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Paperback: 176 pages Publisher: Vintage (September 09 2003) Costumer Rating: Read an Excerpt Chapter 1: The Body Lies: Female-To-Male Transsexuals Chapter 1: The Body Lies: Female-To-Male Transsexuals Female-To-Male Transsexuals : Part 2 Book Description Amy Bloom has won a devoted readership and wide critical acclaim for fiction of rare humor, insight, grace, and eloquence, and the same qualities distinguish Normal, a provocative, intimate journey into the lives of "people who reveal, or announce, that their gender is variegated rather than monochromatic"-female-to-male transsexuals, heterosexual crossdressers, and the intersexed. We meet Lyle Monelle and his mother, Jessie, who recognized early on that her little girl was in fact a boy and used her life savings to help Lyle make the transition. On a Carnival cruise with a group of crossdressers and their spouses, we meet Peggy Rudd and her husband, "Melanie," who devote themselves to the cause of "ordinary heterosexual men with an additional feminine dimension." And we meet Hale Hawbecker, "a regular, middle-of-the-road, white-bread guyv with a wife, kids, and a medical condition, the standard treatment for which would have changed his life and his gender. Casting light into the dusty corners of our assumptions about sex, gender and identity, Bloom reveals new facets to the ideas of happiness, personality and character, even as she brilliantly illuminates the very concept of "normal." About the Author Amy Bloom Amy Bloom is the author of A Blind Man Can See How Much I Love You, Come to Me, and a novel, Love Invents Us. Her work has appeared in The New Yorker, The Atlantic Monthly, and Harper's Bazaar, among other publications, and in many anthologies, including The Best American Short Stories; Prize Stories: The O. Henry Awards; and The Scribner Anthology of Contemporary Short Fiction. » More by Amy Bloom | |||||||