My Brother My Sister
Story of a Transformation
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4.8 • 6 Ratings
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- $11.99
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
A feminist film critic’s thoughtful, outspoken memoir about transgender and family
On a visit to New York, the brother of well-known film critic Molly Haskell dropped a bombshell: Nearing age sixty, and married, he had decided to become a woman. In the vein of Jan Morris’s classic Conundrum and Jennifer Finney Boylan's She's Not There, a transgender memoir, Haskell’s My Brother My Sister gracefully explores a delicate subject, this time from the perspective of a family member.
Haskell chronicles her brother Chevey’s transformation through a series of psychological evaluations, grueling surgeries, drug regimens, and comportment and fashion lessons as he becomes Ellen. Despite Haskell’s liberal views on gender roles, she was dumbfounded by her brother’s decision. With candor and compassion, she charts not only her brother’s journey to becoming her sister, but also her own path from shock, confusion, embarrassment, and devastation to acceptance, empathy, and love.
Haskell widens the lens on her brother’s story to include scientific and psychoanalytic views. In an honest, informed voice, she has revealed the controversial world of gender reassignment and transsexuals from both a personal and a social perspective in this frank and moving memoir.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
When noted feminist film critic Haskell's "utterly normal" brother, Chevey, confesses his long-held desire to become a woman, Haskell sets out on a scholarly quest to understand her brother's path to becoming Ellen in this intimate memoir. Approaching his 60s, following two marriages to women, Chevey simply states that he is going to "change." Given Haskell's background, it is not surprising she first tackles his transsexuality with academic rigor: what the book occasionally lacks in description, it compensates for in captivating, well-synthesized research, citing works from fields as varied as mythology, neuroscience, and religion. Haskell successfully employs these voices to aid her understanding of her brother's surprising "second chance narrative." Her personal tale of coming to terms with this surprise announcement and its aftermath shines through the research and references, becoming the memoir's strongest thread. Coming from a well-to-do, conservative family in Richmond, Va., Haskell felt simultaneous grief for the brother she lost and acceptance of the sister she gained in a story of identity and the impossibility of fully knowing another person, even those closest to us. "You discover you don't know the person you thought you knew," an analyst tells Haskell. As the conversation surrounding the unknowns of what causes transgender continues, this work makes a significant contribution to its literature.
