A heartfelt, accessible book that strives to break down the stigmas surrounding mental illness with remarkable humor and...
Australian playwright Burton charts the ups and downs of his anxious adolescence and early 20s in this hilariously candid debut memoir.
Diagnosed with clinical depression on and off since he was a young child, Burton enters high school determined to make friends, fit in, and get noticed by girls. The young white man finds his niche in drama class, where his talent for acting manifests itself as his alter ego, Crazy Drama Dave, the hyperactive and perennially involved young man that his new friends come to know. At home, he is withdrawn and exhausted with the effort of keeping up this facade while struggling to understand his emerging sexuality and identity. By the time he enters university to study theater, he decides to put a swift end to his confusion about his sexual orientation and adopts a new persona: Gay Dave. Eventually, his avoidance of his mental health issues catches up with him in heartbreaking ways, and he is forced to come to terms with his own unhappiness. Burton’s descriptions of his anxiety and depression are tangibly poignant, giving authentic voice to those struggling with similar issues. His tone morphs fluidly from compulsively funny to devastating from one moment to the next, and his uproarious wit shines throughout.
A heartfelt, accessible book that strives to break down the stigmas surrounding mental illness with remarkable humor and honesty. (Memoir. 15-adult)Pub Date: April 11, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-925240-34-4
Page Count: 268
Publisher: Text
Review Posted Online: Feb. 13, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2017
For The New Yorker, Hofstadter has taken over the role Calvin Tomkins used to fill—as art chronicler: half critic/half profile- maker. And at this he is very, very good. In the five long pieces collected here—about Jean Helion, Henri Cartier-Bresson, Avigdor Arikha, David Bomberg and the subsequent generation of London painters (Kossof, Kitaj, etc.), and Richard Diebenkorn—he almost negligently scatters brilliant associational perceptions (why, for example, Cartier-Bresson the photojournalist was hardly different from C-B the surrealist: the same ``cretinous voyaging'') while being cannier than most art writers about the varieties and dilemmas—glorious both—of representational painting. He also writes (occasionally he posturingly overwrites) with a genuinely beautiful style. But what is a little disconcerting is the form of the articles: Hofstadter seems to appear in the company of the artists he writes about here not exactly as a journalist but as an instant intimate or friend; there is an air of relaxed offhandedness (``I got to know Richard Diebenkorn in 1986, a few years before he and his wife, Phyllis, moved from Santa Monica to Healdsburg, in northern California. Dick was already sixty-five then but a lot of his strict, formal, well-to-do Protestant background still showed''). This self-conscious relaxation of role carries over as well into what he has to say about the painters: He has scorn finally for the Londoners (``dungeon masters'') on account of their all-or-nothing aesthetic neuroticism and battles with life, while reserving his highest admiration for the artist who, like Diebenkorn, is serious without solemnity. Deflation of high artistic pretension and behavior in favor of pragmatic dilution always has been, editorially, a New Yorker stock-in-trade—and Hofstadter is particularly good at it. But the attractiveness of the interesting men (and most often quite interesting artists too) that he writes about seems finally more about personal style than art.
Pub Date: April 7, 1992
ISBN: 0-395-58111-3
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 1992
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
The textured perspective that emerges in candid and quirky interviews with gay, lesbian, and bisexual youth is marred by a reductive approach to sexuality. Journalist Chandler follows six teenagers over a few years, through crucial points in their coming-out processes. (The book grew out of a series of articles he wrote for the Minneapolis Star- Tribune.) Attempting to give a broad overview of the sexual- minority youth experience, Chandler devotes some chapters to the young people's (and, in some cases, their parents') personal stories and some to broad generalities about homosexuality and young people. The teens' narratives are often powerful; though there is a good share of coming-out clichÇs (``I always felt different,'' ``She was always such a tomboy,'' etc.), the author also includes the kinds of particularities that bring such stories to life. One girl, for instance, takes her mother to a gay nightclub so she can see what it's like; in another celebratory family moment, a father delights his daughter and her friends by joining them in a raucous lesbian-sex joke-telling session. Chandler, who is heterosexual, negotiates the diversity of queer youth culture more open-mindedly than most mainstream journalists, neither avoiding nor reviling drag queens, tattooed girls, and shirtless young women at pride marches. Unfortunately, the Homosexuality 101 sections are simplistic; in a chapter called ``The Roots of Homosexuality,'' Chandler reassures his readers ad nauseam that gay people do not ``choose'' to be gay and that an individual's essential sexual identity is fixed and unchangeable. Chandler's approach to homosexuality has the effect of unnecessarily distancing these kids from readers, who he seems to assume are straight and have never questioned their heterosexuality. The personal narratives here are compelling, but unfortunately, Chandler seems determined not to let his readers identify with his subjects. (Author tour)
Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1995
ISBN: 0-8129-2380-4
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Times/Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1995
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