Amy Bloom has won a devoted readership and wide critical acclaim for fiction of rare
humor, insight, grace, and eloquence, and the same qualities distinguish Normal,
a provocative, intimate journey into the lives of people who reveal, or announce,
that their gender is variegated rather than monochromatic -female-to-male transsexuals,
heterosexual crossdressers, and the intersexed.

We meet Lyle Monelle and his
mother, Jessie, who recognized early on that her little girl was in fact a boy and
used her life savings to help Lyle make the transition. On a Carnival cruise with
a group of crossdressers and their spouses, we meet Peggy Rudd and her husband, Melanie,

who devote themselves to the cause of ordinary heterosexual men with an additional
feminine dimension. And we meet Hale Hawbecker, a regular, middle-of-the-road,
white-bread guy with a wife, kids, and a medical condition, the standard treatment
for which would have changed his life and his gender.

Casting light into the dusty
corners of our assumptions about sex, gender and identity, Bloom reveals new facets
to the ideas of happiness, personality and character, even as she brilliantly illuminates
the very concept of normal.