- Read by: Amy Ellis Nutt narrates her own reporting with the measured authority of a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, steady, empathetic, and never sensationalized.
- At its heart: Transgender identity and family acceptance, gender science and biology, community resistance and legal battles
- Vibe: Moving and quietly urgent, with moments of hard-won warmth
- Short version: A rigorously reported and deeply human account of one family's transformation that holds up as both journalism and memoir.
I came to Becoming Nicole on a quiet weeknight after a long day, expecting something important and prepared to be moved in the distant way that important books sometimes move you. What I did not expect was to still be listening past midnight, and to find myself genuinely thinking about the Maines family for days afterward. Amy Ellis Nutt spent nearly four years embedded with them, and that depth of access shows in every chapter.
The story begins simply enough: Wayne and Kelly Maines adopt identical twin boys, Wyatt and Jonas. Within a few years, it becomes clear that Wyatt experiences himself as a girl. What unfolds from that point is not a tidy narrative of acceptance but something far more honest, a portrait of a family stumbling through confusion, fear, and eventually transformation alongside their child.
The Verdict, Briefly
Nutt has written a book that refuses the easy arc. This is not a before-and-after story. The Maines family does not move gracefully from denial to celebration. Wayne, in particular, is portrayed with real complexity, a man whose blue-collar conservatism collides with his fierce love for his child, and who has to rebuild his understanding of gender from scratch, late in life, with his kid waiting. That tension is where the book earns its weight. Nutt covers the scientific literature on gender identity with the thoroughness you would expect from someone who has reported on neuroscience, and she integrates it into the narrative without making it feel like an explainer. The sections on the biological basis of gender identity are genuinely illuminating without being reductive.
Nutt narrates her own work, which is worth noting. Her voice has the measured quality of long-form print journalism, she does not perform the emotions of the story, she conveys them through precision. That restraint turns out to be exactly right for material this charged. When the Maines family faces a school discrimination case that goes to the Maine Supreme Judicial Court, Nutt's steady delivery makes the stakes feel real rather than theatrical. The legal battle, which Nicole eventually wins, is narrated with the same intimacy as the family dinner scenes, and that tonal consistency gives the book an unusual kind of authority. Listeners who noted the book sometimes slows during the more technical scientific passages are not wrong, there is a stretch in the middle where the research displaces the narrative, but the family story reasserts itself with enough force to carry you through.
Things to Know Before Starting Becoming Nicole
Pay attention to Jonas, Nicole's twin brother. He is one of the most quietly affecting figures in the book, a boy who loves his sibling and is also an ordinary kid trying to navigate school, identity, and a family that has become, suddenly, very public. Nutt gives him real space on the page, and the bond between the twins becomes one of the emotional anchors of the whole account. Also worth noting: the book was published in 2015, before Nicole Maines became the first transgender superhero on television in CW's Supergirl. Reading it now, knowing what comes next for her, adds a particular resonance to the scenes of her childhood uncertainty. The Stonewall Honor in Nonfiction and the Lambda Literary Award finalist status are well deserved.
Who Will Get the Most From It
This is for anyone who wants to understand the experience of raising a transgender child from the inside, without ideology and without sentimentality. It is equally for readers interested in how scientific consensus on gender identity actually forms and filters into public life. Listeners who prefer memoir to be driven by family dynamics rather than advocacy will find this accessible and absorbing. Those who want a quick, emotionally simple story should know this is careful, layered journalism, it rewards patience. Readers who picked up this title based on Nicole's later profile on Supergirl will find that the book covers her life only through adolescence, and that is probably its most important stretch.
