Genuinely insightful through and through—a must-read for anyone interested in the trans experience.
The warm, engaging memoir about how a transsexual woman and her family came to terms with her transition from male to female.
Best-selling author Boylan (English/Colby Coll.; I'm Looking Through You: Growing Up Haunted, 2008, etc.) started out life as a boy named James. She began cross-dressing as a young teen and kept her struggles with gender identity a secret throughout her adolescence and young adulthood. As James, Boylan believed that if a woman could love her deeply enough, she "would be content to stay a man." She eventually did marry and became the father of two boys. But when Boylan turned 40, she knew that she had to make "the thing [she] felt on the inside visible” to the world and decided to undergo the painful process of gender transition. Remarkably, the woman she married decided to stay rather than seek "the love of some nice man," and her two sons accepted her as their parent with little difficulty. Boylan knew that she and her family had been "very lucky" to be able to maintain strong, loving relationships with each other throughout her strange and difficult journey. The more she embraced her new identity and life, however, the more she found herself questioning received notions of mother- and fatherhood. In an effort to broaden her understanding of these and related issues, Boylan talked to fellow writers (including Augusten Burroughs, Edward Albee and Ann Beattie), former students and others from across the straight-trans-gay spectrum about their experiences with marriage, family and parenting; she includes these interviews in what she calls "Time Outs" from her memoir. This informal investigation and her touchingly funny and always candid story work together to reveal the book's ultimate truth: that "to accept the wondrous scope of gender is to affirm the vast potential of life in all its messy, unfathomable beauty.”
Genuinely insightful through and through—a must-read for anyone interested in the trans experience.Pub Date: April 23, 2013
ISBN: 978-0767921763
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Jan. 13, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2013
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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