Fresh details, stand-up jokes and anecdotes compensate for the lack of smooth narrative flow.
A zany, erratic, painfully poignant memoir of growing up working class and gay in the Bronx during the ’60s and ’70s.
Actor/playwright Capotorto’s debut is based on his one-man show of the same title, a loose translation of his surname (torto = twisted; capo = boss or head). The gallery of nutty grotesques who inhabited his Italian-American family and neighborhood ran the gamut from his tyrannical, slave-driving father to his long-suffering mother and three sisters; an array of grandmas, aunts, cousins and teachers also peopled his lonely, awkward childhood. Capotorto’s father struggled to wrest a living from the off-the-beaten-path Cappi’s Pizza and Sangweech Shoppe near Pelham Parkway, but his strict house rules drove customers away. Cappi exercised a despotic rule over his family as well. He verbally abused everyone, censored all cultural activities and tracked down eldest daughter Rosette when she ran away to become a flower child. Once the Capotortos moved from their tiny apartment into a big house a block away, teenaged Carl spent his weekends toiling thanklessly for his father in the ramshackle building’s renovation. His cameo portraits of various sadistic public-school teachers are wickedly funny, as is his send-up of the “high theatrics” of the local Catholic church, St. Lucy’s. As the author became aware of his homosexuality, he sought out likeminded “misfits,” discovered disco, got involved in drama and experimented with sexual partners. Unsurprisingly, hiding his true nature from his father made him fearful and anxious. Cappi, who never really accepted his son, died of a heart attack in 1998.
Fresh details, stand-up jokes and anecdotes compensate for the lack of smooth narrative flow.Pub Date: Oct. 7, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-7679-2861-8
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Broadway
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2008
As is to be expected from Lessing (The Real Thing; 1992, etc.), whose clear and always intelligent no-nonsense writing has explored subjects that transcend the commonplace, this first volume of her autobiography reflects all her remarkable strengths. The year of her birth, 1919, was auspicious neither for her parents in particular nor for the world in general. The ill-matched Taylers had married not out of love but out of a mutual need to expunge the horror of the recently ended world war, which had maimed Lessing's father both physically and mentally — he'd lost a leg in battle, but more important, be was embittered by what he considered Britain's poor treatment of her soldiers. Her mother, an able nurse, had lost a fiancÉ, and marriage now seemed to offer only the consolation of children. These disappointments, exacerbated by the harsh life in rural Zimbabwe (then Southern Rhodesia), where her family settled after a stint in Persia, would indelibly shape Lessing. She quarreled frequently with her mother, whose well-meaning strictures she resented; observed her father's despair and his failures as a settler-farmer; and resolved that she would not live like them — "I will not, I will not!" — even if it meant defying convention. Which she did, as she left her first husband and their two children for another man — Gottried Lessing; joined the local Communist Party in the midst of WW II "because of the spirit of the times, because of the Zeitgeist"; and then moved in 1949 permanently to London. Like so many bright and alienated provincials, Lessing found an escape in voracious reading. Though determined to be a writer, the consuming distractions of motherhood, wartime society, and political activities frustrated this ambition for a long time. Refreshingly, not a self-indulgent mea culpa, but a brutally frank examination of how Lessing became what she is — a distinguished writer, a woman who has lived life to the full, and a constant critic of cant.
Pub Date: Sept. 22, 1994
ISBN: 0-06-017150-2
Page Count: 416
Publisher: HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 1994
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
In a dramatic memoir, Sexton (Private Acts, 1991, etc.) offers her account of life with suicidal poet Anne Sexton. This highly personal account complements Diane Middlebrook's 1991 biography of Anne Sexton, and even textual overlaps can be intriguing. For example, Middlebrook places one of Anne's suicide attempts near Linda's Harvard dormitory room but across from the office of Barbara Schwartz, then Anne's therapist. Here Linda simply omits Schwartz from the scene, thus highlighting her own importance to the story. One of Linda's primary themes is in fact her attempt to extricate herself from her mother's dependence on her. The childhood scenes Linda paints (including seeing her mother masturbate) most often terrify her and her younger sister, Joy. Anne's depression and instability make a poor match for her husband's volatility: She taunts him, and he beats her as the children look on. Writing with the immediacy of the present tense, Linda notes than when Anne spanks her, ``she never counts. She just does it till she isn't angry anymore.... I hate her. I hate me.'' Linda responds to such chaos by imposing order in her own small ways, eating precisely one piece of Halloween candy each day or tidying the house her mother ignores while she writes. Linda even tries to take care of her mother, but it is not until she reaches high school that they become friends: ``At last she seemed to like me.'' As Linda matures, she learns about writing, particularly from Anne and her friend Maxine Kumin, but she also struggles to free herself of her mother. Even after Anne's suicide, Linda finds her life linked to her mother's, most directly in her work as literary executor, but most disturbingly in her own struggle against depression and her battles to maintain her equilibrium when dealing with her own children. In deceptively fluid prose, Linda explores her complex relationship to her mother and strips raw the nerves of a troubled family. (Photo insert, not seen) (Author tour)
Pub Date: Oct. 5, 1994
ISBN: 0-316-78207-6
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 1994
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
