“Men I Hate performs the surgical accomplishment of dissecting a life while enacting a delicate transition from rage and fear into empathy and understanding. D’Amico gifts readers life-sustaining insights by immersing them inside the exhilarations, frustrations, and exhaustions of being a daughter, a lesbian, a wife, a writer, a patient, a citizen, and a human. Without shying away from the complicated details of a life that demands shifts in how she defines and understands herself, she skillfully guides us through many challenges we all face. One can only have gratitude for the perspective and hope she provides as she masterfully unlearns the past in order to meet the present.” —Claudia Rankine
“With a disarming blend of candor and style, Lynette D’Amico traces the tectonic shifts of a long-term relationship with exhilarating clarity. Men I Hate confronts the hardest questions—what happens when everything you thought you knew changes?—and does so without flinching. An impelled, acoustically alive, unforgettable book.” —Paul Lisicky, author of Song So Wild and Blue: A Life with the Music of Joni Mitchell
“Men I Hate is a book about a relationship that’s really about a relationship to self—from escaping the myth of the American dream to negotiating the tyranny of gender rules and roles to facing the complications of family, romance, aging, illness, and the search for home. Here Lynette D’Amico inhabits all her insecurities—her rage, heartbreak, and longing— with rare precision so that facing grief might offer the possibility for comfort.” —Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore, author of Terry Dactyl
“Lynette D’Amico gives free play to the stories within the stories, the countervailing stories, the stories that split the truth right down the middle of the stories we tell ourselves and those that we live by. Tough, insightful, purely conceived, and deeply contextualized, Men I Hate passionately investigates a history of desire retold, transformed, and possibly undone when one member of a lesbian couple transitions. D’Amico’s deft, fresh grasp of the essay delivers us to a form that can withstand the shattering, shelter the thrown, and accommodate the contradictions, all the while moving across uncharted terrain. Men I Hate is a knockout.” —Mary Cappello, coauthor of Buffalo Trace: A Threefold Vibration
Can a lesbian who loves a trans man still call herself a lesbian? Against the backdrop of a traditional Sicilian American upbringing, Lynette D’Amico identified as a lesbian despite the expectation that life hinged on the man she married. As a teenager, she fled her St. Louis home in the dark of night to escape her fate. No boys allowed, until one day D’Amico’s life was completely upended when her lover and spouse of twenty years—P. Carl, the acclaimed author of Becoming a Man: The Story of a Transition—told her he was a man.
Seemingly overnight, D’Amico no longer recognized her spouse in photos of past vacations or of the couple celebrating their legal gay marriage. In Men I Hate, she asks: What happens when the people we are closest to change? As D’Amico tries to engage more deeply with the man she is married to, she looks at all the men—historical figures, politicians, men in her family—in search of clear dividing lines between good men and bad, between the men she loves and the men she hates. These lines dissolve as she writes her way toward an understanding of the words marriage, husband, and home—and how we reconcile who we are with who we become.
Lynette D’Amico is an essayist and fiction writer. She is the author of the novella Road Trip and a recipient of a fellowship from the Vermont Studio Center. She holds an MFA from the Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College.
Photo credit: P.Carl
Contents
Changing the Story
The Brother
The Man Next Door
Becoming Queered
Cities and Bodies in Motion
The Burning Bed
The Stasi Men
The Ghosts in Our Marriage
Men I Love
Afterword
Acknowledgments
Notes
