On the 26^th May 2022, Caroline Litman received news that no parent should have to hear, news that would change everything: her youngest daughter had died by suicide.

Alice was 20, and by that time had waited almost three years to get an appointment at a gender identity clinic.

Caroline channelled her grief and wrote a memoir, allowing herself and her daughter Alice to have their say. After a proliferation of books written by people telling us their views on gender and how we should feel about trans people, she wrote a book showing the devastating effect those views can have on real, living people and everyone who knows them. The views of academics wishing to make names for themselves, those with an axe to grind because they were told off once, or those who see this as a way of cashing in on a culture war should be treated with caution. In writing this book, Caroline is the polar opposite of those; she simply wants the daughter she loved to be remembered and for the system, and us all, to do better by trans people.

Using jumps in time to show us life before, and after Alice’s death, Caroline shows how the system failed her daughter in life, and the toll that the death of a child, especially by suicide, can have. As an examination of grief, I haven’t read anything this profound since ‘A Grief Observed’ by C.S. Lewis.

I found the passages where she describes her own feelings towards her daughter’s transition, painfully honest and the reactions of others illuminating, not least those of her mother and her friend Jane. Some lighter moments made me smile as well. Caroline has a wicked sense of humour.

The inside cover says, ‘in stunningly beautiful prose,’ and that sounds like hyperbole, but it’s a perfect description. Caroline writes beautifully, and I’d be honoured to read anything she wrote should she choose to do so in the future. I hope she does.

I also hope that this encourages more trans people and their friends & families to write about their experiences.

At the heart of this is Alice who comes across as such a sweet and kind kid, teenager, and then young woman. No one reading Caroline’s memoir is likely to forget Alice, or her family. It has the power to educate and illuminate, especially those people in authority making decisions about those people they know little about.  10/10