A powerfully honest coming-of-gender story by Cyrus Grace Dunham, who joins Kepler’s Literary Foundation in conversation with Angie Coiro for a This Is Now discussion of their transition memoir, A Year Without A Name.

“Back then, I knew how to stay in character as a girl. Polite, curious, the right mix of self-assured and humble. When puberty hit, I became obsessed with mirrors. I checked my reflection—four times, eight times, twelve times—to make sure that I hadn’t lost control of my performance. Twenty years later, my girlhood was dissolving, with no clear alternative in place. I felt less embodied than ever, less able to gather myself into one person.”

Without abandoning the person that Grace was—that history, that connection to family, and friends— Cyrus Grace Dunham undergoes a journey towards self-realization that navigates the place between genders, a nonbinary space habited not by societal enforcements of masculine and feminine, but by one person’s embodied experience of both. Cyrus moves towards masculinity after a long internal reckoning, but the story is more complicated than that. A Year Without A Name offers clarity, warmth, and encouragement to all those who have ever struggled to conform for the sake of love and connection. Through a nonbinary lens and against the pressure to align exclusively with femininity or masculinity, Cyrus Grace chooses their self: one person, honoring gender complexity and living out an embodied truth in disregard of how the outside world interprets a person’s body.

“Passionate and clear eyed and unputdownable. Bravo to this extraordinary new voice.” —Mary Karr

Photo of Cyrus by Sam Richardson.