It Must Be Beautiful To Be Finished: A Memoir of My Body

This debut memoir by Canadian author Gies (creative nonfiction, George Brown Coll.) is an emotionally raw, vulnerable, and intelligent critique of the medical institution as a whole, a system that judges bodies born with imperfections as specimens in need of fixing. Gies takes readers on an incredible journey of what her life was like growing up with only one ear and having multiple childhood surgeries in which doctors attempted to make her what they considered whole, normal, and beautiful. At times heartbreaking, this is both a very personal memoir and also a look into the way society dismisses people with visible and invisible differences as lacking and lesser than. Compellingly written with a dual-timeline structure, Gies’s book interweaves her life in the past with her life in the present, based on her own recollections as well as her documented medical history, as she tries to reconcile her identity and resolve her past trauma.