This Body I Wore: A Memoir

by Diana Goetsch

Overview

A Washington Post Best Book of the Year

A captivating memoir of one woman’s long journey to late transition, as the trans community emerges alongside her.

“Achingly beautiful.” —Manuel Betancourt, The New York Times Book Review

Long before Laverne Cox appeared on the cover of Time, far removed from drag and ballroom culture, there were countless trans women living and dying as men, most of whom didn’t even know they were trans. Diana Goetsch’s This Body I Wore chronicles one woman’s long journey to coming out, a path that runs parallel to the emergence of the trans community over the past several decades.

“How can you spend your life face-to-face with an essential fact about yourself and still not see it?” This is a question often asked of trans people, and a question that Goetsch, an award-winning poet and essayist, addresses with the power and complexity of lived reality. She brings us into her childhood, her time as a dynamic and beloved teacher at New York City’s Stuyvesant High School, and her plunge into the city’s crossdressing subculture in the 1980s and ’90s. Under cover of night, crossdressers risked their jobs and their safety to give expression to urges they could neither control nor understand. Many would become late transitioners, the Cinderellas of the trans community largely ignored by history.

Goetsch has written not a transition memoir, but rather a full account of a trans life, one both unusually public and closeted. All too often trans lives are reduced to before-and-after photos, but what if that before photo lasted fifty years?

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780374722326
Publisher:	Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Publication date:	05/24/2022
Sold by:	Macmillan
Format:	eBook
Pages:	336
Sales rank:	164,137
File size:	3 MB

About the Author

Diana Goetsch is an American poet and essayist. Her poems have appeared widely, in The New Yorker, Poetry, The Gettysburg Review, Ploughshares, The Best American Poetry, and the Pushcart Prize anthology, and in the collections Nameless Boy and In America, among others. She also wrote the “Life in Transition” blog at The American Scholar. Her honors include fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the New York Foundation for the Arts, and the New School, where she served as the Grace Paley Teaching Fellow. For twenty-one years Goetsch was a New York City public school teacher, at Stuyvesant High School and at Passages Academy in the Bronx, where she ran a creative writing program for incarcerated teens.
Diana Goetsch is an American poet and essayist. Her poems have appeared widely, in The New Yorker, Poetry, The Gettysburg Review, Ploughshares, The Best American Poetry, and the Pushcart Prize anthology, and in the collections Nameless Boy and In America, among others. She also wrote the “Life in Transition” blog at The American Scholar. Her honors include fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the New York Foundation for the Arts, and the New School, where she served as the Grace Paley Teaching Fellow. For twenty-one years Goetsch was a New York City public school teacher, at Stuyvesant High School and at Passages Academy in the Bronx, where she ran a creative writing program for incarcerated teens.

Table of Contents

A Note About Language xi

Prologue: Stepping Out 3

Part 1

Woman Good Man Bad 11

The Admirer 27

The Fabric Factory 38

The Limelight 44

Stuyvesant 56

Jeri 78

Straight Pool 81

URNotAlone 93

Part 2

Accident 111

Northport 141

War Is Hell 163

Part 3

Isle of Staten 185

Femme Fever 211

Poet-in-Captivity 223

Revisionist History 233

In the Cabin of the Crazy One 259

The Thousand Gateless Gates 275

Epilogue: Mother's Day 305

Acknowledgments 315

Editorial Reviews

03/28/2022

Traversing several decades and much societal change, poet Goetsch (The Job of Being Everybody) fashions a brilliant and tapestried story of her late-in-life gender transition. As a young, assigned-male cross-dresser in 1987 New York City, Goetsch struggled to feel like she belonged. Even when the internet brought “millions of closeted people” unprecedented community in the ’90s, Goetsch writes, her reticence to settle on a fixed identity in her 30s isolated her. Still, she confesses, “I’d fantasized all my life about being a girl.” Pulled between the false promise of stability that masculinity offered and the terrifying freedom she found in feminine expression, Goetsch traces how she came to reconcile her torn selves, reckoning with the specters of an abusive childhood, navigating sexual obstacles in her adulthood, discovering Tibetan Buddhism, and, eventually, finding herself as a woman at age 50. Balancing profound personal revelations (“Gender may be the only category of human experience where what you long to be is what you are”) with cogent analysis of cultural gender narratives—including the “forced feminization” trope, “where a male gets into some predicament that makes it necessary to present as a female” (as seen in Some Like It Hot and Mrs. Doubtfire)—she constructs a gorgeous self-portrait that defies categorization. The result obliterates binary confines around gender with breathtaking finesse. (June)

