These intimate portraits of transsexual, crossdressing and hermaphrodite individuals reinvents the idea of sex, gender, and identity, and the very concept of what is "normal".
With the humour, empathy and fine writing that grace her prize-winning fiction, Amy Bloom takes us into the world of the intersexed - transsexuals, crossdressers, hermaphrodites - a group of people larger and more "normal" than most of us would imagine.
There are men like Hale Hawbecker, a "regular, middle-of-the-road, white-bread guy" with a medical condition, the standard treatment for which would have changed his life and his gender. Mothers like Jessie, who recognised that her little girl Lyle was in fact a boy and used her life savings to help him make the transgender transition. And couples like Peggy Rudd and her husband, "Melanie", who holiday on cruise ships along with fellow heterosexual crossdressers.
Pulling apart our assumptions, Bloom brilliantly stitches together a revised, contemporary view of happiness, human nature, identity, self, and above all - what is normal.
