Tues, March 27; 7:30pm Pagan Kennedy THE FIRST MAN-MADE MAN
(Books & Brews series)
The 1920s, the era of Kennedy’s devastatingly good book, were a time when, though thousands may have felt trapped in the wrong bodies, the word transsexual was unknown. For such persons, leading double lives and being unable to trust anyone for fear of exposure involved “silence and subterfuge.”… Yet back then, Michael Dillon (nee Laura Dillon) and Roberta Cowell (ne Robert Cowell) risked everything to change their genders. In mesmerizing detail after mesmerizing detail, Kennedy describes the deception, the secrets, the endless humiliations, and the almost unimaginable effort that went into not only Dillon’s and Cowell’s daily lives, which essentially involved living a lie during every waking moment, but also the struggles they had to endure to find someone who understood what they were going through and, most important, could alter their lives–that is, perform sex change operations…Novelist Kennedy’s literary chops serve her well in this fascinating and heartbreaking social history and tale of two lost souls, for it is as absorbing and powerful as any fiction. (Booklist, starred review)