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
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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
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