Bridge: Writing Across the Binary

One writer's deeply compelling story of growing up nonbinary in the 1940s and '50s.

"Most people know their gender identity by the time they are two or three. My memories don't go back quite that far, but as far back as I do remember, I was never certain. I asked my mother and grandmother over and over again, 'Am I a boy, or am I a girl?'—asked so many times they got sick of answering and started getting mad at me, and then I would hear, 'I told you!' They always told me that I was a boy, but I was never convinced. It would take me over sixty years to arrive at a clear understanding of my problem—I was trapped inside what we now would call 'the gender binary,' the notion that there are only two choices."

So begins The Bridge, Keith Maillard's fascinating memoir of growing up in West Virginia in the 1940s and '50s: a time and place where the word "nonbinary" didn't exist. This memoir from one of Canada's most celebrated writers is an instant classic—timely, accessible, and wonderfully evocative. Maillard is a natural, gifted storyteller.