REVIEW: REMAINING SAMUEL

Samuel Rafael's Remaining Samuel is a must-read. If you're transgender you may be amazed, as I was, to find so many aspects of your own experience reflected in Samuel's story. If you love a transgender person or just want to learn more about us, this book will be invaluable. This is a story told with rare insight and honesty, vividly capturing both the joys and agonies of Samuel's experience as a transgender person.

While clearly autobiographical the story is told in the third person and with a somewhat academic style, deliberately distancing choices that actually serve to make some of the darker events more harrowing and tragic. We can sense how painful these memories are, that the author is choosing to view them from such a remove. At times it almost reads like horror fiction, with a cool and clinical voice describing the tortures inflicted upon this undeserving soul.

But the book isn't a grim slog by any means. Samuel becomes a successful therapist, finding peace and helping others find it too. By the end of the book you get the sense that he brings lifetimes of experience to his practice, that all of this suffering has been put to its best possible use. I sometimes marvel at how some people use their own misfortune as an excuse to inflict pain on others, while others develop a profound empathy and set out to do what they can to make this world a better place. Samuel is one of the latter, and his story is truly inspirational.