Alessia Burst’s The Bitch in the Mirror: Silence, Survival, and Liberation is not the kind of memoir that tiptoes around discomfort or softens its truths for polite company. It is a punch in the gut and a hand reaching out all at once. From the first page, Burst makes it clear that her story will not whisper. It will scream, laugh, bleed, and dance its way through the wreckage of addiction, silence, and shame until only survival remains. Written with a mix of dark humor, sarcasm, and naked vulnerability, this memoir captures the paradox of being a trans woman in a world that prefers quiet compliance. Instead, Burst chooses noise.
Growing up queer in Montana, Alessia Burst learned early that silence was both a weapon and a survival tool. Her upbringing was steeped in unspoken rules about gender, family, and sin. When she married, it was not love that guided her but the crushing weight of expectation. Her descent into alcoholism was not a sudden fall but a slow, methodical erasure of self. The bottle became both her armor and her escape, until her body finally rebelled and she was told she had five years left to live. For many, that would have been an epitaph. For Burst, it became a deadline for rebirth.
