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A review by brice_mo
One Day I'll Grow Up and Be a Beautiful Woman: A Mother's Story by Abi Maxwell
2.0
Thanks to NetGalley and Knopf for the ARC!
Abi Maxwell’s One Day I’ll Grow Up and Be a Beautiful Woman is a fiercely maternal book, albeit one that suggests the characteristics of a wonderfully protective mother make for a needlessly defensive memoir.
All memoir is myth. All memoir is mis-remembrance.
In the best memoirs, however, authors resist—or, at least, interrogate—their own impulse to bend history to their will. They use the form as an opportunity for reflection, revisiting complex experiences with the grace of hindsight. It becomes a site for self-critique as much as self-forgiveness.
Unfortunately, Abi Maxwell seems keen on sanding down every narrative edge, ensuring that she is unimpeachable at every turn and contorting the narrative into a feel-good story with all the sheen of a Netflix original. As a gift to her daughter, it works; as a book for wide readership, it does not.
The prose is as sweet as cough syrup, going down smoothly and progressively dulling the reader’s senses with the warmth of nostalgia—a foreknowledge that rings false. For example, when describing how her 4- or 5-year-old daughter wanted to wear pink shoes pre-transition, Maxwell writes, “we had raised a little feminist human, a child who understood in her bones that female did not equal less." It reads profoundly artificial and self-serving, less like a celebration of her daughter’s unmitigated enthusiasm and more as Maxwell's need to reify mainstream cultural constructions of gender by offering herself as their antithesis. Even in the book’s darkest moments, the author telegraphs her inevitable triumph in a way that betrays the emotional truth of the narrative, and this approach becomes a recurrent weakness.
If one boils the book down to its essence, its premise is “I’m an amazing ally.” After a point, the author’s righteous anger starts to feel like self-righteous posturing, simply because she’s so adamant about declaring it over and over. The emotional weight that might be felt in a short-form essay is lost through repetition. Furthermore, and I hesitate to say this because it’s such a damning critique, there are moments where both Maxwell’s daughter—and her gay brother, Noah—feel like props, as if their purpose is to showcase the author’s advocacy. We don’t get a sense of anyone’s personality in this book, which makes it feel like the author is more interested in LGBTQIA+ issues than LGBTQIA+ people.
It honestly made me squeamish.
It’s a shame because there’s clearly a story to be told here, and I think a book like this could be really encouraging to parents in a similar situation. In fact, I understand and sympathize with why Maxwell frames the story the way she does—she is rightfully protective of her daughter, but I’m not sure we can protect ourselves from history in the way she attempts. Memoir must wrestle with all of it.
Based on other reviews, I’m clearly in the minority opinion, so I hope One Day I’ll Grow Up and Be a Beautiful Woman offers something of substance to its readers; I just wonder if its palatability does more harm than good.
Abi Maxwell’s One Day I’ll Grow Up and Be a Beautiful Woman is a fiercely maternal book, albeit one that suggests the characteristics of a wonderfully protective mother make for a needlessly defensive memoir.
All memoir is myth. All memoir is mis-remembrance.
In the best memoirs, however, authors resist—or, at least, interrogate—their own impulse to bend history to their will. They use the form as an opportunity for reflection, revisiting complex experiences with the grace of hindsight. It becomes a site for self-critique as much as self-forgiveness.
Unfortunately, Abi Maxwell seems keen on sanding down every narrative edge, ensuring that she is unimpeachable at every turn and contorting the narrative into a feel-good story with all the sheen of a Netflix original. As a gift to her daughter, it works; as a book for wide readership, it does not.
The prose is as sweet as cough syrup, going down smoothly and progressively dulling the reader’s senses with the warmth of nostalgia—a foreknowledge that rings false. For example, when describing how her 4- or 5-year-old daughter wanted to wear pink shoes pre-transition, Maxwell writes, “we had raised a little feminist human, a child who understood in her bones that female did not equal less." It reads profoundly artificial and self-serving, less like a celebration of her daughter’s unmitigated enthusiasm and more as Maxwell's need to reify mainstream cultural constructions of gender by offering herself as their antithesis. Even in the book’s darkest moments, the author telegraphs her inevitable triumph in a way that betrays the emotional truth of the narrative, and this approach becomes a recurrent weakness.
If one boils the book down to its essence, its premise is “I’m an amazing ally.” After a point, the author’s righteous anger starts to feel like self-righteous posturing, simply because she’s so adamant about declaring it over and over. The emotional weight that might be felt in a short-form essay is lost through repetition. Furthermore, and I hesitate to say this because it’s such a damning critique, there are moments where both Maxwell’s daughter—and her gay brother, Noah—feel like props, as if their purpose is to showcase the author’s advocacy. We don’t get a sense of anyone’s personality in this book, which makes it feel like the author is more interested in LGBTQIA+ issues than LGBTQIA+ people.
It honestly made me squeamish.
It’s a shame because there’s clearly a story to be told here, and I think a book like this could be really encouraging to parents in a similar situation. In fact, I understand and sympathize with why Maxwell frames the story the way she does—she is rightfully protective of her daughter, but I’m not sure we can protect ourselves from history in the way she attempts. Memoir must wrestle with all of it.
Based on other reviews, I’m clearly in the minority opinion, so I hope One Day I’ll Grow Up and Be a Beautiful Woman offers something of substance to its readers; I just wonder if its palatability does more harm than good.