Shakespeare had it right all along: Love will kill you in the end.

Janet Mock's honest and sometimes searing journey is a rare and important look into la vida liminal, one that she manages to negotiate remarkably well, with grace, humor, and fierce grit. Mock doesn't only redefine what realness means to her, but challenges us to rethink our own perceptions of gender and sexuality, feminism and sisterhood, making this book a transcendent piece of American literature.

I guess it all depends on whom you ask and when you ask. Race, I've learned, is in the eye of the beholder.

There are things in our blood that are just naturally passed down to us, whether we want to recognize them or not.

Women destroy me. I allow them to.

This is what I know about my parents. They spent the next several years trying to forget each other, and me.

The hospital room was as cold as dead skin, the hallway crowded with lost souls and reeking of illness.