The New Girl: A Trans Girl Tells It Like It Is

by Rhyannon Styles

Overview

'Inspiring and heart-wrenching' Paloma Faith

'Love Rhyannon. Love this book' Grace Dent

The remarkable transgender memoir you won't stop hearing about. Rhyannon Styles will do for transgender what Matt Haig did for mental health. Elle columnist Rhyannon Styles tells her unforgettable life story in THE NEW GIRL, reflecting on her past and charting her incredible journey from male to female. A raw, frank and utterly moving celebration of life.

Imagine feeling lost in your own body. Imagine spending years living a lie, denying what makes you 'you'. This was Ryan's reality. He had to choose: die as a man or live as a woman.

In 2012, Ryan chose Rhyannon. At the age of thirty she began her transition, taking the first steps on the long road to her true self.

Rhyannon holds nothing back in THE NEW GIRL, a heartbreakingly honest telling of her life. Through her catastrophic lows and incredible highs, she paints a glorious technicolour picture of what it's like to be transgender. From cabaret drag acts, brushes with celebrity and Parisian clown school, to struggles with addiction and crippling depression, Rhyannon's story is like nothing you've read before.

Narrated with searing honesty, humour and poignancy, THE NEW GIRL is a powerful book about being true to ourselves, for anyone who's ever felt a little lost.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781472242587
Publisher:	Headline
Publication date:	03/27/2018
Pages:	336
Sales rank:	556,590
Product dimensions:	5.25(w) x 7.87(h) x 0.75(d)

About the Author

Rhyannon Styles is a journalist, performance artist and musician. Her ground-breaking Elle column, 'The New Girl', charts her journey from male to female, where she bares all about her experience of transitioning. In her colourful life as a performer, career highlights include a show at the Guggenheim Museum NYC, dancing with Kylie Minogue on ITV and rollerskating naked at the Barbican art gallery. A star of the transgender community, Rhyannon was name-checked on Independent's Rainbow List as 'One to Watch'.

Get up close and personal with Rhyannon online:

Elle column: www.elleuk.com/tags/rhyannon-styles

Website: www.rhyannonstyles.com

Twitter: @rhyannonstyles

Instagram: @rhyannon_styles

YouTube: /RStyles

Table of Contents

Prologue: Introducing the New Girl 1

1 The Lost Boy 7

2 Growing Pains 37

3 The Big Smoke 59

4 The Club Kid is Born 79

5 Life Is a Stage 100

6 The Business of Show 123

7 The B-side 158

8 Transcendence: The Beginning 180

9 Transcendence: Changes 216

10 Transcendence: A Journey 250

11 Enter Rhyannon Styles 286

12 Transcendence: Is This the End …? 308

Epilogue: Rhyannon Right Now 322

Acknowledgements 327

Editorial Reviews

I watched Rhyannon Styles begin as the most inspiring and heart-wrenching cocoon I ever saw and now she is a glorious butterfly—Paloma Faith

Love Rhyannon. Love this book. Everything you've ever wondered about transition, cocooned in an epic tale of fleeing suburbia and big city fabulousness—Grace Dent

I loved this book - Rhyannon doesn't just shine a light on this subject, she sets off a bloody fireworks display—Cherry Healey

I am changed for having read this - congratulations, Rhyannon, on a bold life that inspires and lifts - the world needed this truth—Laura Jane Williams, author and blogger

A story that will make you smile and sob in equal measure, and challenge everything you thought you knew about gender, sex, and fashion. Once read, never forgotten—Rebecca Root

A wonderful asset to our community—Caroline Tula, Trans icon, model and Bond girl

Proud to be holding this book ... The best and worst of times in a wonderful memoir—Lorraine Candy, Sunday Times

Rhyannon is such a great ambassador for the trans community. She writes with such class while also keeping it super real. I've got a book coming out later this year and all I'm saying is I'm glad my book isn't a memoir, because I'd hate to have to compete with this—Charlie Craggs

Rhyannon Styles journey of transition is fraught with the unique issues of her generation. Honest and unflinching, she walks the tightrope of uncertainty with confidence in the unknowing. A modern Artemis in the queer wilderness, midwifing her own becoming—Penny Arcade

A deeply honest and candid memoir ... In a beautifully moving account of her life, Rhyannon left us captured until the very last page—Marie Claire South Africa

From the Publisher

2018-01-22
Styles, who began transitioning from male to female at age 30 in 2012, looks back over the path of her life from childhood up to the present.In her first book, the British author, who was the transgender columnist for Elle U.K. from 2015 to 2017, reaches out to readers who wonder about the often awkward and confusing process of transitioning. She begins with memories of growing up in rural England in the 1980s, often switching "between the roles of girl and boy in my head, unsure of which one felt more secure." Young Ryan—who changed his name to Rhyannon when he began transitioning—liked to dress in girls' clothes and wear makeup and felt at home with the girls in his primary school. Bullied as an early teen, he found a home later in adolescence with other teens involved in art and music and then went on to London to study jewelry making in art school. For a while, the author satisfied his desire to dress as a woman by performing in drag shows. Eventually, however, he wanted a more permanent and less showy change, so he began to communicate with his family, whom he had previously kept in the dark about his gender identity. Though generally upbeat, Styles also reveals a more tormented side in a chapter called "The B-Side," which details long periods of depression and drug and alcohol abuse, eventually abated through 12-step programs. She describes in cheerful detail the process of transitioning, including the effects of hormones on her body and personality, both positive and negative, and she details her present state of indecision about just how far to go with transition. Her acceptance of a fluid identity should be comforting for readers who feel out of place in a cultural system that divides gender into traditional male and female roles.An honest and helpfully specific journey through a life that has taken some unexpected turns, of interest to all open-minded readers and especially to transgender individuals and those who care about them.

Kirkus Reviews