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Mohrbooks Literary Agency
Sebastian Ritscher
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English
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BECOMING A MAN

P. Carl

The Story of a Transition

"A memoir that is jolting, honest, passionate, and beautifully written" (Claudia Rankine), Becoming a Man explores one man's gender transition amid a pivotal political moment in America.
Becoming a Man is the striking memoir of P. Carl's journey to become the man he always knew himself to be. For fifty years, he lived as a girl and a queer woman, building a career, a life, and a loving marriage, yet still waiting to realize himself in full. As Carl embarks on his gender transition, he takes us inside the complex shifts and questions that arise throughout - the alternating moments of arrival and estrangement. He writes intimately about how transitioning reconfigures both his own inner experience and his closest bonds - his twenty-year relationship with his wife, Lynette; his already tumultuous relationships with his parents; and seemingly solid friendships that are subtly altered, often painfully and wordlessly.


P. Carl is a Distinguished Artist-in-Residence at Emerson College in Boston and was awarded a 2017 Art of Change Fellowship from the Ford Foundation, the Berlin Prize fellowship from the American Academy for the Fall of 2018, the Andrew W. Mellon Creative Research Residency at the University of Washington, and the Anschutz Fellowship at Princeton for spring of 2020. He made theater for twenty years and now writes, teaches, travels, mountain climbs, and swims. He resides in Boston and lives with his wife of twenty-two years, the writer Lynette D'Amico and their dogs Lenny and Sonny. Becoming a Man is his first book.
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Published 2020-01-28 by Simon & Schuster

Comments

The New York Times Magazine did a first serial story last week. Read more...

Wondrous... Carl has written a poignant and candid self-appraisal of life as a 'work of progress.'

P. Carl has written a candid, intimate, and moving memoir about his gender transition in our current cultural moment and how it affected his relationships, his inner and outer identities and his place within the world. Read more...

In this deeply personal and moving debut memoir, theater writer Carl shares the story of his difficult yet triumphant gender transition... Carl's honest, timely musings illustrate the deep ruminations that can arise about one's assigned gender at birth and the gender one becomes. Carl's thoughts about sexuality and his compassionate feelings for sexual assault survivors will captivate readers from the first page to the last. Read more...

This moving narrative illuminates the joy, courage, necessity, and risk-taking of his gender transition and the ways his loved ones became affected and eventually enriched by it. A passionate, eloquent memoir about how "complex stories of humanity [and] our capacity for imagination are what give us hope. Read more...

This is a memoir of the present, without closure or resolution, and the narrative sometimes feels incomplete or unsatisfying. Still, many readers will appreciate Carl's honesty and perhaps read this work alongside Charlie Cragg's excellent anthology, To My Trans Sisters. Read more...

A brave, raw account of the author's journey toward embracing his maleness. Read more...

In a scrupulously honest memoir, P. Carl examines how his transition upended both his marriage and his notions of white masculinity. Included within is a compassionate letter he composes to his lesbian-identifying wife: "I wonder as I write this what you miss most." Read more...

Author's article: Driving in Boston as a man, after my gender transition - After living as a white woman for almost 50 years, I finally see the privileges I had been missing out on... Read more...