An often gripping read about misfits, money, and motivation.
A Canadian exotic dancer offers a fast-paced account of her early years.
Debut author Kissel-Verrier’s journey begins innocuously with a childhood spent in a small town in Alberta, Canada, at her paternal Grandpa Lloyd’s farm. After her parents’ bitter divorce and her father’s bankruptcy, she was put to work at her abusive mother Francoise’s butcher shop and meatpacking plant as a middle schooler. She also had to deal with her insular French Catholic community’s judgment of her family. As a teenager, she craved adventure and autonomy, so she quit an unpaid engineering apprenticeship to pursue a part-time paid gig at a Fort Kent exotic-dancing establishment, which eventually took her from the bar to the stage. Her memoir explores female sexuality and destigmatizes sex work even as it soberly notes the prevalence of crime, drug use, and alcoholism in the exotic-dancing world. As the author tells of performing at remote Alberta outposts and in big-city Toronto and flashy Texas joints, Kissel-Verrier reflects on masculine ego, feminine beauty, and personal and financial independence; eventually, she decided to leave the industry and to reenroll in college. Having sworn to never be a “normie,” Kissel-Verrier proudly reveals her “weird sparkly and sequined roots” in this account. Her chapters have playful titles and epigraphs from such disparate figures as the musician Beck and the utilitarian philosopher Jeremy Bentham. Although the author shows herself to have a highly spontaneous streak, her narration tempers the instantaneity that one might expect from a writer who references journalist Hunter S. Thompson. Instead, she sets many dramatic moments into a psychological frame of trauma or immaturity, sometimes heavy-handedly. Her most visceral, affecting prose, though, describes sensory activation: the overwhelming feeling of a deep sea dive or the superheated water of a steam-generating drum.
An often gripping read about misfits, money, and motivation.Pub Date: Oct. 28, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-5255-8821-1
Page Count: 282
Publisher: FriesenPress
Review Posted Online: Dec. 14, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2021
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Riveting and exquisitely crafted.
Musician, poet and visual artist Smith (Trois, 2008, etc.) chronicles her intense life with photographer Robert Mapplethorpe during the 1960s and ’70s, when both artists came of age in downtown New York.
Both born in 1946, Smith and Mapplethorpe would become widely celebrated—she for merging poetry with rock ’n’ roll in her punk-rock performances, he as the photographer who brought pornography into the realm of art. Upon meeting in the summer of 1967, they were hungry, lonely and gifted youths struggling to find their way and their art. Smith, a gangly loser and college dropout, had attended Bible school in New Jersey where she took solace in the poetry of Rimbaud. Mapplethorpe, a former altar boy turned LSD user, had grown up in middle-class Long Island. Writing with wonderful immediacy, Smith tells the affecting story of their entwined young lives as lovers, friends and muses to one another. Eating day-old bread and stew in dumpy East Village apartments, they forged fierce bonds as soul mates who were at their happiest when working together. To make money Smith clerked in bookstores, and Mapplethorpe hustled on 42nd Street. The author colorfully evokes their days at the shabbily elegant Hotel Chelsea, late nights at Max’s Kansas City and their growth and early celebrity as artists, with Smith winning initial serious attention at a St. Mark’s Poetry Project reading and Mapplethorpe attracting lovers and patrons who catapulted him into the arms of high society. The book abounds with stories about friends, including Allen Ginsberg, Janis Joplin, William Burroughs, Sam Shepard, Gregory Corso and other luminaries, and it reveals Smith’s affection for the city—the “gritty innocence” of the couple’s beloved Coney Island, the “open atmosphere” and “simple freedom” of Washington Square. Despite separations, the duo remained friends until Mapplethorpe’s death in 1989. “Nobody sees as we do, Patti,” he once told her.
Riveting and exquisitely crafted.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-06-621131-2
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Ecco/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2009
PERSPECTIVES
PERSPECTIVES
SEEN & HEARD
A raw but uneven narrative capturing Gen Z anxiety, though sometimes undermined by its attention-seeking impulses.
Young actor’s path from troubled youth to ascending Hollywood success.
In his provocative debut memoir, the emerging star behind memorable turns in The White Lotus and Euphoria delivers an engaging if somewhat disjointed portrait of coming-of-age trauma and Hollywood ambition. Gage vividly recounts his chaotic San Diego childhood—divorced parents, substance abuse, and a harrowing stint at a brutal rehab facility—with the kind of unflinching detail that will resonate powerfully with young adult readers navigating similar struggles. His voice feels most authentic when excavating family dysfunction and internal turmoil, capturing the emotional extremes and disconnection that define so much of adolescent experience. The memoir’s second half, chronicling his move to Los Angeles and emergence as an actor while grappling with his expanding sexual awareness and subsequent romantic relationships, feels less focused. Here, Gage’s self-aware attention-seeking—the book’s driving conceit—tips toward performative navel-gazing. His eventual borderline personality disorder diagnosis provides some clarity: “After my BPD diagnosis, I thought I’d discovered some profound epiphany about who I was and why I did the things that I did….I could finally see the patterns I’d been blind to before. Every relationship, the same cycle. Too fast, too deep, too reckless.” While Gage succeeds in chronicling the messy realities of mental health, addiction, and queer identity with refreshing honesty, his tendency toward calculated vulnerability can feel manufactured. The memoir works best as a snapshot of a particular generational moment—one in which therapy, social media, and celebrity culture collide in ways both illuminating and exhausting. Despite its inconsistent execution, Gage proves himself an effective and often entertaining storyteller, offering genuine insight into the psychological mechanics of family connection, fame seeking, and self-destruction that will resonate particularly with younger readers seeking meaning amid the noise.
A raw but uneven narrative capturing Gen Z anxiety, though sometimes undermined by its attention-seeking impulses.Pub Date: Oct. 14, 2025
ISBN: 9781668080078
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: July 16, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2025
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