In-your-face funny but with surprisingly moving moments.
A gay writer reflects on his life as a single man on the prowl for sex and connection in New York City.
Oliver first moved to the city to attend college. But it wasn’t until after he graduated that he “started hooking up” with the colorful strangers he describes in this offbeat collection of wickedly humorous essays, sketches, and poems about urban life and love. Intimacy typically came in the form of one-night stands with men he found on Internet websites like Manhunt or mobile apps like “Grindr, Scruff, and Tindr.” The men—like the married lawyer from Connecticut, the “Broadway understudy under whom [he] studied for a night,” or the Australian flight attendant with a fetish for dressing up as a dolphin—were as unique as they were transient. When Oliver wasn’t scoring dates or sexting with men online or handing out his telephone number to the “bartenders, waiters and merchandise managers at Broadway musicals,” he was busy fantasizing about hot men on the subway. Hit-and-run as his relationships were, Oliver did occasionally think about marriage. Yet when he or his sex partners tried to communicate a desire for closeness, neither side could respond with complete acceptance. When the author tried to kiss a neighborhood hookup, the man “pulled away [and] smiled politely.” When a hockey player began calling Oliver out of loneliness and despair over being diagnosed with Huntington’s disease, Oliver could only listen and offer no comfort. Only after a sexless encounter with another gay writer at an artists’ colony in New Hampshire did the author finally find an unacknowledged mirror for himself and his actions. The writer had plenty of opportunities for sex but not “plenty of people to confide in, people to feel close to”—just like Oliver himself, who was caught in the ceaselessly carnival-esque flow of big-city life.
In-your-face funny but with surprisingly moving moments.Pub Date: June 2, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-4767-4666-1
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: March 27, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2015
PROFILES
However charily one should apply the word, a beautiful book, an unconditionally involving memoir for our time or any time.
Maya Angelou is a natural writer with an inordinate sense of life and she has written an exceptional autobiographical narrative which retrieves her first sixteen years from "the general darkness just beyond the great blinkers of childhood."
Her story is told in scenes, ineluctably moving scenes, from the time when she and her brother were sent by her fancy living parents to Stamps, Arkansas, and a grandmother who had the local Store. Displaced they were and "If growing up is painful for the Southern Black girl, being aware of her displacement is the rust on the razor that threatens the throat." But alternating with all the pain and terror (her rape at the age of eight when in St. Louis With her mother) and humiliation (a brief spell in the kitchen of a white woman who refused to remember her name) and fear (of a lynching—and the time they buried afflicted Uncle Willie under a blanket of vegetables) as well as all the unanswered and unanswerable questions, there are affirmative memories and moments: her charming brother Bailey; her own "unshakable God"; a revival meeting in a tent; her 8th grade graduation; and at the end, when she's sixteen, the birth of a baby. Times When as she says "It seemed that the peace of a day's ending was an assurance that the covenant God made with children, Negroes and the crippled was still in effect."
However charily one should apply the word, a beautiful book, an unconditionally involving memoir for our time or any time.Pub Date: Feb. 1, 1969
ISBN: 0375507892
Page Count: 235
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 14, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1969
SEEN & HEARD
IN THE NEWS
SEEN & HEARD
Doyle offers another lucid, inspiring chronicle of female empowerment and the rewards of self-awareness and renewal.
More life reflections from the bestselling author on themes of societal captivity and the catharsis of personal freedom.
In her third book, Doyle (Love Warrior, 2016, etc.) begins with a life-changing event. “Four years ago,” she writes, “married to the father of my three children, I fell in love with a woman.” That woman, Abby Wambach, would become her wife. Emblematically arranged into three sections—“Caged,” “Keys,” “Freedom”—the narrative offers, among other elements, vignettes about the soulful author’s girlhood, when she was bulimic and felt like a zoo animal, a “caged girl made for wide-open skies.” She followed the path that seemed right and appropriate based on her Catholic upbringing and adolescent conditioning. After a downward spiral into “drinking, drugging, and purging,” Doyle found sobriety and the authentic self she’d been suppressing. Still, there was trouble: Straining an already troubled marriage was her husband’s infidelity, which eventually led to life-altering choices and the discovery of a love she’d never experienced before. Throughout the book, Doyle remains open and candid, whether she’s admitting to rigging a high school homecoming court election or denouncing the doting perfectionism of “cream cheese parenting,” which is about “giving your children the best of everything.” The author’s fears and concerns are often mirrored by real-world issues: gender roles and bias, white privilege, racism, and religion-fueled homophobia and hypocrisy. Some stories merely skim the surface of larger issues, but Doyle revisits them in later sections and digs deeper, using friends and familial references to personify their impact on her life, both past and present. Shorter pieces, some only a page in length, manage to effectively translate an emotional gut punch, as when Doyle’s therapist called her blooming extramarital lesbian love a “dangerous distraction.” Ultimately, the narrative is an in-depth look at a courageous woman eager to share the wealth of her experiences by embracing vulnerability and reclaiming her inner strength and resiliency.
Doyle offers another lucid, inspiring chronicle of female empowerment and the rewards of self-awareness and renewal.Pub Date: March 10, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-9848-0125-8
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Dial Books
Review Posted Online: Dec. 21, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2020
PROFILES
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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