Synopses & Reviews
Professor Jay Ladin made headlines around the world when, after years of teaching literature at Yeshiva University, he returned to the Orthodox Jewish campus as a woman—Joy Ladin. In Through the Door of Life, Joy Ladin takes readers inside her transition as she changed genders and, in the process, created a new self.
With unsparing honesty and surprising humor, Ladin wrestles with both the practical problems of gender transition and the larger moral, spiritual, and philosophical questions that arise. Ladin recounts her struggle to reconcile the pain of her experience living as the “wrong” gender with the pain of her children in losing the father they love. We eavesdrop on her lifelong conversations with the God whom she sees both as the source of her agony and as her hope for transcending it. We look over her shoulder as she learns to walk and talk as a woman after forty-plus years of walking and talking as a man. We stare with her into the mirror as she asks herself how the new self she is creating will ever become real.
Ladin’s poignant memoir takes us from the death of living as the man she knew she wasn’t, to the shattering of family and career that accompanied her transition, to the new self, relationships, and love she finds when she opens the door of life.
2012 Finalist for the National Jewish Book Award for Biography, Autobiography, or Memoir“Wrenching—and liberating. . . .[it] opens up new ways of looking at gender and the place of LGBT Jews in community.”—Greater Phoenix Jewish News
“Given her high-profile academic position, Ladin’s transition was a major news story in Israel and even internationally. But behind the public story was a private struggle and learning experience, and Ladin pulls no punches in telling that story. She offers a peek into how daunting it was to learn, with little support from others, how to dress as a middle-aged woman, to mu on make-up, to walk and talk like a female. She provides a front-row seat for observing how one person confronted a seemingly impossible situation and how she triumphed, however shakingly, over the many adversities, both societal and psychological, that stood in the way.”—The Gay and Lesbian Review Worldwide
Review
“A Horse Named Sorrow is simply, inexorably beautiful. It is sexy, cinematic, the prose itself an absolute joy to read, and often funny as holy hell. It is, at the same time, one of the saddest works I have ever read: piercing, poignant, and memorable.”—Maureen Seaton, author of Sex Talks to Girls: A Memoir
Review
“A Horse Named Sorrow is a great love story, one with political vibrations, the tragic tenderness of Leonard Cohen’s early LPs andnovels, and the manic queer energy of William Burroughs’ The Wild Boys.”—Kevin Killian, author of Impossible Princess
Review
“The novel is unforgettable. . . . Powerful is an understatement. What Healey has created here is a new classic in literary fiction, along the lines of
On the Road and
Giovanni’s Room, which will echo in the heart of his readers like the fading encore of the perfect song.”—
Lambda LiteraryReview
“Healey’s sexy, heartbreaking novel is further testament that this talented queer author only seems to be getting better at mastering the fine art of storytelling.”—
Bay Area ReporterReview
A painfully beautiful book. It’s also gloriously sexy and . . . among the finest depictions of queer life in 1990s San Francisco. Poetic, tragic, and often euphoric, it’s the kind of story that I found myself wanting to live inside of.”—
The Gay and Lesbian ReviewReview
“[Seamus’s] sojourn is reminiscent of other literary journeys portrayed by Steinbeck and Kerouac. In that sense, this is a very American novel; it conveys authentically the bustling life of San Francisco with its small, crowded apartments as well as slow motions of innumerable American towns, motels, cafes, and churches.”—
dot429Review
“Lyrical and sad, Healey’s prose uplifts rather than depresses. If you have ever had grief in your life, this will speak to you.”—Out in Print: Queer Book Reviews
Review
“Ladin’s story is a deep, beautifully written exploration of her journey from being a man to becoming a woman.”—Lucy Bledsoe, author of The Big Bang Symphony, Ferro-Grumley Award finalist for LGBT fiction
Review
“Joy Ladin’s book succeeds so well because it is anything but a trans tract; it is a fierce story of regular old human life: hideous choices, endless repercussions, occasional glory, frequent humiliation, abiding difficulty. It could have happened to us. She makes us believe it.”—Kay Ryan, former poet laureate of the United States, and winner of the Pulitzer Prize for poetry
Review
"Not only a memoir of transgender experience, it's also a story of family heartbeak and family love; of growth as a teacher and writer; and, not least, of a self deeply connected to God and Judiasm throughout a life lived across genders."—Rabbi Jill Hammer, author of The Jewish Book of Days and director of spiritual education at the Academy for Jewish Religion
Review
“Readers will be rewarded not only with an expanded understanding of a complicated choice but also a compelling and moving story of a person transitioning, not only from male to female but from a numb, suicidal 'nonexistence' to opening the 'door of life.' ”—Publishers Weekly (starred review)
Review
“Moving from living in misery to being joyful and grateful provided a profound, fundamental release from what she saw as a moral quandary. It’s the kind of resolve that makes her work reverberate with emotion, and her artful, thoughtful writing creates an even deeper resonance. . . . A cohesive, powerful memoir.”—ForeWord
Review
“Joy Ladin’s Through the Door of Life: A Jewish Journey Between Genders is a life-affirming and generous work—and one of the most compelling memoirs of recent years. . . . [S]he writes with beautiful clarity, humility and breathtaking candor.”—Jewish Woman Magazine
Review
“No doubt about it, change was going to hurt. It would require, if not tears, then a kind of ripping of your soul, a new way of life, an alteration of outlook. . . . For author Joy Ladin, pain was exactly the reason for change. Pain had accompanied her for most of her days, but in her new book
Through the Door of Life, she explains a journey that was, for her, long overdue.”—
LGBT WeeklyReview
“In painstakingly and painfully constructing her new self, Ladin is fully aware of the societal conventions and privileges of which she makes use. . . . But there seems to be a poignancy, of which Ladin is exquisitely aware, that precisely because what Ladin wants is so normal, her efforts to obtain it are so fraught with pain.”—Lambda Literary
Synopsis
Selection, Over the Rainbow Project, GLBT Round Table of the American Library Association Finalist, General Fiction, Lambda Literary Awards Winner, Ferro-Grumley Award for LGBT Fiction, Publishing Triangle Winner, Duggins outstanding Mid-Career novelist Award, Lambda Literary Foundation
Award-winning novelist Trebor Healey depicts San Francisco in the 1980s and 90s in poetic prose that is both ribald and poignant, and a crossing into the American West that is dreamy, mythic, and visionary.
