🌟🌟🌟🌟 Jenny Finney Boylen, a self-proclaimed bookish, goofy (outwardly male) college professor, knew from an early age that she was a girl inside — a transgender path she did not follow until she reached her forties. Exactly how that journey unfolded, the changes encountered and the spaces left unfilled cannot…
🌟🌟🌟🌟💫 For anyone who has ever considered their body, and judged it not “good”, without really stopping to wonder — Not good for what? Or whom? — this memoir, written by a woman who has explored that question, painfully and from birth, will definitely set your head spinning. Diagnosed with…
🌟🌟🌟🌟🌟➕ Turning the final page on this literary memoir I find my head spinning, mind struggling to form an articulate, coherent summary beyond an overwhelming and incontrovertible — Wow. So here we are - my own “fusion” of somewhat disconnected (utterly blown-away) impressions underlying this incredible work. First, with sheer…
🌟🌟🌟🌟🌟➕ I listened to the (excellent) audio version of this memoir, narrated by Julia Roberts and Riley Keough, and interspersed with audio clips from Lisa Marie Presley that she recorded as part of her book preparations. Lisa Marie, having reached out to her daughter, Riley, for help in pulling the…
🌟🌟🌟🌟💫 A raw and powerful memoir, a story of a life lived with trauma, written by an author who is very well known for her fiction, and who cannot resist playing a trick or two on the reader, beginning with her identification as a perhaps inevitably “unreliable” narrator. The author’s…
🌟🌟🌟🌟🌟➕ Every now and then one of those books comes along that makes you stop, take a beat, and reset. This is just such a book - a heartbreaking, gorgeous compendium of interviews, journal entries, and notes concerning who must be (and still is) “the greatest Canadian hero ever”. This,…
🌟🌟🌟🌟💫 Absolutely gripping and quite possibly the scariest book this reader has encountered this year, this real-life memoir, written by a first-person female former practicing member of Christian Fundamentalism (at its most devout) is a harrowing deep-dive into toxic patriarchal religious dogma and its stealthy indoctrination of the most horrifying…
🌟🌟🌟🌟 A clear-eyed look at the tragedy of aging with dementia, and the enormous burden placed on those left behind. In this detailed and chilling memoir, the author, a hospital speech pathologist in her fifties, must cope with the rapid cognitive decline of not only her father, as he approaches…
🌟🌟🌟🌟 A memoir packed with heartrending revelations, damning the instigator and obfuscating the author’s grief over the sudden death of her husband, Sean, at the young age of forty seven. For Sean was, in fact, a bastard. A terrible one - being both a liar and a cheat and hiding…
🌟🌟🌟🌟 “Can I be a boy?” A question asked by a six-year-old, born a girl, to their mother - without guile - rooted in an innocence that is devastating in its clear-eyed belief in a world that can simply make things right. A world that does not unfortunately, and in…