A multifaceted, rich, and moving exploration of the trans experience.
A Texan decides to have gender-affirming surgery in this memoir.
Jeremy Ivester was born as Emily in 1989. Growing up in Austin, he wanted to be one of the boys. He loved short haircuts, male clothes, and football, playing on teams where he held his own as the only one perceived to be a girl on the field. His idyllic tomboy existence was upended in middle school, where he was excluded by classmates as his gender nonconformity became more glaring in the midst of adolescent dating culture. He was further horrified when puberty gave him breasts and curves that felt decidedly unnatural. A decadelong process of self-discovery and self-adjustment ensued. Google searches helped Jeremy put the term “asexual” to his perennially misfiring dates and lack of interest in either sex. An MTV episode of True Life on gender-affirming surgery proved a revelation—maybe he could have the masculine body he dreamed of. After much exploration and equivocation—“I don’t necessarily feel like I’m a male….None of the pronouns feel right”—top surgery and hormones allowed Jeremy’s body to reflect his gender identity, and he experienced that quintessential rite of passage: chugging brews with male buddies, shirtless. (“I felt the sticky beer all over my chin and chest,” he recalls exuberantly.) His saga, penned by his mother, Jo Ivester, and based on interviews and Jeremy’s video diary of his transition, incorporates reminiscences in both their voices and those of his father, siblings, and in-laws. It’s not a traumatic coming-out story: Jeremy’s family and co-workers were generally supportive. But there is quieter drama as they all navigate uncharted emotional territory, with Jo feeling unspoken anguish that Jeremy has decided to forgo marriage and children and young Jeremy enduring the aching loneliness that many gender-nonconforming kids feel: “My throat hurt and my chest tightened, and I felt isolated and deserted as I thought about how long it had been since I’d hung out with my teammates like when we were little kids.” The result is a heartwarming story that anyone with a complicated life and identity can relate to.
A multifaceted, rich, and moving exploration of the trans experience.Pub Date: April 21, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-63152-886-6
Page Count: 352
Publisher: She Writes Press
Review Posted Online: Jan. 21, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2020
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
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
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
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