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3.9 AVERAGE
3.9 AVERAGE
I really wanted to love this book, but there really wasn’t a beginning, middle, or an end. I can’t imagine the courage it must have taken to tell all of the stories the author did, but I just came away feeling sad and without hope for his happiness. I so want to be wrong, but that was the feeling I left with.
challenging
emotional
hopeful
medium-paced
P Carl was not as poignant as I wanted
challenging
emotional
reflective
fast-paced
I plan to come back and give a thorough review at some point, but I can't just leave 5 stars and walk away like I do with other books.
This book is not long, but it took me over three weeks to read. That's not normal for me. I usually read a book in less than a week. It was hard to read, though. Not because it was bad! It was the opposite! It was so good! But it was so painfully true and, honestly, painfully relatable. I need to process this book and come back to review. If you read this before I'm able to do that, just take my review as positive and read the book.
This book is not long, but it took me over three weeks to read. That's not normal for me. I usually read a book in less than a week. It was hard to read, though. Not because it was bad! It was the opposite! It was so good! But it was so painfully true and, honestly, painfully relatable. I need to process this book and come back to review. If you read this before I'm able to do that, just take my review as positive and read the book.
challenging
emotional
reflective
slow-paced
This book utterly floored me. Carl transitioned at 51, after a lifetime of knowing himself as a man but not living as one. The agility, humility, and self-analysis in this book is just brilliant. It's a book about wresting with masculinity, in all its ugly and benign forms. Carl interrogates how it felt to live as a woman, and all the complexities of how that life affected his experience of manhood. There is so much nuance and uncertainty and contradiction here—he’s willing to tell a lot of messy truths, and the result is a book that’s one specific story of one particular trans life, but also a book that gets at all the crooks and crannies of identity. This book also has some of the clearest and most breathtaking writing about bodies—and the ways that truth, knowledge, identity, trauma, history and experience live in bodies—that I’ve ever read.
A section of this memoir recounts how his transition affected his marriage, and those parts were painful to read. What amazed me was how many angles he was able to illuminate, even about something so intimate. He gets right to the heart of transphobia in queer communities, especially lesbian ones. But he also writes about the very real ways maleness and masculinity can harm women, and the complexity of how that plays out in queer relationships. It left me with a whole lot to chew on.
There are many gorgeous and smart lines throughout the whole thing, but here's one that will stay with me a long time: “We are still here together because we are holding on to the knowing that multiple truths, and multiple bodies, are possible.” In may ways, this book is a celebration of multiple truths, of the multiplicity of lives lived in one body, the multiplicity of bodies that one life can hold, of all the possibilities that exist in the complexity of human experience.
Also, brilliant, moving audio, narrated by the author. It is not a long listen (just over five hours) and worth every minute.
A section of this memoir recounts how his transition affected his marriage, and those parts were painful to read. What amazed me was how many angles he was able to illuminate, even about something so intimate. He gets right to the heart of transphobia in queer communities, especially lesbian ones. But he also writes about the very real ways maleness and masculinity can harm women, and the complexity of how that plays out in queer relationships. It left me with a whole lot to chew on.
There are many gorgeous and smart lines throughout the whole thing, but here's one that will stay with me a long time: “We are still here together because we are holding on to the knowing that multiple truths, and multiple bodies, are possible.” In may ways, this book is a celebration of multiple truths, of the multiplicity of lives lived in one body, the multiplicity of bodies that one life can hold, of all the possibilities that exist in the complexity of human experience.
Also, brilliant, moving audio, narrated by the author. It is not a long listen (just over five hours) and worth every minute.
challenging
emotional
informative
inspiring
medium-paced
I was enthralled by P. Carl's honest fiercely honest and accessible memoir of transition. After 50 years of "living as a white Midwestern woman," P. Carl risked his wife, family, friends, and a successful career to launch a journey into accepting his true self, something most of us are too afraid to do. He opens up his life as he grapples with what it means to transition from a queer woman into a straight white man, upper-middle class man in Trump's America. He explores his experiences with gender, violence, masculinity, transphobia, race, love, politics, family, and mental and physical health. What does it mean to enjoy privileged masculine spaces? How does transitioning reconstruct ones inner experience and the experience of his closest family and friends? Is it possible to live the life you've always dreamed of? I highly recommend this book and I wish more authors took the risk of being so honest.
I am glad I read this alongside Argonauts. So wonderfully honest and thought-provoking. Delicious nuances to open your eyes to colors of the spectrum you’ve been blind to before. I'm recommending to friends and family of trans loved ones.