A parent’s love letter to a daughter who has always known exactly who she is.
One ordinary day, a caseworker from the Department of Children and Families knocked on the Hays family’s door to investigate an anonymous complaint about the upbringing of their transgender child. It was this knock, this threat, that began the family’s journey out of the Bible Belt but never far from the hate and fear resting at the nation’s core.
Self-aware and intimate, A Girlhood asks us all to love better, not just for the sake of Hays’s child but for children everywhere enduring injustice and prejudice just as they begin to understand themselves. A Girlhood is a call to action, an ode to community, a plea for empathy, a hope for a better future. A Girlhood is a love letter to a child who has always known exactly who she is—and who is waiting for the rest of the world to catch up.
Carolyn Hays is an award-winning, critically acclaimed, bestselling author who has chosen to publish A Girlhood: Letter to My Transgender Daughter under a pen name to protect the privacy of her family. Her novels have been published by Hachette, Simon and Schuster, and HarperCollins and have been listed as New York Times Notable Books and Kirkus’s Best Fiction of the Year. She’s also written for National Public Radio and the Washington Post.
Erin Bennett is an award-winning, Los Angeles-based voice actress whose passion for storytelling informs her love of narrating audiobooks. An AudioFile Earphones winner, she has recorded 130 titles for Penguin Random House, Hachette, Harper, Blackstone, Recorded Books, Tantor, Deyan, Dreamscape, and Audible, among others. Her genres vary widely, from literary fiction to mysteries to science fiction to memoir, as well as nonfiction, multicast recordings, and romance. Her recent on-camera work includes Grandfathered on FOX and Children's Hospital on Adult Swim, and her voice-over work spans animation, radio plays for the BBC, video games, and commercials for radio and television.