DAMAGES

An emotionally lacerating childhood preceeds an unquenchable search to discover and freely express his identity, in Bazhe’s agile memoir.

The story opens with Bazhe’s return to his native Macedonia in the mid-1990s. His father has just died and his mother will soon be diagnosed with terminal cancer: This will be his first return in six years to a place with many bitter memories. His father, besides being a roundly abusive brute, had aristocratic pretensions, which caused him to scorn his peasant neighbors and keep Bazhe under virtual house arrest for much of his youth. His adoptive mother is a striver, and despite her refusal to acknowledge Bazhe’s homosexuality (Macedonia was not the safest place to be a young gay man), she nonetheless tendered him unconditional love. Back home, he makes contact with his biological mother and lays his life before her, seeking the sort of acceptance that his adoptive mother had been unable to give him because of her prejudices. In a tone that can be haughtily defensive, but more often deliberate, staccato, observant and harshly critical, Bazhe explores the full spectrum of his emotions: the rage he feels toward the cancer; an incredulity that he survived a fair number of his sexual encounters; the distaste he harbors for his neighbors and their narrow worlds; and the anger over his childhood. He finally lands a crushing yet liberating realization that his biological mother cannot be his long-lost savior, but a vessel into which he must pour his aching memories. His adoptive mother emerges as the mortar in his life, though doomed to leave him an orphan once again when her illness overcomes her.

A revelatory, pained, unyielding ride. Hold on tight.