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 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
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