A Girlhood: A Letter to My Transgender Daughter
A parent's love letter to a daughter who has always known exactly who she is.
One ordinary day, a caseworker from the Department of Children and Families knocked on the Hays family's door to investigate an anonymous complaint about the upbringing of their transgender child. It was this knock, this threat, that began the family's journey out of the Bible Belt but never far from the hate and fear resting at the nation's core.
Self-aware and intimate, A Girlhood asks us all to love better, not just for the sake of Hays's child but for children everywhere enduring injustice and prejudice just as they begin to understand themselves. A Girlhood is a call to action, an ode to community, a plea for empathy, a hope for a better future. A Girlhood is a love letter to a child who has always known exactly who she is--and who is waiting for the rest of the world to catch up.
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Carolyn Hays is an award-winning, critically acclaimed, bestselling author who has chosen to publish to A Girlhood: Letter to My Transgender Daughter under a pen name to protect the privacy of her family. Her novels have been published by Hachette, Simon and Schuster, and HarperCollins and have been listed as New York Times Notable Books and Kirkus's Best Fiction of the Year. She's also written for National Public Radio and the Washington Post.
Touching, combative, compelling...This memoir begins with the suspense of a thriller and ends with...hope.
-- "Vogue (Italian edition)"Carolyn Hays's memoir is searing, haunting, and inspiring....In prose memorable for its gentleness and wisdom, Hays's story is about more than the transgender question: it's about ignorance and wisdom; hatred and love; men, women, and children. In the end, A Girlhood is about all of us.
-- "Jennifer Finney Boylan, author of She's Not There"A Girlhood is a transfixing odyssey of a mother stewarding a preternaturally wise child, and an American family circling to protect that child...A Girlhood is...an act of epic compassion.
-- "Diana Goetsch, author of This Body I Wore"
