Christie De Vries’s autobiography Down the Rabbit Hole...: An Autobiography is a brave, raw, and deeply personal account of a life marked by upheaval, survival, and transformation. Born in Germany in 1957, Christie emigrated to Australia as a child, where her life quickly became turbulent. She endured a painful and stormy relationship with her adoptive mother Anna, who shaped much of her early years with strictness, conflict, and at times cruelty. The abuse she suffered at the hands of her adoptive parents, combined with the alienation of being different, left her feeling both unwanted and unseen.
Her autobiography spares no detail in describing these struggles, offering readers a glimpse into the isolation of a child trying to make sense of a fractured world.
As Christie recalls, her adolescence was spent in institutions, places meant to control and discipline rather than nurture. Yet even within those walls, she carried the spark of her true identity. She began her transition in her late teens, starting hormone therapy at seventeen and undergoing gender reassignment surgery at twenty-one. The path to becoming herself was fraught with obstacles, impatience, and a society that offered little tolerance for transgender lives.
In her interview for The Heroines of My Life, she reflected that she would never want to go through it all again, but she remains grateful for having persevered when so much was against her.
Christie’s story also takes readers into the glittering but often unforgiving world of the stage. In her late teens and early twenties she became a ShowGirl, performing in revues at a time when, as she put it, it was one of the very few ways for transgender women to make a living. The pay was meager, and exploitation was common, yet the stage gave her a sense of freedom and a chance to express her femininity in a society that otherwise rejected it. She described the lifestyle as both fun and precarious, one she eventually left behind once she felt ready to try life outside the lights of the cabaret.
At the age of fifty, Christie suffered a breakdown that forced her to reckon with decades of pain. Her stormy bond with Anna had left deep scars, and the grief that followed her passing brought unresolved trauma back to the surface. Writing her autobiography became her way of catharsis. As she explained in her conversation with me, putting such intimate details into the world was terrifying. She almost withdrew the book after nine years of writing, but ultimately decided that telling her story was necessary, not only to free herself from her past but also to help others struggling with gender identity and self-acceptance.
In the end, Christie De Vries’s autobiography is both a confession and a declaration. It confesses to the wounds of the past while declaring her survival and her triumph over them. It is a concise read, yet it carries a weight that lingers long after the last page. For transgender readers it offers solidarity, for others it provides perspective and empathy, and for Christie herself it represents peace hard won. As she told me during our interview, she hoped her book would be a guidepost for young people facing gender issues. In that hope, she succeeded.
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