Despite occasional opacity, this noteworthy debut showcases a unique voice in contemporary memoir.
A provocative memoir of personal essays exploring race, identity, and queer love.
In his debut essay collection, first-generation Chinese American writer Dai crafts an intricate tapestry of memory and reflection through lush, impressionistic prose. The book ambitiously explores themes of identity, race, language, love, and queerness, framed by Dai’s travels across the U.S.—from Tennessee to Arizona—and back to his ancestral homeland in China. Dai’s exploration of identity begins poignantly with his name—Thomas versus Nuocheng—offering a compelling entry point: “Thomas gets me through the roll call quicker….It is the name on my driver’s license and passport, a word whose primary synonym in my head is me.” What follows is stylistically profound yet often veers into self-conscious territory. The narrative is peppered with references to influential thinkers like Roland Barthes, Alain Badiou, and Vladimir Nabokov, suggesting Dai’s thoughts are filtered through their sensibilities. He reflects, “For so long, I have thought about love as a feeling that lives and dies in the moment. I have thought about love through the words of philosophers like Barthes and Badiou rather than poets like Audre Lorde—Lorde, who writes, breathlessly describing a lover’s touch, ‘I am come home.’” This intellectual approach sometimes results in opaque descriptions, particularly when describing relationships with family and lovers—two of whom are referred to simply as “J” or “you.” Stark black-and-white photos attempt to enhance his written impressions but add to the book’s somewhat elusive quality. Dai’s prose oscillates between clarity and dense, stylized writing. At its best, it offers insightful reflections on the immigrant experience and queer identity. However, the weight of its intellectual indulgences sometimes threatens to overshadow the personal narrative. The work will likely resonate with readers drawn to lush prose and literary experimentation, but it may leave others yearning for more grounded, accessible storytelling.
Despite occasional opacity, this noteworthy debut showcases a unique voice in contemporary memoir.Pub Date: Jan. 21, 2025
ISBN: 9781324066378
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: Oct. 26, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2024
A virtuoso performance and an ode to an undervalued medium created by two talented artists.
The veteran actor, comedian, and banjo player teams up with the acclaimed illustrator to create a unique book of cartoons that communicates their personalities.
Martin, also a prolific author, has always been intrigued by the cartoons strewn throughout the pages of the New Yorker. So when he was presented with the opportunity to work with Bliss, who has been a staff cartoonist at the magazine since 1997, he seized the moment. “The idea of a one-panel image with or without a caption mystified me,” he writes. “I felt like, yeah, sometimes I’m funny, but there are these other weird freaks who are actually funny.” Once the duo agreed to work together, they established their creative process, which consisted of working forward and backward: “Forwards was me conceiving of several cartoon images and captions, and Harry would select his favorites; backwards was Harry sending me sketched or fully drawn cartoons for dialogue or banners.” Sometimes, he writes, “the perfect joke occurs two seconds before deadline.” There are several cartoons depicting this method, including a humorous multipanel piece highlighting their first meeting called “They Meet,” in which Martin thinks to himself, “He’ll never be able to translate my delicate and finely honed droll notions.” In the next panel, Bliss thinks, “I’m sure he won’t understand that the comic art form is way more subtle than his blunt-force humor.” The team collaborated for a year and created 150 cartoons featuring an array of topics, “from dogs and cats to outer space and art museums.” A witty creation of a bovine family sitting down to a gourmet meal and one of Dumbo getting his comeuppance highlight the duo’s comedic talent. What also makes this project successful is the team’s keen understanding of human behavior as viewed through their unconventional comedic minds.
A virtuoso performance and an ode to an undervalued medium created by two talented artists.Pub Date: Nov. 17, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-250-26289-9
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Celadon Books
Review Posted Online: Aug. 30, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2020
PERSPECTIVES
Sedaris at his darkest—and his best.
In which the veteran humorist enters middle age with fine snark but some trepidation as well.
Mortality is weighing on Sedaris (Theft by Finding: Diaries 1977-2002, 2017, etc.), much of it his own, professional narcissist that he is. Watching an elderly man have a bowel accident on a plane, he dreaded the day when he would be the target of teenagers’ jokes “as they raise their phones to take my picture from behind.” A skin tumor troubled him, but so did the doctor who told him he couldn’t keep it once it was removed. “But it’s my tumor,” he insisted. “I made it.” (Eventually, he found a semitrained doctor to remove and give him the lipoma, which he proceeded to feed to a turtle.) The deaths of others are much on the author’s mind as well: He contemplates the suicide of his sister Tiffany, his alcoholic mother’s death, and his cantankerous father’s erratic behavior. His contemplation of his mother’s drinking—and his family’s denial of it—makes for some of the most poignant writing in the book: The sound of her putting ice in a rocks glass increasingly sounded “like a trigger being cocked.” Despite the gloom, however, frivolity still abides in the Sedaris clan. His summer home on the Carolina coast, which he dubbed the Sea Section, overspills with irreverent bantering between him and his siblings as his long-suffering partner, Hugh, looks on. Sedaris hasn’t lost his capacity for bemused observations of the people he encounters. For example, cashiers who say “have a blessed day” make him feel “like you’ve been sprayed against your will with God cologne.” But bad news has sharpened the author’s humor, and this book is defined by a persistent, engaging bafflement over how seriously or unseriously to take life when it’s increasingly filled with Trump and funerals.
Sedaris at his darkest—and his best.Pub Date: May 29, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-316-39238-9
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Feb. 19, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2018
PROFILES
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