A review by laura_sackton
Becoming a Man: The Story of a Transition by P. Carl

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.