Full of small provocations—among them, “I sometimes regret the invention of the category ‘gay’ ”—this is a welcome portrait...
From renowned novelist and essayist White (Rimbaud: The Double Life of a Rebel, 2008, etc.), a graceful memoir of a decidedly ungraceful time in the life of New York City.
“In the 1970s in New York,” writes the author, “everyone slept till noon.” Also, “everyone smoked all the time, and when you French-kissed someone, it was like rubbing one ashtray against another.” The era was one of aspiration and poverty, of a time before New York had “become enslaved by wealth and glitz,” when “people still embraced Ezra Pound’s motto ‘Beauty is difficult.’ ” There is much difficult beauty—and much French kissing—in these pages, which recount White’s arrival to the city in 1962 as a transplanted Texan by way of Ann Arbor and his eventual assimilation. His arrival coincided with a slight but noticeable uptick in the general awareness that there were such a thing as gay people. White lived openly with a young man, but he still knotted his narrow tie carefully and went to work as one of the great silent majority. A “living contradiction,” he reveled in gay weekends while roiling in self-hatred and seeing a psychotherapist in the hope of turning straight and getting married. The cure didn’t take, and White’s self-awareness grew with times that included the rise of the so-called Pink Panthers and the Stonewall Riots. Those were times of danger. As White recounts, wary Manhattanites negotiated the city block by block, shunning, say, 85th Street in favor of one on either side of it and generally keeping doors bolted and windows gated. But they were also times of liberating art, with White enjoying the company of intellectuals and writers—including Richard Howard (“Every moment with him had a sense of occasion”), Richard Sennett (“an odd combination of schoolboy nerd, flamboyant queen, and Mrs. Astor”) and Simon Karlinsky—while publishing his first books and gaining recognition in the literary world.
Full of small provocations—among them, “I sometimes regret the invention of the category ‘gay’ ”—this is a welcome portrait of a time and place long past, and much yearned for.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2009
ISBN: 978-1-59691-402-5
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Bloomsbury
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2009
IN THE NEWS
A courageous and thought-provoking memoir.
A bestselling memoirist’s account of coping with an unexpected midlife evolution in sexual identity.
When Wizenberg, who runs the popular Orangette blog, received a jury duty summons, she never thought that it would lead to divorce. In court, her eyes were immediately drawn to a female defense attorney dressed in a men’s suit. Her thoughts lingered on the attractive stranger after each day’s proceedings. But guilt at being “a woman wearing a wedding ring” made the author feel increasingly guilty for the obsession that seized her. Her husband, Brandon, a successful Seattle restaurateur, and their daughter were the “stars” that guided her path; the books she had written revolved like planets around the sun of their relationship and the restaurants they had founded together. However, in the weeks that followed, Wizenberg shocked herself by telling her husband about the attraction and suggesting that they open their marriage to polyamorous experimentation. Reading the work of writers like Adrienne Rich who had discovered their lesbianism later in life, Wizenberg engaged in deep, sometimes-painful self-interrogation. The author remembered the story of a married uncle, a man she resembled, who came out as gay and then later died of AIDS as well as a brief lesbian flirtation in late adolescence where “nothing happened.” Eventually, Wizenberg began dating the lawyer and fell in love with her. Wizenberg then began the painful process of separating herself from Brandon and, later, from their restaurant businesses that she had quietly seen as impediments to her writing. Feeling unfulfilled by Nora, a self-professed “stone top” who preferred to give pleasure rather than receive it, Wizenberg began to date a nonbinary person named Ash. Through that relationship, she came to embrace both gender and sexual fluidity. Interwoven throughout with research insights into the complexity of female sexual identity, Wizenberg’s book not only offers a glimpse into the shifting nature of selfhood; it also celebrates one woman’s hard-won acceptance of her own sexual difference.
A courageous and thought-provoking memoir.Pub Date: May 12, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-4197-4299-6
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Abrams
Review Posted Online: Feb. 16, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.
“The Mongols swept across the globe as conquerors,” writes the appreciative pop anthropologist-historian Weatherford (The History of Money, 1997, etc.), “but also as civilization’s unrivaled cultural carriers.”
No business-secrets fluffery here, though Weatherford does credit Genghis Khan and company for seeking “not merely to conquer the world but to impose a global order based on free trade, a single international law, and a universal alphabet with which to write all the languages of the world.” Not that the world was necessarily appreciative: the Mongols were renowned for, well, intemperance in war and peace, even if Weatherford does go rather lightly on the atrocities-and-butchery front. Instead, he accentuates the positive changes the Mongols, led by a visionary Genghis Khan, brought to the vast territories they conquered, if ever so briefly: the use of carpets, noodles, tea, playing cards, lemons, carrots, fabrics, and even a few words, including the cheer hurray. (Oh, yes, and flame throwers, too.) Why, then, has history remembered Genghis and his comrades so ungenerously? Whereas Geoffrey Chaucer considered him “so excellent a lord in all things,” Genghis is a byword for all that is savage and terrible; the word “Mongol” figures, thanks to the pseudoscientific racism of the 19th century, as the root of “mongoloid,” a condition attributed to genetic throwbacks to seed sown by Mongol invaders during their decades of ravaging Europe. (Bad science, that, but Dr. Down’s son himself argued that imbeciles “derived from an earlier form of the Mongol stock and should be considered more ‘pre-human, rather than human.’ ”) Weatherford’s lively analysis restores the Mongols’ reputation, and it takes some wonderful learned detours—into, for instance, the history of the so-called Secret History of the Mongols, which the Nazis raced to translate in the hope that it would help them conquer Russia, as only the Mongols had succeeded in doing.
A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.Pub Date: March 2, 2004
ISBN: 0-609-61062-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2003
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