The Nearest Exit May Be Behind You

A collection of short essays on life outside the binary, told with good humor, grace, and a refreshing amount of optimism. As they say in their final essay, the trans narrative is so often the pity narrative, full of the real and common ways in which we are put in danger, hurt, or made to feel outcast, but there is a lot more to our lives than our role as victim or poignant story. Bergman's essays are a strong attempt to get beyond all that. And sure, you're not going to have a trans life free of agitation or worry or the occasional asshole doing an asshole dance in front of you, but after reading this book my takeaway turned out to be, "Hey, at least there are some good stories in all this craziness!"

Awesome book. I found the chapter on shame particularly powerful (not to mention Relevant To My Interests). I'd highly recommend this book for anyone who's interested in trans* issues, and/or anyone who feels that gender as we're "supposed" to do is unpleasantly confining.

Raw and real and so moving. Bear's writing style is engaging and I found it hard to put the book down, although when I had to put it down (apparently we humans need to sleep occasionally) I found the one-essay-per-chapter format to be really nice. Thank you so much for your candid honesty, Bear, you are truly an asset to our rainbow of many, many colors.

This is a really interesting book of essays written about being non gender normative in a very gender binary society. They're easy to read, but also give a great glimpse into Bergman's life and hir interactions with family, Judaism, traveling, health care, sex and starting a family.

I got this for free at Pride last year (yay DC Library!!!), so it obviously should have gone on that list. Oops. Good, insightful, very original.

This book helped me realize that I was allowed to be trans. Pretty cool.

Reviewed here.