Psychopomps

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Psychopomps is currently out of print, BUT…

If you are a trans person, or an ally interested in learning about trans lives, please reach out to me for a free PDF.

Advance Praise for Psychopomps:

“Alex addresses questions many of us aren’t brave enough to ask—about the lives we choose for ourselves and the lives we don’t. Empathy and humility shine through this immensely readable prose in a collection that seems to connect the dots of everything that matters: friendship, love, identity and, of course, ghosts.” ~Mary Adkins, author of When You Read This

Psychopomps is a book about searching: searching for identity, searching for love, searching for family. In so writing, DiFrancesco has brought themselves closer to all of us, with their vibrant prose and messy humanity. Psychopomps often explores a marriage during which both partners change their gender identity and in the process lose each other. Their relationship feels both extraordinary and completely ordinary, because it is. DiFrancesco shows us that there is a little bit of all of us in everyone.  ~Joselin Linder, author of The Family Gene

“Psychopomps is a collection of essays that examines not just the ways in which we are torn apart, but more importantly, the ways we knit ourselves back together. DiFrancesco has a deft hand with language and a keen insight into themself and others, and this collection captures what it means to be young and bent toward justice in this moment in time.”  ~Sarah Einstein, author of Mot: A Memoir

“We can write our own stories so much better than those who use us to glimpse what it’s like on the outside,” Alex DiFrancesco writes in this blisteringly beautiful book.  Psychopomps is a book about transformation—and how any self can’t help but change, disappear, revise, rebuild while in the process of becoming itself.  “I am the Wizard of Oz,” the persona says, “shouting from the balloon that rises into the air, ‘I can’t come back, I don’t know how it works!'”  I will follow this voice no matter what lands it travels, because what it brings back is wisdom.  Psychopomps is populated with the wisdom that comes from inhabiting liminal space—a village we might call Not Knowing How Things Work.  And yet somehow DiFrancesco remakes not just the land below, not just the balloon and its mechanisms, but the air that holds us up, the air that enters our lungs, the very elements that keeps us alive, hungry for more beauty.  Once I’d finished reading Psychopomps, I felt heartbroken.  And so I started all over and felt it again—heartbroken, and healed.”   ~James Allen Hall, author of I Liked You Better Before I Knew You So Well