Compassionate and meticulous ... Carr spares us the ponderous establishing shots that weigh down many books of this genre ... There wasn’t really vocabulary to describe the territory Darling was exploring back then... and her biographer extends a sure hand across the breach. To push her from the Warhol wings to center stage, at a moment when transgender rights are in roiling flux, just makes sense.
Monumental ... Carr had to assemble her portrait of the young Candy from snippets, fragments, misremembered memories, and family shame ... Carr is a wonderful social historian, especially adept in her depiction of New York’s art and theatre scene in the years when Candy made her name.
A complicated, frequently harrowing tale of a woman whose grandest ambitions—to be known and understood in her womanhood, without hesitation—floundered on the shores of self-doubt, transphobia, familial abuse, and poverty ... The book restores humanity and nuance to a woman who we know as only an image.
