A sharp-eyed and hilarious memoir.
A British queer performer’s account of the tumultuous year that became their defining moment.
In this gloriously outrageous memoir, Rasmussen, who speaks both as “Tom” and their performance alter ego “Crystal,” tells stories about the tribulations and triumphs of life as a drag queen. Born to a working-class family in Lancaster, Rasmussen went to Cambridge to study veterinary medicine. When the book opens, the author has graduated and is working in the New York fashion industry: “It’s a fairly usual First Job in Fashion: latte runs, bollockings for eating too much at breakfast, being reminded I’ll never make it in this business.” On the side, Rasmussen dragged, worked as a journalist, and had copious sex while pining for their best friend/love of their life, Ace. Rasmussen returned to England to make their career in London and be close to family and friends. At first, the obstacles seemed overwhelming. Ace was in love with a man, steady dragging work was nowhere to be found, and Rasmussen was forever overdrawn at the bank. Then the author slept with a “handsome brunette bear” writer and editor who helped them begin making connections in the world of journalism. They accepted a job as an intern at an influential London fashion magazine only to be “gently dismissed” shortly afterward for telling magazine editors their work was racist. While Rasmussen’s journalistic career, which would eventually blossom, temporarily stalled, their performing career and personal life began to take off. Their queer performance group played Glastonbury, where, high on ecstasy, Rasmussen and Ace began the journey toward a committed relationship after their “first sexual experience together,” in a Portaloo. Soul-baring, shamelessly explicit, and wickedly funny, Rasmussen’s relentlessly entertaining book gets beneath the glitter and drama of drag to reveal how a practice often dismissed as misogynistic can serve as a kind of salvation for many nonbinary people. Ultimately, it is a revolutionary “kind of self-care that makes you totally healed, a complete person, even if just for a night.”
A sharp-eyed and hilarious memoir.Pub Date: April 14, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-374-53857-6
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: Jan. 25, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2020
PERSPECTIVES
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
PERSPECTIVES
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