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 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. Ladin recounts her struggle to reconcile the pain she experienced living as the 'wrong' gender with the pain of her children in losing the father they love. 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. 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. 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. (Mar.National Jewish Book Award Finalist for Memoir 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.” Agent: Kent D. The book also offers family and friends of transitioning people insight into the complexity of their loved ones’ motivations and struggles. Transgender readers will appreciate Ladin’s nuanced, wide-ranging musings on gender and the longings, terrors, successes, and searing losses arising from her struggle to find life worthwhile and to live authentically. In addition, she shares her navigations through and between gender, and her awkward, exhilarating “second adolescence” as she experiments with walking, dressing, and speaking as a woman her conversations with God, messages from angels, and the surprising consideration and ultimate acceptance from Yeshiva University’s Stern College for Women, where she still teaches. She describes her wife forced “to witness the slow erasure of the man she loved,” her children’s fury and bewilderment at the decision that broke apart their family, and the practice of love.

In this eloquent, bittersweet memoir, professor and poet Ladin (Psalms) leavens with literary artistry the often incredibly painful story of her gender transition from male to female.

Through the Door of Life by Joy Ladin