You've Changed: The Promise and Price of Self-Transformation

ISBN: 006299543X

Author: Denizet-Lewis, Benoit

Condition: New

A blazingly smart, thoughtful, funny, and moving book about the endless hope-and the occasional limits-of human transformation. -Elizabeth Gilbert, author of Eat, Pray, Love and All the Way to the RiverFrom New York Times bestselling author Benoit Denizet-Lewis comes a timely, provocative, and deeply moving exploration of personal transformation in a period of roiling uncertainty. Youve Changed investigates how we remake ourselves-and how identity, belief, and belonging shift in a world that wont stop doing the same.We live in an age obsessed with reinvention. On Instagram, in recovery meetings, through name-change petitions, lifestyle pivots, deconversion blogs, and political conversion manifestos, were surrounded by stories of radical personal change. But what does it really mean to shed an old skin-and why do some transformations inspire us while others raise our hackles?Longtime New York Times Magazine writer Benoit Denizet-Lewis, known for his deeply reported and psychologically rich journalism, takes us on a freewheeling, wild-hearted journey into the mystery of human transformation. He introduces us to an unforgettable array of people in flux-including psychedelic reality benders, sexual and gender transitioners, ideological shapeshifters, seemingly reformed murderers, and an octogenarian grandmother trying to change her temperament (Better late than never! she says)-as well as those working to engineer change: psychologists, neuroscientists, name-change specialists, even his own father, a breath and meditation teacher who once wrote a newsletter about the art and science of transformation. Intertwined with those portraits of change is the authors own reckoning-by turns painful, poignant, and hilarious-with his misfires and epiphanies.Youve Changed is a book for anyone whos ever tried to become someone new, fix what felt broken, drag someone else into changing, or wondered whether real transformation is anything more than a myth we sell ourselves. Denizet-Lewis shows us that profound, positive change is possible-and offers an unexpected, sometimes counterintuitive set of approaches to help us get there. But this is no compass for the dogmatic or the quick-fix brigade. Change, he shows us, is slippery, scary, beautiful, often politically fraught-and best tackled with humility riding shotgun, holding the map upside down.