One Day I'll Grow Up and Be a Beautiful Woman: A Mother's Story

A fiery, heartbreaking, riveting memoir that follows one New Hampshire family over the course of three years, unspooling a story of gender identity, poverty, trans youth, and a child caught in the riptide of America’s culture wars.

Abi Maxwell grew up in rural New Hampshire, one of eight kids in a poor town abutting the wealthier lakeside village of Gilford. As a young couple, Maxwell and her husband planned not to have kids, but when Maxwell became pregnant, she knew she wanted to raise her child near the mountains and lake of her youth. When her six-year-old asks to wear pink sneakers, asks to be a witch for Halloween, asks to wear a girls’ dance costume, Abi worries about how their small community will react. But when that child changes her name, grows her hair long, and announces that she is girl, a firestorm descends on the family.

Weaving together the story of her own youth, marked by long afternoons skiing the mountains, a cottage on the lake, a proud gay brother, but also by hunger, neglect, and bullying that pushed her brother to the brink, Abi Maxwell contends with the rural America where she was raised and, years later, where she is now raising her daughter, as lawmakers push to erase the very existence of trans youths. Intimate and stirring, this book is essential reading for this moment in our history.