A Year Without a Name
A Memoir
-
- $15.99
Publisher Description
A "stunning" (Hanif Abdurraqib), "unputdownable" (Mary Karr) meditation on queerness, family, and desire.
How do you know if you are transgender? How do you know if what you want and feel is real? How do you know whether to believe yourself? Cyrus Dunham’s life always felt like a series of imitations—lovable little girl, daughter, sister, young gay woman. But in a culture of relentless self-branding, and in a family subject to the intrusions and objectifications that attend fame, dissociation can come to feel normal.
A Lambda Literary Award finalist, Dunham’s fearless, searching debut brings us inside the chrysalis of a transition inflected as much by whiteness and proximity to wealth as by gender, asking us to bear witness to an uncertain and exhilarating process that troubles our most basic assumptions about identity. Written with disarming emotional intensity in a voice uniquely his, A Year Without a Name is a potent, thrillingly unresolved meditation on queerness, family, and selfhood.
Named a Most Anticipated Book of the season by:
Time
NYLON
Vogue
ELLE
Buzzfeed
Bustle
O Magazine
Harper's Bazaar
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
This meditative memoir by 27-year-old writer and activist Dunham, who uses they/them pronouns, provides a diaristic account of their unresolved relationship to gender and their journey to becoming Cyrus (the one boy name their parents had chosen while expecting) via a name change, hormones, and eventual top surgery. Born Grace, Dunham sensed they were different from other children around the age of five. Early on, they engaged in compulsive behavior (such as relying on magical numbers) and heard voices in their head: "a secondary, analytical voice that prevented from taking total pleasure in anything" and "the sped-up, echoing voice of Amelia Earhart, my narrative ghost, calling out to me." After high school, Dunham lost their virginity to a girl, figuring "if I couldn't be the boy she desired, at least I'd be the girl who understood." The book follows the trails of other obsessive relationships "Devotion is the closest thing I've known to a stable gender, insofar as our gender is a set of rules we either accept or make for ourselves," Dunham writes and touches on their struggle with mental illness and their difficult feelings after their sister (who along with other family members is never named) became famous. Dunham demonstrates a self-reflective awareness of their own psychology. This memoir will resonate deeply with other young people seeking gender harmony.
