Real Man Adventures
-
-
4.0 • 1 Rating
-
-
- $11.99
-
- $11.99
Publisher Description
A few years ago, the novelist T Cooper wrote his parents a letter telling them he "wasn't their daughter anymore." And that was the "good news."
Real Man Adventures is Cooper's brash, wildly inventive, and often comic exploration of the paradoxes and pleasures of masculinity. He takes us through his transition into identifying as male, and how he went on to marry his wife and become an adoring stepfather of two children. Alternately bemused and exasperated when he feels compelled to explain all this, Cooper never loses his sense of humor. "Ten Things People Assume I Understand About Women But Actually Don't," reads one chapter title, while another proffers: "Sometimes I Think the Whole of Modern History Can Be Explained by Testosterone."
A brilliant collage of letters, essays, interviews (with his brother, with his wife, with the parents of other transgender children), artwork, and sharp evocations of difficult conversations with old friends and puzzled bureaucrats, Real Man Adventures will forever change what you think about what it means to be a man.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
T Cooper (The Beaufort Diaries) used to be a woman. Now he's a man. If we were all comfortable with that, we'd be done. But we're not; there are people who respond violently when they discover that someone doesn't meet their standards of manliness. Cooper knows the "essential truth" that "the foremost thing on people's minds when confronted with a transgender man is his dick," and addresses these facts (salient, but not dispositive), along with others, in a variety of registers humorous, angry, resigned, fearful, accepting, worried, matter of fact. This variety one of the book's strengths extends to the book's contents, which include interviews, telling six-word autobiographies, letters, and longer memoirlike segments. For those seeking a more standard account of a transperson's "journey," the book may disappoint, but Cooper's free-form story, including pieces of his process, paeans to his wife and kids, what it's like to be a member of the "Man Club," and what he most fears, is humorous, surprising, and heartfelt. Spoiler alert: he finesses that most pressing question, pushing the reader to consider their prurience and conceptualization of gender around a key but limited set of body parts.
