Thomas Page McBee, 'Man Alive', on Masculinity and Becoming a Man.

 

KGNU's Claudia Cragg speaks here with Thomas Page McBee, writer (Rumpus, Vice) and author of 'Man Alive'. In this, McBee attempts to answer what it is to be a man 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 is seeking to understand these examples of flawed manhood and explains 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 through 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.