Maybe This Will Save Me - by Tommy Dorfman (Hardcover)

Book Synopsis

"I'm determined to get to know the real Tommy, to trace the shape of my scars."

For years, Tommy Dorfman turned her back on her thoughts and emotions, hoping they'd simply go away.

After a lifetime of confusion, she finally gained clarity around her gender and began to transition.

But there were still parts of herself she'd locked away, elements of her story that she needed, for the first time, to fully confront.

She sought guidance in a tarot deck.

Maybe This Will Save Me is structured through the cards of that tarot pull. The youngest of five children, she grappled with her own identity from an early age and spent her teenage years numbed by drugs and alcohol. At the same time, she harbored dreams of creative stardom and a desire to make herself seen. Charting her early struggles in theater, her rise to fame in 13 Reasons Why, her hard-fought journey to sobriety, and the relationships that shaped her, Maybe This Will Save Me is a luminously written, bracingly honest, and structurally audacious memoir of an artist whose vision transcends mediums.

Review Quotes

"Tommy Dorfman has written a fascinating, innovative twist on memoir, a book that breaks new forms to produce flashing vignettes of insight while compiling a moving document on the process of becoming."--Torrey Peters, national bestselling author of Detransition, Baby

"Tommy Dorfman is as funny as she is self-aware, as bold as she is beautiful, and has turned her remarkably specific life into something wildly universal. This collection will ask you to reckon with what it means to define yourself in a culture hell bent on defining you--required reading for anyone who has ever rejected the story other wrote for them in order to write their own, and for anyone who wants to but doesn't have the tools yet."--Lena Dunham

"In Tommy Dorfman's hands, evolution is nonlinear and kaleidoscopic: in some ways fated from the beginning, in others not guaranteed but slowly earned. Her memoir resists simplicity at every turn. It might have been easier to write as a past tense proclamation, but Dorfman creates from the present, the messy middle, which is all we have. Maybe This Will Save Me is at once a love letter to the person she's been all along and to the mysterious, unending process of becoming."--Chloe Benjamin, New York Times bestselling author of The Immortalists

"A fiercely honest account of a whirlwind youth, and of the hope among the wreckage. Dorfman is sensational."--Nicole Dinan, author of Bellies

"Combustibly propulsive... Translating her full life to this fully engrossing book, Dorfman asserts herself as this kind of artist, too: an imaginative and truthful writer in steady ownership of her story." --Booklist, STARRED review