An intimate portrait of personal struggles and artistic triumphs.
A frank memoir reveals life, art, and death in 1980s New York.
Growing up in suburban Syracuse, McGough was shy, gay, and frequently bullied. In high school, he found refuge in the art room, peopled by “artists and outcasts” like himself, and he became recognized for his talent. After graduating in 1978, he headed eagerly to New York’s Fashion Institute of Technology, hoping to find sexual freedom at last. In his candid debut memoir, the author vividly conveys the turbulence and seediness of the “dirty and dangerous” West Village and of Times Square, “a mess of dirty old theaters” showing horror movies and pornography. “It was everything I dreamed of and more,” he admits, and he spent his tuition money in nightclubs, including the infamous Studio 54, and on rent for squalid rooms. When his money ran out, he took odd jobs illustrating, sketching, and, at one point, painting Danceteria, a new nightclub, where he also worked as a busboy. McGough’s life changed when he met David McDermott, an eccentric, charismatic artist who rejected the modern world as “cheap and vulgar,” claimed he was a genius (and, sometimes, Jesus), and carefully curated environments for himself filled with Victoriana. McDermott’s world, McGough writes, “became immediately alluring, and I felt safe and cut off from a world I thought harsh and cruel.” Soon he, too, was wearing shirts with highly starched detachable collars, frock coats, and homburg hats: “We felt we were making a statement by our very existence.” The two became lovers and artistic collaborators, signing their works with both surnames and eventually gaining a reputation among dealers, collectors, curators (they showed twice at Whitney Biennales), and fellow artists such as Jean-Michel Basquiat, Andy Warhol, and Julian Schnabel. In a world filled with narcissists, grifters, and assorted lost souls, Schnabel and his wife, cleareyed and compassionate, stand out. Bitterness and anger sometimes surface as the author recounts betrayal, severe financial hardship brought about by McDermott’s wanton spending, and years of suffering from AIDS.
An intimate portrait of personal struggles and artistic triumphs.Pub Date: Sept. 17, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-5247-4704-6
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Pantheon
Review Posted Online: June 29, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2019
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
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