Man alive : a true story of violence, forgiveness and becoming a man /

WHAT MAKES A MAN? We know it's not quite enough to be born one. It never has been, really: In America, manhood has long been bound up in aspiration, a thing more ideological than biological. Thomas Page McBee has made this his study for two years in Self-Made Man, his online column for The Rumpus. While alluding to the idea of manhood as something built from the ground up, the column's title also provides a literal description of its author - a transgender man whose exploration of masculinity has been fascinated, personal, compulsory. In "Man Alive," his new autobiography, McBee enlarges the study from a series of vignettes into a full, poetic narrative. "There are the facts of what happened," he writes, but, like a body, "the story is in parts." The book splices these parts together, intercutting at the start between the two defining traumas of McBee's life: his molestation as a child by his father, and his being held at gunpoint at the age of 29. Against these two mirrored examples of male violence is set the quieter, underlying trauma of growing up trans in a culture that has no language to discuss it and only a limited capacity to understand it. All contribute, in their way, to "the split: how I lost a body." For McBee, a physical transition is part of the work of reclaiming the lost body. But first he must understand how violence fits into the male equation, using as his case studies two men who set out to do one thing but did the opposite: The protector who abused him, and the killer who let him live. In "Man Alive," everything eventually faces its double. During the mugging, McBee's would-be murderer hears the sound of his victim's voice and sets him free, giving him "a new story where being female kept me safe." The sense of life regained gives him the courage to confront his earlier suffering, the story in which being female laid him open to harm. McBee sets out to research his father's history, only to learn, in an entirely different sense, what he already knew: Biology isn't everything. It "wouldn't erase my scars," he writes, "and it didn't cause them." By the time a paternity test reveals that his abuser is not his biological father, those scars have taken on a second, physical aspect - the scars of a body in transition, running "like smiles" across the chest of "a body I was just beginning to love." Of course, this body comes with a new set of problems. Becoming male means struggling to navigate a sudden privilege. "Now that you're a guy," his girlfriend points out, "talking about yourself all the time means something different." But sometimes talking is the only way to hit on the right words. As he fumbles to make sense of his story, McBee is both nonexistent, "an invisible man," and multiple: "I crossed the lawn, trying to pass as someone not passing as a man." The tendency of language to fail us at our most vulnerable is exposed to him early, and never loses its sting. When a therapist describes his early abuse as "hurt," he is thrown by the sheer wrongness of the word. "All of these adults," he writes, "missing the language, missing me." In light of this, the act of writing could amount to a kind of revenge. But empathy, instead, is McBee's objective, the most important part of becoming real in one's own eyes. "Being human," he concludes, "means being at the mercy of others." That's a part of aspiration, too. We are born human; with hard work, we achieve humanity. HENRY GIARDINA has written for The New Yorker online, New York magazine, The Los Angeles Review of Books and other publications.

McBee, a columnist for the Rumpus, begins this remarkable memoir by juxtaposing two painful events in his life-a mugging in Oakland, and his childhood revelation to his mother of his father's abuse. These recollections propel the author on a quest of discovery and reconciliation, not just of his personal history and the men who injured him, but on the nature of masculinity, both cultural and biological, as he approaches his own female-to-male gender transition. In taut, careful prose that conveys both brutal awareness and unceasing wonder, McBee captures the tension of his transition, "the warble between the shape in my mind and the one in the mirror," "the assault of language" in simple use of pronouns, the fraught everyday choices of which swimsuit to wear, which public restroom to use. In the end, McBee's answer to the initial question of "what makes a man?" is more generous, more inspiring, and more creative than the usual gender binaries allow. Full of bravery and clear, far-sighted compassion and devoid of sentiment, victimization, and cliché, McBee's meditations bring him a hard-won sense of self-one that is bound to inspire any reader who has struggled with internal dissonance. Agent: Chris Tomasino, Tomasino Agency. (Nov.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.

The transgender author delivers a unique, powerful rite-of-passage memoir. Plenty of writers have written about the experience of making the transition from one gender to another, but most haven't also dealt with child molestation, paternity issues and a mugging by a man who would soon commit murdernot to mention a partner who has mixed feelings about the author's becoming a man. Resisting the inclination to sensationalize (or sentimentalize), McBee interweaves the various strands of the narrative, exercising plenty of restraint. The first section alternates between the author as a 10-year-old girl wrestling with sending a man to prison, and the mugging almost two decades later, when the author (who, still female, could pass for a man) is attacked with her partner by a stranger who would soon make headlines for another crime. In each case, there's a theme of forgiveness, a quality of mercy that does not seem strained. "The world seemed to me a place of beautiful, damaged things and I wanted to love them all," explains the author early on. Whether his fatheror the mugger, for that matteraffected his attitude toward men in general and his decision, with deep ambivalence, to live a life after 30 as a transgender man isn't subject to pat psychology here. Instead, the author writes in matter-of-fact detail about the tension and love shared with a fiancee and about self-discovery pilgrimages to explore bloodlines and paternity. "The world is vicious and beautiful and, to some extent, unexplainable," writes the author. "But that doesn't stop us from wanting a story." This is quite a story, masterfully rendered. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.