Publishers Weekly

A Best Book of the Year at Cosmopolitan
A Must-Read at The New York Times, The Chicago Tribune, The Bay Area Reporter, Glamour, Literary Hub, Shondaland, and CNN

“Achingly beautiful . . . Goetsch has a poetic sensibility that illuminates without simplifying . . . This Body I Wore tenderly sketches out a history of the budding trans communities that developed in the late 20th century . . . Here is an excavated history that endures in the only way it could: in the fleeting memories of those who survived, who endured and who now, like Goetsch, thrive.”
—Manuel Betancourt, The New York Times Book Review

“Rarely does a book arrive so on time, blowing out the noise . . . A hilarious personal history of the full life as a trans woman. It’s never pedantic or even inspirational, which is exactly why it is.”
—Christopher Borrelli, The Chicago Tribune

“[Goetsch] writes about coming of age and into adulthood in an earlier era, when she didn't have the language or knowledge to understand what it meant to be trans.”
—Terry Gross, NPR’s Fresh Air

“A nuanced and beautiful story of a person who wants the most out of life and does everything she can to build on what that means for her.”
—Sarah Neilson, Shondaland

“[This Body I Wore] not only chronicles [Goetsch’s] own transition but beautifully weaves together the story of the trans community over the course of her lifetime.”
—Jasmine Ting and Gretty Garcia, Cosmopolitan

“This exquisite self-portrait explores gender and trans culture from an intimately personal and enlightening perspective.”
—Jim Piechota, The Bay Area Reporter

“Goetsch is an impeccable writer . . . As trans people, especially children, are now under constant and increasing attack by state governments, it’s an especially urgent read.”
—Jenny Singer, Glamour

“An extraordinary read that only deepens over time . . . Reading This Body I Wore is an emotional experience . . . felt just as viscerally as [it is] intellectually.”
—Mara Sandroff, Newcity Lit

“Vulnerable, honest, and unabashed, so fully itself; beautiful and poetic and painful, and often very funny—a story of transition, a document of a life.”
—Melissa Faliveno, Autostraddle

“Striking.”
—Lesley Kennedy, CNN

“Exquisite . . . The hard-won wisdom [of] This Body I Wore offers a new generation of trans and nonbinary youth a guiding hand from a previous generation.”
—Catherine Hollis, BookPage (starred review)

“Goetsch fashions a brilliant and tapestried story of her late-in-life gender transition . . . A gorgeous self-portrait that defies categorization. The result obliterates binary confines around gender with breathtaking finesse.”
—Publishers Weekly

“Enthralling . . . Told with unique eloquence and tenderness . . . Hope blooms within these pages . . . A mesmerizing memoir [that] will appeal to fans of Melissa Febos and Roxane Gay.”
—Alana R. Quarles, Library Journal (starred review)

“Rich, compelling . . . Often lovely and emotionally affecting . . . A valuable memoir enriched by years of personal and societal insight into the fraught subject of gender identity.”
—Kirkus Reviews

“An important and beautiful memoir.”
—Emily Firetog, Lit Hub

“Lyrical, harrowing, and wise. This Body I Wore, the story of one woman doing everything she can to avoid becoming herself, is a universal and profound meditation on the price of authenticity.”
—Jennifer Finney Boylan, author of She’s Not There and Good Boy

