Man Made
A Memoir
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- $20.99
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- $20.99
Publisher Description
Soon to be a major motion picture, here is the funny, revealing, harrowing memoir of a star journalist and hotshot hockey pro who discovers that he is biochemically changing into a woman.
On the surface, Ken Baker seemed a model man. He was a nationally ranked hockey goalie; a Hollywood correspondent for People; a guest-lister at celebrity parties; and girls came on to him. Inside, though, he didn't feel like the man he was supposed to be.
Ken found that despite being attracted to women, he had little sex drive and even less of a sex life. To his anguish, he repeatedly found himself unable to perform sexually. Regardless of strenuous workouts, his body remained flabby and soft, earning him the nickname "Pear" from his macho teammates. Physically, matters grew even more bizarre when he discovered that he was lactating.
The testosterone-driven culture in which Ken grew up made it agonizingly difficult for him to seek help. But in time he discovered something that lifted years of pain, frustration, and confusion: a brain tumor was causing his body to be flooded with massive amounts of a female hormone, which was disabling his masculinity.
Five hours of surgery accomplished what years of therapy, rumination, and denail could not -- and allowed Ken Baker to finally feel -- and function -- like a man.
Ken's story is coming to the screen in Fall 2016 in a much-anticipted Netflix feature film, The Late Bloomer, starring Academy Award-winner JK Simmons (Law & Order, Whiplash, Spider-Man) and Jane Lynch (Glee, The 40-Year-Old Virgin). Watch for the TarcherPerigee movie tie-in edition.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Describing the locker-room banter of his college hockey team, Baker writes, "They don't realize how lucky they are. If they like a girl, just about the only thing stopping them from being with her is the girl. I also have to contend with myself." While locker-room epiphanies are ubiquitous in male gender studies, Baker's memoir about struggling with masculinity in contemporary culture is unique. Throughout his adolescence and early adult life, he suffered from a massive overabundance of prolactin--the hormone that allows females to produce milk. This imbalance, caused by a benign tumor in Baker's brain, engendered a host of physical problems, such as impotence, excess fat on his hips and breasts and sensitive nipples that would occasionally excrete a milky substance. While much of the book traces Baker's long medical quest for the cause of these unsettling symptoms, the heart of the book is a meditation on how society constructs maleness and what happens to men who do not fit the mold. Baker's account of his boyhood is well observed but ordinary, while his detailing of his adult romantic life is painfully adroit. Some of the best parts of the book show Baker's growing awareness of the role that homophobia plays in constituting "appropriate" social maleness: from seeing his father making fun of "faggots" in his youth to covering gay activist protests against Pat Robertson's homophobic religious views. A senior writer at US Weekly, Baker has a breezy journalistic style that may attract those outside the realm of gender studies. While his specific medical problem may be too singular to interest a mass readership, his contemplation of the social prisons of gender and sexuality is not.
