A YEAR WITHOUT A NAME
By Cyrus Grace Dunham
Little, Brown, October 15, 2019
For as long as they can remember, Cyrus Grace Dunham felt like a visitor in their own body. Their life was a series of imitations—lovable little girl, daughter, sister, young gay woman—until their profound sense of alienation became intolerable.
Moving between Grace and Cyrus, Dunham brings us inside the chrysalis of gender transition, asking us to bear witness to an uncertain and exhilarating process that troubles our most basic assumptions about who we are and how we are constituted. Written with disarming emotional intensity in a voice uniquely theirs, A Year Without a Name is a potent, thrillingly unresolved queer coming of age story.
Selected Praise
“Cyrus Grace Dunham has written a classic memoir—passionate and clear eyed and unputdownable. I’ve never seen a gender journey rendered in more tender, riveting detail. Bravo to this extraordinary new voice.” — Mary Karr, author of The Liars’ Club
“Cyrus’s book is raw, beautiful and uncompromisingly honest: a slippery, vital account of gender, family and the longing to be real. I read it with my heart in my mouth.” — Olivia Laing, author of The Lonely City and Crudo
“A work of extraordinarily intimate confession rendered in startling, sparkling—and addictive— prose. This book, simply put, summons a private and deeply pleasurable exchange with its reader. In the grand tradition, it keeps us company.” — Jordy Rosenberg, author of Confessions of the Fox
“Cyrus Grace Dunham’s memoir is unflinching. A Year Without a Name let me travel with Dunham on his difficult, sometimes treacherous, sometimes beautiful, always memorable path.” ― Lynne Tillman, author of Men and Apparations
About the Author
Cyrus Grace Dunham is an activist and writer who has written for the New Yorker, the New York Times and the London Sunday Times.