You've Changed: The Promise and Price of Self-Transformation

"A blazingly smart, thoughtful, funny, and moving book about the endless hope--and the occasional limits--of human transformation." --Elizabeth Gilbert, author of Eat, Pray, Love and All the Way to the River

From New York Times bestselling author Benoit Denizet-Lewis comes a timely, provocative, and deeply moving exploration of personal transformation in a period of roiling uncertainty. You've Changed investigates how we remake ourselves--and how identity, belief, and belonging shift in a world that won't stop doing the same.

We live in an age obsessed with reinvention. On Instagram, in recovery meetings, through name-change petitions, lifestyle pivots, deconversion blogs, and political conversion manifestos, we're surrounded by stories of radical personal change. But what does it really mean to shed an old skin--and why do some transformations inspire us while others raise our hackles?

Longtime New York Times Magazine writer Benoit Denizet-Lewis, known for his deeply reported and psychologically rich journalism, takes us on a freewheeling, wild-hearted journey into the mystery of human transformation. He introduces us to an unforgettable array of people in flux--including psychedelic reality benders, sexual and gender transitioners, ideological shapeshifters, seemingly reformed murderers, and an octogenarian grandmother trying to change her temperament ("Better late than never!" she says)--as well as those working to engineer change: psychologists, neuroscientists, name-change specialists, even his own father, a breath and meditation teacher who once wrote a newsletter about "the art and science of transformation." Intertwined with those portraits of change is the author's own reckoning--by turns painful, poignant, and hilarious--with his misfires and epiphanies.

You've Changed is a book for anyone who's ever tried to become someone new, fix what felt broken, drag someone else into changing, or wondered whether real transformation is anything more than a myth we sell ourselves. Denizet-Lewis shows us that profound, positive change is possible--and offers an unexpected, sometimes counterintuitive set of approaches to help us get there. But this is no compass for the dogmatic or the quick-fix brigade. Change, he shows us, is slippery, scary, beautiful, often politically fraught--and best tackled with humility riding shotgun, holding the map upside down.

Benoit Denizet-Lewis is an associate professor at Emerson College and a longtime contributing writer for The New York Times Magazine. He has written three previous books, including America Anonymous and the New York Times bestseller Travels With Casey. A New America Fellow and NEH Public Scholar, he divides his time between Boston and Prague.