Deb Carson’s Becoming Flo… A Mostly True Story opens like a dare to history itself. It asks the reader to imagine Baltimore in 1920, a city heavy with immigrant struggle and rigid social rules, and to step into the life of a sixteen-year-old Orthodox Jewish boy who does not fit the narrow future laid out for him. He is surrounded by siblings, four sisters who adore him and four brothers who judge him, and ruled by a father whose brutality is justified by faith, fear, and shame. This boy loves art, color, performance, and beauty, things his father finds unforgivable. Worse still, he harbors a secret that has no language in his world and a desire that threatens his very survival. Carson frames this moment not as melodrama but as a stark, human question, what would you do if staying meant destruction and leaving meant everything unknown.
The boy, born Abraham Isadore Meyrowitz, does what almost no Orthodox Jewish boy of his time dared to do. He runs away. He joins the circus. And in doing so, he eventually becomes Flo. Carson traces this transformation with care and empathy, grounding it in historical reality while allowing Flo’s inner life to shine through. The early chapters are steeped in the legacy of trauma carried from the Russian shtetl to American streets, a legacy shaped by pogroms, religious persecution, and the desperate hope that tradition might protect what violence could not. Instead, tradition becomes another weapon in the hands of an abusive father, and Carson never softens this truth. The violence Flo escapes is not abstract, it is intimate, relentless, and justified by a world that sees no problem in crushing an effeminate child into obedience.
