history of drug abuse made her ineligible for hormone replacement therapy. Desperate to put her messy past behind her, she married a woman to whom she revealed that it had been her “drug-addled world”—rather than her core identity—that had given rise to her desire to transition. The pair moved to Oregon where they lived the straight life that DuBois thought would save her but only drove her to drink and do drugs in secret. A family crisis tore the fragile bonds that held them together. Unmoored but realizing she needed to finish the therapy she had begun in San Diego, DuBois began the painful but ultimately liberating process of coming out in midlife. While the chronology of the story is sometimes confusing, the narrative is nevertheless quite compelling. The author’s resilience and ability to come to terms with her difficult, sometimes-bizarre past are both inspiring and life-affirming.
A fierce, unsparing memoir.Pub Date: Aug. 22, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-299-31390-6
Page Count: 218
Publisher: Univ. of Wisconsin
Review Posted Online: June 4, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 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 moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
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