MY AVANT-GARDE EDUCATION

PEN/Hemingway Award winner Cooper (The Bill from My Father: A Memoir, 2006, etc.) returns with a memoir/essay collection (some previously published) that chronicles his early interest in pop art and charts where that interest has taken him.

It began in the author’s junior high school library (in the early 1960s) when a Life magazine piece about pop art caught his fancy. He tore it out, and his adult life began. Cooper tells us how he pursued this growing obsession in local bookstores, watched a TV art teacher (Jon Gnagy) and eventually realized that art “didn’t have to be somber and lofty; it could be as laughable and blunt as a pratfall.” The author’s interests—and his creations—puzzled his parents, but he persisted. At about the same time, Cooper was also realizing he was homosexual, an orientation he had to conceal fiercely during his youth. He dated women, but he yearned for men. He shares memories of his parents, of his school days (experiencing a gym teacher who paddled, learning about the JFK assassination from that same teacher), his search for technique, and his years as a student at CalArts, which opened its doors just at the time he was ready to walk through them. Cooper writes fondly of some instructors at the school, and he notes how he began to realize that he had talents for writing, as well. An art teacher told him, “[s]ounds like you’re ready to write.” And so he did: He spent some years as an art critic and a few as a writing instructor. Cooper also deals with crises in his life, including the death of his mother and the grim arrival of AIDS in his world. His account of the suffering of his partner is one of the most wrenching sections, and he concludes with a brief passage about his chronic insomnia. Throughout, his sentences elicit laughs, gasps and tears.

An unconventional narrative that focuses on sharp, piercing moments.