Author Event Diana Goetsch

Pound Ridge Library, in collaboration with Pound Ridge Partnership, the Human Rights Advisory Committee, and Booksy Galore, is thrilled to welcome author Diana Goetsch as we kick off Pride Month!

Diana will be discussing her book, This Body I Wore, a Washington Post Best Book of the Year. It has been described as, ‘A captivating memoir of one woman’s long journey to late transition, as the trans community emerges alongside her.’

“Achingly beautiful.” –Manuel Betancourt, The New York Times Book Review

Long before Laverne Cox appeared on the cover of Time, far removed from drag and ballroom culture, there were countless trans women living and dying as men, most of whom didn’t even know they were trans. Diana Goetsch’s This Body I Wore chronicles one woman’s long journey to coming out, a path that runs parallel to the emergence of the trans community over the past several decades.

“How can you spend your life face-to-face with an essential fact about yourself and still not see it?” This is a question often asked of trans people, and a question that Goetsch, an award-winning poet and essayist, addresses with the power and complexity of lived reality. She brings us into her childhood, her time as a dynamic and beloved teacher at New York City’s Stuyvesant High School, and her plunge into the city’s crossdressing subculture in the 1980s and ’90s. Under cover of night, crossdressers risked their jobs and their safety to give expression to urges they could neither control nor understand. Many would become late transitioners, the Cinderellas of the trans community largely ignored by history.

Goetsch has written not a transition memoir, but rather a full account of a trans life, one both unusually public and closeted. All too often trans lives are reduced to before-and-after photos, but what if that before photo lasted fifty years?

Please register below. Registration guarantees a spot in the program, but does not guarantee a parking space. To purchase a copy of Diana’s book to have signed at the event, please visit Booksy’s website.

Please register below. Registration guarantees a spot in the program, but does not guarantee a parking space.