Easily the best book I’ve read all year. Best review I can think of: read it.

I picked up this audiobook on a whim because it fit the profile of "memoirs narrated by the author" that I've been enjoying listening to lately. Sarah McBride's name and the cover looked vaguely familiar, but I actually came into this book knowing nothing (or having forgotten all I knew) about who she is. The experience of reading this very time-specific book felt a bit like I was being sucked back in time through a not wholly pleasant tunnel. Much like the odd melancholia of watching the recent Hassan Minhaj interview with President Obama, this book took me back to a time when the world felt so much more hopeful, when we hadn't had so many years of nonsense and deterioration of all political decorum. It peeled back years of grime to look, painfully, at the trajectory of U.S. politics that could have been. But as a semi-historical artifact (of only six years' age, I know...), I think this book has a deep value in its affirmation of the need for justice and the reminder that, even in times of seemingly constant progress, equality is still something that people are working tirelessly to fight for, and that progress is not a given.

I really appreciated this book's inside look at the process of activism within government and the steps it took to get specific laws passed, without becoming too dry and political itself. McBride manages to deftly weave this public storyline alongside her personal whirlwind of experiences with coming out, falling in love, and grief. So much happens in this book that I was constantly stunned by her references to the timeline (most of it recounts a span of only two years). The theme of personal empowerment and coming into one's authentic self is really strong: the book both recounts how her story changed lives and acts itself as a furthering of that work. I also appreciated how she approaches the stories of acceptance (especially in recounting her parents' initial reactions to her coming out) by focusing on themes of love -- this seems like the kind of book that might be both gentle and firm enough to sway a reader who's unsure of how to feel about transgender people.

A couple final notes on the audiobook specifically: The foreword was really disconcertingly read by what seemed to be an actual robot. Biden's words are touching and well-crafted, but the voice reading them was so stilted and awkward, I almost decided to skip through it. I thought McBride's narration was fine and true to herself, but at particularly at some of the more high-energy points, I could definitely feel the voice of a public speaker coming out, which wasn't quite the energy level that makes sense to be sustained through that much of an audiobook, at least for me.