My First Thirty Years - by Gertrude Beasley (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

Banned in 1925. Rediscovered nearly a century later. One woman's fearless truth still demands to be heard.

In My First Thirty Years, Gertrude Beasley lays bare what others only dared to whisper. Raised in poverty and violence in early 20th-century Texas, Beasley refused silence. Her memoir--blunt, bold, and decades ahead of its time--was banned shortly after publication for its searing depictions of sexual abuse, class struggle, and a woman's fight for bodily autonomy.

With unflinching prose and fierce clarity, Beasley dismantles the myths of the noble frontier and exposes the brutal reality many women endured. A teacher, journalist, and activist, she carved a life of resistance--only to vanish under mysterious circumstances.

Today, her voice roars back. This isn't just a memoir. It's a revolution in print.

Praise for My First Thirty Years:

"For almost a century in Texas literary circles, Gertrude Beasley's 1925 memoir has been more a legend than a book... The tangled history of My First Thirty Years, and Beasley's horrific personal fate, are case studies in society's merciless treatment of women of her era who gave voice to socially unspeakable truths. The memoir's republication this month, which makes it widely available for the first time in 96 years, is a long-overdue moment of reckoning. It's also a rich gift to the Texas literary canon."--Texas Monthly

"We should all be as fierce, loud, and convinced of our own self-worth as Gertrude Beasley was. This story of a justifiably angry woman living ahead of the world she lived in will resonate deeply today."--Soraya Chemaly, activist and award-winning author of Rage Becomes Her: The Power of Women's Anger

"Gertrude Beasley's 1925 memoir grabs the reader by the arm and holds tight, speaking with a voice as compelling as if she had just put down her pen this morning. Feminist, socialist, and acute observer of both herself and the world around her, Beasley gives us stories that illuminate the costs of poverty and of being a woman. To read My First Thirty Years is to be in conversation with an extraordinary mind."--Anne Gardiner Perkins, author of Yale Needs Women

Review Quotes

""This fierce chronicle of one woman's determination to confront insurmountable odds in the fight for women'srights is a template of righteous dissent against many persistent forms of social injustice." Booklist" -- Booklist

"A long-overdue moment of reckoning.... a rich gift to the Texas literary canon." -- Texas Monthly

"From its unforgettable first sentence, this brilliant, bitter memoir of West Texas girlhood in the 1920s sears itself into the reader's imagination. Published by an avant-garde Paris press in 1925, banned, forgotten, remembered, treasured, buried again, and finally made available in this new edition, Gertrude Beasley's memoir is invaluable to our understandings of modernism, feminism, sexual violence, and Texas history. Beasley is a born storyteller. I could not put this book down." -- Lisa Moore, Archibald A. Hill Professor of English and Professor of Women's and Gender Studies, The University of Texas at Austin

"Gertrude Beasley wrote one of the great modern autobiographies, but it was immediately suppressed. Widely available at last, it is a shocking but moving feminist exploration of growing up in America." -- Bert Almon, author of This Stubborn Self: Texas Autobiographies

"Gertrude Beasley's 1925 memoir grabs the reader by the arm and holds tight, speaking with a voice as compelling as if she had just put down her pen this morning. Feminist, socialist, and acute observer of both herself and the world around her, Beasley gives us stories that illuminate the costs of poverty and of being a woman. To read My First Thirty Years is to be in conversation with an extraordinary mind." -- Anne Gardiner Perkins, author of Yale Needs Women

"In a voice as compelling as it is sinister, Gertrude Beasley recounts a hardscrabble upbringing, transcending time and place to bring to life her story of overcoming brutal circumstances in the search for a different way to live--even if her own success was partial. This long-banned memoir is one of the best coming-of-age stories about being poor and a woman--another way of saying, being human--in 20th century Texas. My First Thirty Years is a damn good book, and it deserves a wide audience." -- Mary Helen Specht, author of Migratory Animals

"My First Thirty Years is a brutally graphic personal memoir that was censored, suppressed, and nearly forgotten. This reprint will finally enable people outside of library special collections to read and honor this memoir by an indominable and almost erased Texas heroine." -- Dr. Sylvia Grider, co-author of Texas Women Writers & Senior Professor Emerita, Texas A&M University

"The timing could not be more fortuitous: My First Thirty Years provides a foundational exploration of the Lone Star State's treatment of women, which, if not uniquely brutal, shows real ambition in a crowded field." -- The New York Review of Books

"We should all be as fierce, loud, and convinced of our own self-worth as Gertrude Beasley was. This story of a justifiably angry woman living ahead of the world she lived in will resonate deeply today." -- Soraya Chemaly, activist and award-winning author of Rage Becomes Her: The Power of Women's Anger