A Year Without A Name by Cyrus Grace Dunham describes Dunham's experience of transcending the gender they were assigned at birth. Dunham catalogs their internal experience of feeling disconnected from their feminine body: “My body wasn’t real so the cold didn’t matter much. The skinny, breast-budding, miniskirted pale thing was just a container” (57). They experience a sense of dissociation from reality—“What does it mean to be alive? Was I real?” (40)—one that is heightened through the dissonance between the way they see themself and the way others see them, as well as their discontent with their physical features. 

The limitations of Cyrus's assigned gender at birth become a barrier between them and the truth. They become disingenuous in all aspects of their life since they feel unable to express who they are: “I resigned myself to being incapable of not lying. To do otherwise would require being a new person entirely, one who would require being a new person entirely, one who had not fashioned themself—“herself”—around hiding” (55). 

This single sentence of the memoir initiates much of the journey of the rest of the memoir. Interwoven into Cyrus’s past and present, the story becomes focused on their journey into authenticity, and becoming a new version of themself who will do so.

Accordingly, the title of this novel represents this journey. A Year Without A Name depicts the period of instability and flux in which Cyrus exits their previous way of living under the name Grace and enters a more truthful way of being that is more aligned to who they are. The name that they chose is instrumental in this journey: Cyrus represents far more than just a name. Cyrus is a commitment to being honest and being genuine about who they are. The name represents a desire to truly be seen for the first time after a lifetime of hiding. Cyrus writes, “We require a stable identity so that we can be known. I can’t write about my name without writing about being known—the desire to be known, the disdain for and fear of that desire” (115). 

Much of Cyrus’s aim throughout the novel had been to make themself invisible. They didn’t want to be known as Grace, and they didn’t want to be seen: “The more of myself I felt, the more that Grace just…drifted away…I wanted to be nameless, nothing, the opposite of known” (117). But during the journey of becoming Cyrus, they change, and seek to be seen for the first time: “The truth is that, after all this, I still feel a special kind of euphoria in being witnessed” (163). 

One characteristic of this memoir is Dunham's commitment to portraying the nuance and non-linearity of their journey. They do not describe a point A to point B kind of journey: a clear-cut story of someone who was given the name Grace at birth and then became Cyrus in a process of self-discovery. Interestingly, Dunham does not depict Cyrus as completely replacing Grace, as Grace is interwoven into the entirety of the novel. Grace is nowhere near erased from the novel. Instead, Grace is a constant presence, one that Cyrus views with compassion: “I started having the dream about walking behind my childhood self again. In the dream I held Grace’s hand while she led me around” (124). Cyrus reflects on the liminality of sitting in between two names, two people, and two genders. Cyrus and Grace interact with and are shaped by each other: “The two names talked over each other, always on my mind, an etching on the inside of my eyelids, like the letters of the alphabet had been when I first learned to write…Cyrus and Grace floating over everything, shrinking and growing, switching places between foreground and background. I felt if I didn’t choose one, I would cease to be” (123). 

Dunham also describes how the journey of transitioning from one’s gender at birth is not linear and is never finished. The stereotype of the point A to point B nature of a gender transition is shattered here: “I name myself with the knowledge that I will be dispersed, not that I will cohere. Any name can be destroyed, can destroy itself. My value is not in my permanence but in the resilience with which I recover, and re-cover, and re-form after my deluge…Cyrus is a sign and he may not last. And still, I choose to be him now. I choose to move toward something like manhood—a mercurial concept in which my belief flickers—because, for reasons I still do not know, it makes me feel closer to earth, to everyone and everything else in the flood” (152).

This memoir reverberates with truth, as it captures the complexities of their experience so difficult to pinpoint. Dunham's ability to represent the nuances, emotions, and contradictions of transcending one’s gender is one of the greatest achievements of this story.