What does it really mean to be a man? In this memoir, Thomas Page McBee attempts to answer that question by focusing on two of the men who most impacted his life--one, his otherwise ordinary father who abused him as a child, and the other, a mugger who threatened his life and then released him in an odd moment of mercy. Standing at the brink of the decision to transition from female to male, McBee seeks to understand these examples of flawed manhood as he cobbles together his own identity.