Synopses & Reviews
What does it really mean to be a man?
In Man Alive, Thomas Page McBee attempts to answer that question by focusing on two of the men who most impacted his life — 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 Alive engages 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 Alive grapples with the larger questions of legacy and forgiveness, love and violence, agency and invisibility.
Review
"Man Alive is a sweet, tender hurt of a memoir....McBee takes us in his capable hands and shows us what it takes to become a man who is gloriously, gloriously alive." Roxane Gay, author of Bad Feminist and An Untamed State
Review
"...McBee's story of how he came to claim both his past and his future is by turns despairing and hopeful, exceptional and relatable. To read it is to witness the birth of a fuller, truer self." Ann Friedman, columnist, New York Magazine
Review
"Exquisitely written and bristling with emotion, this important book reminds us of how much vulnerability and violence inheres to any identity. A real achievement of form and narrative.” Jack Halberstam, author of The Queer Art of Failure
About the Author
Thomas Page McBee was the first transgender man to ever box in Madison Square Garden. He is the author of Amateur and an award-winning memoir, Man Alive: A True Story of Violence, Forgiveness, and Becoming a Man, which was named a best book of 2014 by NPR Books, BuzzFeed, Kirkus Reviews, and Publishers Weekly. Thomas’s writing has appeared in The Rumpus, Pacific Standard, The New York Times, Playboy, and Glamour.