Julia Phillips - The King is Dead...

2025, English, Julia Phillips, UK,

Full title: "The King is Dead... Long live the Queen" by Julia Phillips.

“The King is Dead... Long Live the Queen” by Julia Phillips is not simply a book you read. It is a book you witness. From its opening pages to its quiet, devastatingly honest conclusion, it feels less like a constructed narrative and more like an open door into a life that has been lived under pressure, secrecy, longing, and finally, truth. It is a personal journal in the purest sense, unpolished where it needs to be, tender where it must be, and unflinchingly brave in its refusal to look away from pain.

 

At its heart, this work is a chronicle of heartbreak and love lost. It tells the story of the end of a grand romance, not in melodramatic terms, but in the slow, aching way that real love often ends. Julia writes with the clarity of someone who has had no choice but to sit with her grief, examine it from every angle, and eventually accept it. The relationship that dissolves across these pages is not treated as a failure, but as something meaningful and transformative, something that shaped her and ultimately pushed her toward a deeper reckoning with herself. What makes the book extraordinary is that this love story runs parallel to another, more difficult one. The love story between Julia and her true self. Written as a form of therapy, the book documents a journey that spans despair, self-reflection, and frank acceptance before arriving at redemption, joy, and hope. Spread across four volumes, the journals capture the emotional reality of a trans woman confronting her gender head-on for the first time after fifty years of hiding behind a carefully constructed façade. This is not a sudden awakening or a neat moment of realization. It is a slow dismantling. When you reach the very end, all the walls fall down, and you see yourself for who you truly are.

 

Julia does not romanticize this process. Desperate circumstances force her into honesty, and she writes about that desperation with striking vulnerability. There is fear, confusion, and a profound sense of loss for the life she thought she was meant to live. At the same time, there is relief in finally naming what has always been there. The reader walks with her through moments of doubt and moments of clarity, through nights where the weight of repression feels unbearable and mornings where the possibility of truth feels like oxygen. Despite its deep exploration of gender, the book never reduces itself to a single theme. Fundamentally, it remains a love story. Love for another person, love that could not survive unchanged, and love for oneself that had been postponed for decades. Julia’s writing makes it clear that gender exploration does not happen in isolation. It is entangled with relationships, with history, with the roles we play to survive, and with the cost of pretending for too long.

 

There is also a quiet meta-narrative running through the book, one about the act of writing itself. Julia shares how these journals came into being almost by accident. She had been through so much in her life, and much to her own surprise and everyone else’s, she managed to write it all down. At first, the pages were simply a way to cope. Later, she reread them and realized they were not as bad as she feared they might be. They told a story worth telling. Typing them up became a labor of love, even when it meant reliving some of the hardest moments of her life. The pain was real, but so was the sense that these words might help someone else, even if they only helped her. The publication story mirrors the emotional journey of the book. With a manuscript in hand and no clear expectations, Julia approached Maple Publishing after a simple online search. There was no grand plan, just a hope that the words might find a home. What followed was a collaboration that turned out to be deeply affirming. Maple Publishing did not just produce a book. They helped make the story real. When the complimentary copies arrived, it was not just paper and ink. It was validation. A real book, a real author, and a life that no longer had to remain hidden.

 

Reading “The King is Dead... Long Live the Queen” feels like being invited to sit down while Julia says, gently and directly, “Are we sitting comfortably? Then I will begin.” The voice is intimate, conversational, and disarmingly sincere. There is no attempt to impress, only a desire to be understood. That sincerity is what gives the book its power. It trusts the reader enough to tell the truth. By the final pages, the reader understands the weight of the closing declaration. It has been fifty years, but Julia is finally living her truth. That truth is not presented as an ending, but as a beginning. The king, the façade, the old identity built for survival, is finally laid to rest. In its place stands the queen, not triumphant in a fairytale sense, but real, flawed, hopeful, and alive. The book closes not with certainty, but with openness, and with the quiet, hard-won knowledge that seeing yourself clearly is the greatest act of love there is.

Available via Amazon

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