Like Everyone, but Different

With great naturalness, wit and laconicity, Nora Eckert recounts her change of sex: painful depilations, the initial irritation when buying shoes and clothes, self-treatment with hormones and the feeling of happiness to live "a third way". She tells of the humiliating assessment process she had to undergo in order to also be "officially" a woman. Retrained as a steno-contorist from the Berlin employment office, Nora Eckert returns to the bourgeois world in 1982. Now she plunges into the "highly cultural" nightlife of the city: theatre, opera, concerts. The stage on which all this takes place is the second heroine of this book, which is also a great declaration of love to the wild, hedonistic West Berlin.