RANSVESTIA

from that point of view. But the people I wrote for-you who are reading these lines-are not concerned with theatrical make-up, acts, stage deportment or whatever. You are concerned with making the best of what you have, being as authentic ladies as you can not only in appearance but in behaviour. What great knowledge would a homosexual stage impersonator have in these areas?

As to the comment that the book is horseshit-I find that worthy of comment on two grounds. To begin with, the numbers of letters of appreciation I have gotten over the years for the help that book has been, are satisfaction enough for me that it has served its purpose and helped hundreds of wives to better understand the subject and thus has improved marriages that were about to fall apart. Naturally it was not and is not the universal panacea. No book could be since the end result is an interaction between what is said in a book and the attitudes and experiences of the person reading it. So naturally, there have been a number of wives who were not helped by it (or refused to be helped) and a number of marriages have gone down the drain (with and without exposure to the book). Those of you who have profited by it would be its greatest recommendation.

But secondly, there is something interesting in Eve's attitude of calling it horseshit and of saying it could be condensed into a few pages or one short one. This sounds much more like envy than anything else. If you can't or haven't done something that has proved successful, one of the commonest of defenses against your own inadequacies is to try to destroy or downgrade the efforts, activities, or personality of the one who did do something. I can see that someone might not agree with the book, might think it could be improved in some way, that some points of view should be deleted or could make some sort of valid criticism and that would be accept- able. But to put down a non-fiction book whose only purpose was to help people with problems and which has been into three printings, by accusations of "horseshit" which I take to mean that the book is wrong, useless, inadequate, incorrect, or misleading, leads me to say, as Shakespeare did, "Methinks thou protesteth too much." It is com- forting to know that Eve acknowledges in two places that "there are some good points" even though she can't remember them. I'm not terribly surprised that she can't remember them. When one has such an overriding need to downgrade someone else in the same field (entirely gratuitously, since I have not had any contact with Eve Browne before or since this Book "Review???"), one's mind is not

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