A fascinating, gripping, moving memoir perfect for anyone interested in learning more about gender identity or about the...
A visceral memoir that deftly explores Grace’s experience fronting seminal punk band Against Me! as well as the years she spent grappling with gender dysphoria.
From the time she was 5 watching Madonna perform “Material Girl,” Grace, who was born in 1980 as Thomas James Gabel, knew that she wanted to be a woman. Her father was an Army officer, and Grace’s family moved frequently. In 1991, Grace’s parents divorced, and she moved to Naples, Florida, with her mother. Frequently bullied by her peers, she turned to music as an escape. After playing in local bands and getting into the punk scene, Grace decided to create her own solo music project, Against Me!, which eventually grew into a successful and highly influential punk band. The author traces her band’s slow but significant rise to fame, discussing the many issues she faced as they rose—most significantly, the constant worry that the originally anarchist group was “selling out” as well as the debilitating substance abuse that went hand in hand with a touring lifestyle. Grace also explores her constant feelings of gender dysphoria, her attempts to suppress them, and, eventually, her realization that they were not going to go away, which ultimately led to acceptance. Throughout, the author’s voice is candid and raw, and she delivers a touching, occasionally heartbreaking firsthand narrative of what it feels like to be born in the wrong body. “By coming out,” she writes, “I indirectly triggered changes around me….People I’d known for years and saw every day cycled out of my world. It wasn’t that they were transphobic or unsupportive, it was just that things were different.” The book is also a revealing look behind the scenes at the music industry and what it takes, and means, for a band to “make it.”
A fascinating, gripping, moving memoir perfect for anyone interested in learning more about gender identity or about the complicated inner workings of the music business.Pub Date: Nov. 15, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-316-38795-8
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Hachette
Review Posted Online: Nov. 18, 2016
A courageous and thought-provoking memoir.
A bestselling memoirist’s account of coping with an unexpected midlife evolution in sexual identity.
When Wizenberg, who runs the popular Orangette blog, received a jury duty summons, she never thought that it would lead to divorce. In court, her eyes were immediately drawn to a female defense attorney dressed in a men’s suit. Her thoughts lingered on the attractive stranger after each day’s proceedings. But guilt at being “a woman wearing a wedding ring” made the author feel increasingly guilty for the obsession that seized her. Her husband, Brandon, a successful Seattle restaurateur, and their daughter were the “stars” that guided her path; the books she had written revolved like planets around the sun of their relationship and the restaurants they had founded together. However, in the weeks that followed, Wizenberg shocked herself by telling her husband about the attraction and suggesting that they open their marriage to polyamorous experimentation. Reading the work of writers like Adrienne Rich who had discovered their lesbianism later in life, Wizenberg engaged in deep, sometimes-painful self-interrogation. The author remembered the story of a married uncle, a man she resembled, who came out as gay and then later died of AIDS as well as a brief lesbian flirtation in late adolescence where “nothing happened.” Eventually, Wizenberg began dating the lawyer and fell in love with her. Wizenberg then began the painful process of separating herself from Brandon and, later, from their restaurant businesses that she had quietly seen as impediments to her writing. Feeling unfulfilled by Nora, a self-professed “stone top” who preferred to give pleasure rather than receive it, Wizenberg began to date a nonbinary person named Ash. Through that relationship, she came to embrace both gender and sexual fluidity. Interwoven throughout with research insights into the complexity of female sexual identity, Wizenberg’s book not only offers a glimpse into the shifting nature of selfhood; it also celebrates one woman’s hard-won acceptance of her own sexual difference.
A courageous and thought-provoking memoir.Pub Date: May 12, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-4197-4299-6
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Abrams
Review Posted Online: Feb. 16, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
Graceful and deeply felt.
A collection of personal pieces, combined into an affecting memoir by longtime New Yorker editor Angell.
The author, a noted baseball writer (A Pitcher’s Story, 2001, etc.), has many intimate connections to the magazine Gardner Botsford once dubbed “The Comic Weekly,” in which most of these reminiscences originally appeared. His mother, Katherine, was the New Yorker’s fiction editor; years later, Angell held her former job—and occupied her office. His stepfather, E.B. White, was the magazine’s most important contributor during its most influential years. The memoir mostly concerns New Yorker colleagues and other remarkable people who have been a part of the author’s life. His father, lawyer Ernest Angell, lost Katherine to the younger White but over the years became a figure of immense importance to Roger. Angell loved his mother, loved White, loved his first wife (not much here about the cause of their 1960s divorce), loved his coworkers, loved his job. His portraits are really tributes, whether of the well-known William Maxwell, V.S. Pritchett, Harold Ross or William Shawn, or the lesser-known Botsford and Emily Hahn. Angell offers some New Yorker–insider tidbits (Ian Frazier mimicked Shawn’s voice so well that he could fool colleagues over the phone) and a bit more than you want to know about some of his aunts, one of whom wrote a book about Willa Cather. A dazzling story-within-a-story describes a 1940 round of golf with a mysterious woman who lost a valuable ring. The author seems uncertain how an iPod works but reveals an expertise with machine guns. His fickle memory frustrates and bemuses him. Sometimes he can recall only sensory images; sometimes the story unreeling in his mind skips, stops, fades, dissolves into something else. In several of his most appealing passages, he writes about the fictions that memory fashions.
Graceful and deeply felt.Pub Date: May 8, 2006
ISBN: 0-15-101350-0
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Harcourt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2006
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