“Moving and vividly recalled, This Body I Wore conjures the pain of a life in search of language for who you are. Diana Goetsch has written a powerful testimony of the need for transgender acceptance.”
—Alex Marzano-Lesnevich, author of The Fact of a Body

“In This Body I Wore, Diana Goetsch the poet is present in every line of prose. The writing is spacious, beautiful, precise, and poignant. The reader floats through the sentences, entranced. ‘Magnificent’ is not an overstatement.”
—Thomas Peele, Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist and author of Killing the Messenger

“One of the most honest, unflappable, important books I’ve read in a long time. Diana Goetsch writes with lyricism and grace about her struggles and triumphs with family, love, and gender identity. Everyone should be required to read this book.”
—Ann Hood, author of Kitchen Yarns: Notes on Life, Love, and Food

“A book that many will cherish and few will forget. Some of us need another world, a world of the spirit, before we can live or become ourselves in this one, and Diana Goetsch has now shown us why.”
—Stephanie Burt, author of Don’t Read Poetry

“Clear, thoughtful, and deeply moving, This Body I Wore is an affirmation to anyone who has struggled to live an authentic life.”
—Ellen Bass, author of Indigo

“The perfect prescription for today’s world—compelling and lyrical in equal measures. A riveting read!”
—Danielle Ofri, MD, author of What Doctors Feel

“This Body I Wore is startling, humorous, haunting, and truly illuminating. I had chills when I began reading it and was floored by the end. A pitch-perfect memoir.”
—Laurie Gwen Shapiro, author of The Stowaway

From the Publisher

★ 04/01/2022

Goetsch, an award-winning essayist and poet, captivates and educates with this enthralling memoir/coming-out story. Told with unique eloquence and tenderness, the memoir follows the emotional and physical transition of someone who spent 50years living in someone else's skin. Goetsch's lyrical talent mesmerizes with an honest and heartfelt recall of the crossdressing culture of the 1980s, as well as her openness about the evolution of her trans community over the span of several decades. Her memoir opens a window into the cultural evolution of trans communities, gender identity, authenticity, and mental health, with nothing held back as she ascends shame through intimacy. Hope blooms within these pages. Readers will witness first-hand the tragedy of living a life closeted and the miracle of discovering it's never too late to shed your old skin and become the person you were always meant to be. VERDICT Powerful and beautifully written, this is a mesmerizing memoir and will appeal to fans of Melissa Febos and Roxane Gay.—Alana R. Quarles

Library Journal

2022-02-11
A trans poet and essayist who transitioned later in life reflects on decades of discovering, reckoning with, and finally embracing her gender identity.

Poet and author Goetsch opens with a section about her mid-20s, when she was living as a man whose public persona concealed severe depression, aching loneliness, and the cross-dressing as a woman that exhilarated and confused her as well as isolated her from the human connection she craved. While studying at Wesleyan in the 1980s, the author tried desperately to understand herself and her “unmoored” perception of gender, struggling with feelings for which there were few avenues of expression at the time. At the beginning of the book, she includes a note about the language she uses throughout, which reflects the often offensive attitudes of the time period she describes. The narrative follows a nonlinear structure, with chapters indicated by years as well as titles. In the second part of the book, Goetsch returns to her childhood and adolescence, marked by family dysfunction, bullying, abuse, and loneliness, and the third section delves into the last significant relationships the author had with women while living as a man, her blossoming affinities for poetry and Buddhism, and the process of coming out as trans at age 50. Goetsch recalls periods and important locations in her life with rich, compelling detail, but sometimes her revelries are sprawling and unevenly paced. The prose is often lovely and emotionally affecting, as when she describes writing a painful goodbye to an ex-girlfriend’s sons after the breakup, and her insights into what it means to be trans, both on a personal and societal level, are valuable. Readers may find her blunt quips about transphobia even within the queer community sadly relevant, highlighting how much work still needs to be done: “The institutional transphobia was appalling: L, G, and B didn’t give a fuck about T.”

A valuable memoir enriched by years of personal and societal insight into the fraught subject of gender identity.

Kirkus Reviews