This meandering memoir delivers a surprisingly touching account of one man’s experiences.
A sequel offers recollections from a Gen Xer on life in and out of a small New England town.
Gorman follows up his previous memoir, Until We’re Strangers Again (2014), about life in professional wrestling, with a look at his adventures both before and after that career. The author grew up in Medfield, Massachusetts. As a youngster, he felt a lot of rage about the place. In the opening pages he explains that at the age of 13 he hated not only his stepfather, but most authority figures in the area as well. He had a loathing for the police who harassed him and his friends and a strong dislike for many of his teachers. His tastes skewed toward heavy metal, Beavis and Butt-Head, and people on the rougher side of town. As he explains in these pages, he and his friends were “far from poor, but by the standards of nouveau Medfield, we were practically homeless, and we all probably looked it from the way we dressed.” Still, unlike some of his acquaintances, he graduated from high school and went to college. He decided to study creative writing at Emerson College in Boston. Although he saw himself not so much as a student as a college “customer,” his experiences were not all bad. Some of his professors may have lacked inspiration, but he got to see firsthand what writing for a living was like. After graduating, he landed a job with an alternative publication called The Boston Phoenix. He had some escapades in Boston, not the least of which involved a fling with a co-worker. A personal tragedy eventually brought him back to Medfield, compelling him to examine the town he left behind.
Honest from the get-go, the book is most striking when exploring Medfield and the people who lived there. It was a place whose population included a public works employee with religious convictions so strong (and strange) he would not allow knickknacks in his home. It was a town with girls who wore “Adidas windbreakers and reeked of Kool cigarettes and Aqua Net hairspray” and where someone put a diagram on how to build a bomb in the school yearbook (an action that included plenty of repercussions). Readers learn much about the fine details of the town from such sketches. By contrast, anecdotes about college, like the undoing of a pitiful, frenzied theater major, are not all that enlightening. Nor are scenes from the life of a young professional, such as a night out with co-workers in Boston where the author learned what a mojito was. Still, the volume’s diverse strands give readers a vivid, three-dimensional picture of Gorman and the things he experienced. All of these elements that constitute a life make the later portions, which include a very personal look at death, quite moving. As someone points out on the final page, “When you’re dead, you’re fucked. And you don’t get to do cool shit anymore.”
This meandering memoir delivers a surprisingly touching account of one man’s experiences.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: 978-1-5427-2919-2
Page Count: 344
Publisher: Self
Review Posted Online: Jan. 16, 2021
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A blissfully vicarious, heartfelt glimpse into the life of a Manhattan burlesque dancer.
A former New York City dancer reflects on her zesty heyday in the 1970s.
Discovered on a Manhattan street in 2020 and introduced on Stanton’s Humans of New York Instagram page, Johnson, then 76, shares her dynamic history as a “fiercely independent” Black burlesque dancer who used the stage name Tanqueray and became a celebrated fixture in midtown adult theaters. “I was the only black girl making white girl money,” she boasts, telling a vibrant story about sex and struggle in a bygone era. Frank and unapologetic, Johnson vividly captures aspects of her former life as a stage seductress shimmying to blues tracks during 18-minute sets or sewing lingerie for plus-sized dancers. Though her work was far from the Broadway shows she dreamed about, it eventually became all about the nightly hustle to simply survive. Her anecdotes are humorous, heartfelt, and supremely captivating, recounted with the passion of a true survivor and the acerbic wit of a weathered, street-wise New Yorker. She shares stories of growing up in an abusive household in Albany in the 1940s, a teenage pregnancy, and prison time for robbery as nonchalantly as she recalls selling rhinestone G-strings to prostitutes to make them sparkle in the headlights of passing cars. Complemented by an array of revealing personal photographs, the narrative alternates between heartfelt nostalgia about the seedier side of Manhattan’s go-go scene and funny quips about her unconventional stage performances. Encounters with a variety of hardworking dancers, drag queens, and pimps, plus an account of the complexities of a first love with a drug-addled hustler, fill out the memoir with personality and candor. With a narrative assist from Stanton, the result is a consistently titillating and often moving story of human struggle as well as an insider glimpse into the days when Times Square was considered the Big Apple’s gloriously unpolished underbelly. The book also includes Yee’s lush watercolor illustrations.
A blissfully vicarious, heartfelt glimpse into the life of a Manhattan burlesque dancer.Pub Date: July 12, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-250-27827-2
Page Count: 192
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: July 27, 2022
A juicy story with some truly crazy moments, yet Anderson's good heart shines through.
The iconic model tells the story of her eventful life.
According to the acknowledgments, this memoir started as "a fifty-page poem and then grew into hundreds of pages of…more poetry." Readers will be glad that Anderson eventually turned to writing prose, since the well-told anecdotes and memorable character sketches are what make it a page-turner. The poetry (more accurately described as italicized notes-to-self with line breaks) remains strewn liberally through the pages, often summarizing the takeaway or the emotional impact of the events described: "I was / and still am / an exceptionally / easy target. / And, / I'm proud of that." This way of expressing herself is part of who she is, formed partly by her passion for Anaïs Nin and other writers; she is a serious maven of literature and the arts. The narrative gets off to a good start with Anderson’s nostalgic memories of her childhood in coastal Vancouver, raised by very young, very wild, and not very competent parents. Here and throughout the book, the author displays a remarkable lack of anger. She has faced abuse and mistreatment of many kinds over the decades, but she touches on the most appalling passages lightly—though not so lightly you don't feel the torment of the media attention on the events leading up to her divorce from Tommy Lee. Her trip to the pages of Playboy, which involved an escape from a violent fiance and sneaking across the border, is one of many jaw-dropping stories. In one interesting passage, Julian Assange's mother counsels Anderson to desexualize her image in order to be taken more seriously as an activist. She decided that “it was too late to turn back now”—that sexy is an inalienable part of who she is. Throughout her account of this kooky, messed-up, enviable, and often thrilling life, her humility (her sons "are true miracles, considering the gene pool") never fails her.
A juicy story with some truly crazy moments, yet Anderson's good heart shines through.Pub Date: Jan. 31, 2023
ISBN: 9780063226562
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Dey Street/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Dec. 5, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2023
SEEN & HEARD
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