An exquisitely melancholy, reflective, and ultimately hopeful personal history of love and longing.
A brokenhearted transgender woman reflects on the evanescence of romantic love.
A decade ago, author Faye was traversing South London after-parties, openly apathetic about the notions of dating, falling in love, and relationships. Now, as a single woman in her mid-30s, her attitudes have changed. She’d found herself besotted, immersed in a love affair with a cis man for a year and a half, which then collapsed due to their own diverging styles of loving and her inability to bear biological offspring. Faye’s journey grieving the devastating breakup forms what she considers to be one of the “most ubiquitous of struggles” in her life as a trans woman. While she confesses that the excruciatingly painful “lovesickness devoured me from the inside out,” it also afforded her moments of formative reflection. Faye eloquently elaborates on how the idyllic and frustratingly elusive search for companionship has since evolved, forcing her to revisit and confront the old, damaging, self-destructive ideas about lovelessness and unworthiness she’d experienced as a dissonant, gender dysphoric young adult. The author’s referential and historical discussion about the ideal of romantic love is as fascinating as chapters on Faye’s trials on gay dating apps, the “tiny teenage humiliations” of adult male-to-female transition, attempts at separating emotional vulnerability and sex, and the culture of shame and invisibility around trans women as desirable, sexual people. Faye’s narrative diverts further still to debate the tenets of desire, motherhood, gender-critical feminism, and queer friendship, as well as addiction, her father’s alcoholism, and her own journey toward sobriety. A closing chapter on religion is awkwardly extraneous, but Faye’s prose is so conversational, readers won’t even notice. With language as crisp and passionate as that found in her report on systemic transphobia and social justice, The Transgender Issue (2021), Faye’s book deliberates over the pleasures and pitfalls of relationships, navigating them in a way that will appeal to all readers, regardless of their sexuality.
An exquisitely melancholy, reflective, and ultimately hopeful personal history of love and longing.Pub Date: May 13, 2025
ISBN: 9780374615529
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: March 22, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2025
The heartbreaking story of an emotionally battered child delivered with captivating candor and grace.
The former iCarly star reflects on her difficult childhood.
In her debut memoir, titled after her 2020 one-woman show, singer and actor McCurdy (b. 1992) reveals the raw details of what she describes as years of emotional abuse at the hands of her demanding, emotionally unstable stage mom, Debra. Born in Los Angeles, the author, along with three older brothers, grew up in a home controlled by her mother. When McCurdy was 3, her mother was diagnosed with breast cancer. Though she initially survived, the disease’s recurrence would ultimately take her life when the author was 21. McCurdy candidly reconstructs those in-between years, showing how “my mom emotionally, mentally, and physically abused me in ways that will forever impact me.” Insistent on molding her only daughter into “Mommy’s little actress,” Debra shuffled her to auditions beginning at age 6. As she matured and starting booking acting gigs, McCurdy remained “desperate to impress Mom,” while Debra became increasingly obsessive about her daughter’s physical appearance. She tinted her daughter’s eyelashes, whitened her teeth, enforced a tightly monitored regimen of “calorie restriction,” and performed regular genital exams on her as a teenager. Eventually, the author grew understandably resentful and tried to distance herself from her mother. As a young celebrity, however, McCurdy became vulnerable to eating disorders, alcohol addiction, self-loathing, and unstable relationships. Throughout the book, she honestly portrays Debra’s cruel perfectionist personality and abusive behavior patterns, showing a woman who could get enraged by everything from crooked eyeliner to spilled milk. At the same time, McCurdy exhibits compassion for her deeply flawed mother. Late in the book, she shares a crushing secret her father revealed to her as an adult. While McCurdy didn’t emerge from her childhood unscathed, she’s managed to spin her harrowing experience into a sold-out stage act and achieve a form of catharsis that puts her mind, body, and acting career at peace.
The heartbreaking story of an emotionally battered child delivered with captivating candor and grace.Pub Date: Aug. 9, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-982185-82-4
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 30, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2022
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
An intriguing but uneven family memoir and travelogue.
An author’s trip to Venice takes a distinctly Borgesian turn.
In November 2020, soccer club Venizia F.C. offered Nigerian American author Madu a writing residency as part of its plan “to turn the team into a global entity of fashion, culture, and sports.” Flying to Venice for the fellowship, he felt guilty about leaving his immigrant parents, who were shocked to learn upon moving to the U.S. years earlier that their Nigerian teaching certifications were invalid, forcing his father to work as a stocking clerk at Rite Aid to support the family. Madu’s experiences in Venice are incidental to what is primarily a story about his family, especially his strained relationship with his father, who was disappointed with many of his son’s choices. Unfortunately, the author’s seeming disinterest in Venice renders much of the narrative colorless. He says the trip across the Ponte della Libertà bridge was “magical,” but nothing he describes—the “endless water on both sides,” the nearby seagulls—is particularly remarkable. Little in the text conveys a sense of place or the unique character of his surroundings. Madu is at his best when he focuses on family dynamics and his observations that, in the largely deserted city, “I was one of the few Black people around.” He cites Borges, giving special note to the author’s “The House of Asterion,” in which the minotaur “explains his situation as a creature and as a creature within the labyrinth” of multiple mirrors. This notion leads to the Borgesian turn in the book’s second half, when, in an extended sequence, Madu imagines himself transformed into a minotaur, with “the head of a bull” and his body “larger, thicker, powerful but also cumbersome.” It’s an engaging passage, although stylistically out of keeping with much of what has come before.
An intriguing but uneven family memoir and travelogue.Pub Date: April 2, 2024
ISBN: 9781953368669
Page Count: 144
Publisher: Belt Publishing
Review Posted Online: Nov. 17, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2023
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