When troubled twenty-one-year-old Seamus Blake meets the strong and self-possessed Jimmy (just arrived in San Francisco by bicycle from his hometown in Buffalo, New York), he feels his life may finally be taking a turn for the better. But the ensuing romance proves short-lived as Jimmy dies of an AIDS-related illness. The grieving Seamus is obliged to keep a promise to Jimmy: Take me back the way I came.”
And so Seamus sets out by bicycle on a picaresque journey with the ashes, hoping to bring them back to Buffalo. He meets truck drivers, waitresses, college kids, farmers, ranchers, Marines, and other travelerseach one giving him a new perspective on his own life and on Jimmys death. When he meets and becomes involved with a young Native American man whose mother has recently died, Seamuss grief and his story become universal and redemptive.
Synopsis
Selection, Over the Rainbow Project, GLBT Round Table of the American Library Association Finalist, General Fiction, Lambda Literary Awards Winner, Ferro-Grumley Award for LGBT Fiction, Publishing Triangle Winner, Duggins outstanding Mid-Career novelist Award, Lambda Literary Foundation
Award-winning novelist Trebor Healey depicts San Francisco in the 1980s and 90s in poetic prose that is both ribald and poignant, and a crossing into the American West that is dreamy, mythic, and visionary.
When troubled twenty-one-year-old Seamus Blake meets the strong and self-possessed Jimmy (just arrived in San Francisco by bicycle from his hometown in Buffalo, New York), he feels his life may finally be taking a turn for the better. But the ensuing romance proves short-lived as Jimmy dies of an AIDS-related illness. The grieving Seamus is obliged to keep a promise to Jimmy: Take me back the way I came.
And so Seamus sets out by bicycle on a picaresque journey with the ashes, hoping to bring them back to Buffalo. He meets truck drivers, waitresses, college kids, farmers, ranchers, Marines, and other travelerseach one giving him a new perspective on his own life and on Jimmy s death. When he meets and becomes involved with a young Native American man whose mother has recently died, Seamus s grief and his story become universal and redemptive.
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Synopsis
On a bracing autumn day in Door County, a prominent philanthropist disappears. Is the elderly Gerald Sneider known as Mr. Packer for his legendary support of Green Bay football suffering from dementia, or just avoiding his greedy son? Is there a connection to threats against the National Football League?
As tourists flood the peninsula for the fall colors, Sheriff Dave Cubiak s search for Sneider is stymied by the FBI. When human bones wash up on the Lake Michigan shore, the sheriff has more than a missing man to worry about. With the media demanding answers and two puzzles to solve, Cubiak must follow his instincts down a trail of half-remembered rumors and local history to discover the shocking truth."
About the Author
Trebor Healey is author of the novel Through It Came Bright Colors, a selection of the InsightOut Book Club and the winner of both the Violet Quill Award and the Publishing Triangle’s Ferro-Grumley Award for Fiction. His other books include the novel Faun, the short-story collection A Perfect Scar, and a volume of poetry, Sweet Son of Pan.
Table of Contents
Acknowledgments
A Blessing (Spring 2007)
Introduction: A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to Stern College (September 2008)
Part One: Who Will Be
1 Things Fall Apart (Summer 2005)
2 Being a Man (Fall 2006)
3 Girl in a Bag (Winter 2007)
4 In the Image (Spring 2007)
5 Suicide (Spring 2007)
6 Truth (Spring 2007)
7 Choosing Life (June 26, 2007)
Part Two: Adolescence
8 Adolescence (Summer 2007)
9 Mothering (Summer 2007)
10 Like a Natural Woman (July 2007)
11 Anger (Summer 2007)
Part Three: The Door of Life
12 The Day My Father Died (October 2, 2007)
13 The God Thing (Fall 2007)
14 The Voice of the Future (Summer 2008)
15 Two Trips to the Wailing Wall (March 2002 and October 2008)
16 Teaching Naked (Spring 2010)
17 The Door of Life (March 2010)
18 Try (May 2010)