Man Alive: A True Story of Violence, Forgiveness and Becoming a Man [Paperback]

Winner - Best Transgender Nonfiction - 2015 Lambda Literary Awards

Best Books of 2014 -Publishers Weekly

Best Books of 2014 - NPR Books

Best Nonficton Books of 2014 -Kirkus Reviews

10 Best Transgender Non-Fiction Books -Advocate

Thomas Page McBee’sMan Alivehurtled through my life. I read it in a matter of hours. It’s a confession, it’s a poem, it's a time warp, it’s a brilliant work of art. I bow down to McBee—his humility, his sense of humor, his insightfulness, his structural deftness, his ability to put into words what is often said but rarely, with such visceral clarity and beauty, communicated. —Heidi Julavits, author ofThe VanishersandThe Uses of Enchantment

What does it really mean to be a man?

InMan Alive, Thomas Page McBee attempts to answer that question by focusing on two of the men who most impacted his life&mash;one, his otherwise ordinary father who abused him as a child, and the other, a mugger who almost killed him. Standing at the brink of the life-changing decision to transition from female to male, McBee seeks to understand these examples of flawed manhood and tells us how a brush with violence sent him on the quest to untangle a sinister past, and freed him to become the man he was meant to be.

Man Aliveengages an extraordinary personal story to tell a universal one—how we all struggle to create ourselves, and how this struggle often requires risks. Far from a transgender transition tell-all,Man Alivegrapples with the larger questions of legacy and forgiveness, love and violence, agency and invisibility.

Praise forMan Alive:

Man Aliveis a sweet, tender hurt of a memoir ... about forgiveness and self-discovery, but mostlÓ.