Abi Maxwell’s memoir One Day I’ll Grow Up and Be a Beautiful Woman: A Mother’s Story is a raw and unflinching portrait of a family thrust into the center of America’s ongoing cultural battles. At its heart, it is the story of a mother and daughter bound by love, resilience, and the determination to exist truthfully, even as the world around them questions their very right to do so. It is a book that not only charts the deeply personal journey of one family in New Hampshire but also illuminates the larger, national struggle faced by trans youth and their families as they navigate an era of relentless scrutiny and political hostility.
Maxwell grew up in rural New Hampshire, one of eight children in a family that lived on the edge of poverty. Her childhood was defined by both beauty and hardship. She remembers the grandeur of the mountains where she skied, the serenity of a lakeside cottage, and the fierce pride she felt in her gay brother who lived openly despite hostility. Yet she also recalls hunger, neglect, and the bullying that left her brother isolated and vulnerable, nearly breaking him. Those contradictions, the constant push and pull of beauty and struggle, echo throughout the memoir as she reflects on how her past shaped the way she parents her own child.
When Maxwell and her husband first married, they did not intend to have children. But when she became pregnant, she felt an instinctive desire to return to the land that shaped her, to raise her child in the same mountains and beside the same lake that had given her solace as a girl. For a time, it seemed possible that her family could build a quiet life there. That illusion began to crack when her child, then six years old, asked to wear pink sneakers, wanted to be a witch for Halloween, and longed for the chance to wear a girls’ dance costume. Maxwell understood that these choices would not be received with kindness in their small community, where difference was often met with suspicion or disdain. The full reality struck when her child grew her hair long, chose a new name, and told the world that she was a girl. What might have been a moment of celebration in another environment became the spark that lit a firestorm around the family.
What makes the book so powerful is the way Maxwell braids her daughter’s journey with her own. By looking back at her childhood in a poor town abutting the wealthier village of Gilford, she draws sharp lines between class, identity, and survival. She describes the weight of poverty, the ways it marked her family as outsiders, and the resilience it demanded. That context makes her present fight for her daughter all the more poignant. She understands what it means to grow up marginalized in a place where resources are scarce and acceptance scarcer still. Her memoir becomes not only a story of gender identity but also a broader meditation on class and community in rural America.
The writing is at once intimate and fiery, suffused with both heartbreak and defiance. Maxwell does not shy away from her fears for her daughter’s safety, nor from the anger she feels toward a society intent on policing children’s identities. At the same time, she brings to the page the tender moments of family life that sustain her, moments of joy and affirmation that prove more enduring than the cruelty surrounding them. Her love for her daughter radiates from every page, a steady flame that refuses to be extinguished.
One Day I’ll Grow Up and Be a Beautiful Woman is more than a memoir of motherhood. It is a testament to the courage it takes to love a child fully and unapologetically in a country where that love is challenged by laws and prejudice. It is a reminder that the culture wars often discussed in abstract terms are lived out in the intimate spaces of kitchens and playgrounds, in the choices families make each day to affirm their children. By telling her story with honesty and urgency, Maxwell ensures that her daughter’s voice, and the voices of countless other trans youths, are not erased.
In this moment of history, when trans rights are under siege and families like Maxwell’s are forced to defend their children against waves of misinformation and fear, her memoir stands as essential reading. It is at once a chronicle of a single family and a reflection of an entire nation grappling with questions of identity, justice, and belonging. For readers, it is a call to empathy and action, a demand that we recognize the humanity of children who only want to grow up and be who they are.
Available via Amazon
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