The Perfect Book for Every Bad Mood and Upsetting Dilemma
We all have our trying times (or years). Here's the cure for what ails you. Read—and be restored.
By Liesl Schillinger
For when you, or those close to you, have gender-identity issues
In the 1970s, the novelist John Irving anticipated today's Caitlyn Jenner-led apotheosis of gender-identity awareness with The World According to Garp (1978), in which the football player Robert Muldoon becomes Roberta through surgery. Roberta tells Garp, "I always knew I should have been a girl." Her friends had tried to persuade her not to change her sex, she explains, but she fiercely defended her decision. Irving presciently understood that a person's sexual self-definition resides not in the mirror, but in the mind.
Published 04/25/2016