Liana Cusmano’s interview with Toronto author Michelle Alfano offers reflections on gender identity and living through a child’s transitioning. The act of writing helped Alfano overcome the distress she felt during this difficult time. In her memoir The Unfinished Dollhouse, Michelle Alfano recounts the journey she underwent in accepting and embracing her son’s transgender identity. From tell-tale signs in early childhood and the mental and physical afflictions in the early teen years, to the reactions of family and friends and the final steps in a social and medical transition from female to male, Alfano explores the thoughts and feelings she experienced over the years as her son, River, fought to be his truest self.

Researchers should cite this work as follows:

• Cusmano, L., (2025), "Michelle Alfano on Her Memoir, The Unfinished Dollhouse", HSSCommons: (DOI: )

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1. Alfano
2. Cusmano
3. gender
4. identity
5. Italian Canadiana
6. memoir
7. transitioning
8. Writing

Original publication: Cusmano, Liana. "Michelle Alfano on Her Memoir, The Unfinished Dollhouse." Italian Canadiana 34: 2021. 163-166. DOI: 10.33137/ic.v34i0.37475. This material has been re-published in an unmodified form on the Canadian HSS Commons with the permission of Iter Canada / Italian Canadiana. Copyright © the author(s). Their work is distributed by Italian Canadiana under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License. For details, see https://creativecommons.org/licenses/.