
Her Name Is Alice
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Narrated by:
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Caroline Litman
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By:
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Caroline Litman
About this listen
'Thoughtful, beautiful, incredibly necessary. People need to read this book, especially if they feel a resistance to. I wish everyone would.' Sofie Hagen
‘Uncompromising, anguished, combative: culture wars have victims, and this is an agonising story told with honesty and passion.’ Richard Beard
'An intimate, beautifully told memoir' Elinor Cleghorn
When my third child was born, I was told I had a boy. The baby was given a boy’s name and raised in that gender. But when she died, twenty years later, she died as my daughter, and will forever be remembered that way.
Alice Litman died by suicide in May 2022, aged just twenty years old, having already waited almost three years for her first appointment at a gender identity clinic.
In stunningly beautiful prose, Caroline Litman captures the realities of an often-messy journey navigating both her daughter’s transition and the days, weeks and months after Alice’s death.
Searing, urgent and utterly unique, Her Name is Alice is the raw, human story of a mother’s love and grief for her child – and of a young trans woman who is impossible to forget and who must be remembered.
©2025 Caroline Litman (P)2025 HarperCollins PublishersEveryone should read this book
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Caroline Litman does two important things in this book: 1. Writes about Alice, celebrates Alice and ensures her life is one that, although it was cut short, is not forgotten. 2. Writes with brutal honesty in a way that must have been difficult - especially when acknowledging feelings and actions that she may regret with hindsight.
I have always shied away from memoirs detailing tragedy but with the way the lives of trans and nonbinary people are being used as a political football and with so many people being utterly ignorant and making proclamations having never met a trans person I felt it important to have some insight into what is clearly a huge problem - the high self-harm and suicide rate amongst trans people.
I was surprised how much joy there is in the book. I was pleased that the author ensured her husband and other children also featured prominently. I am all too aware of how suicide can impact so severely on a parent that their partner and other children feel less important or even entirely unimportant in the years that follow. I feel I have learned a great deal by reading this book but also it has not changed how I felt before reading it: trans people are beautiful souls who need our love and support not condemnation, suspicion or ludicrous assumptions that they harbour some malevolent reason for transitioning.
Caroline, that must have been an incredibly difficult book to write and your ability to bare your soul and be so honest about something so personal is remarkable. I bought the book when it came out and was so captivated that I then bought the audiobook so I could also listen on my long commute in the car. I think I will probably come back to it and read it again one day.
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I deeply admire Caroline and Peter's bravery in sharing the truth in so many ways and it's a master class in parenting, showing how one might do it better.... loving and nurturing kids into openness and cherishing them as individuals without suffocating who they truly are....but also, they show the deep love that carries families into and through the toughest of life's moments.
There is no perfect but there is trying your best.
I hope they continue to find peace in realizing how special they are.
a postscript to Caroline and Peter's which might not ease any pain but has lightened my load....anger, negativity and trying to control the rights for individual choices and the funding of help needed.....I have been bullied, attacked, grieviously let down by people tasked to protect me, tried serious suicide attempts x3 and discriminated for most of my 70 years....these people who fail us in our right to live as we are...im not trans but have other challenges. these people are lost, shallow, fearful, have needs to control other people's l8ves because of things and ignorance in their own lives. They are lacking in depth, intelligence, empathy and a large dose of reality. We can not change the cruelty and pain we have been dealt, we can not change the losses we suffer...we can only find some peace in the knowledge we have risen above the unevolved humans struggling to force themselves on us...understand with some pity they are lost and by delving into our own life and continuing to grow and learn and move forward, we have been blessed with a depth they will never know....we feel the highest highs because of the deepest depths we endured. I will choose to believe that children like Alice, who crossed over far too soon and usually in some pain, have been taken because of something beyond us who knew their future was unfair for them to have to endure. The pain is hell but maybe they've been saved from more pain. What has pulled me up at the toughest times is a rather odd, quirky sense of humor and an ability to treat the negative parts of life as lessons to remind us how we are fortunate not to be like the 'them'.....and a belief they are never truly gone but are living at a higher spiritual life.....I hope this makes sense....xo
A true lesson in self discovery and love
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