LETTERS OF FORGIVENESS

In Burke’s debut memoir, he says the things he wishes he could say to people in his past.

Now a senior citizen, Burke looks back on his decades spent as a closeted gay man, keeping his private affairs hidden from his professional life as a journalist and ad writer. That tension was present from a young age, and it kept Burke from speaking up to certain people he knew along the way. The author supplements his narrative with letters to some of these people. There are the predictable figures: parents, former friends, ex-lovers. But there are also letters to more peripheral figures as well, like the group of jocks he briefly hung out with in high school or the disciplinarian nun who served as the school’s principal. There’s a letter to his first boss, a grown man who kissed Burke when he was still a teen, and another to Marie, a girl Burke himself tried to kiss on the first night they met. There are letters to would-be oppressors, like the group of boys who almost beat up Burke and a man while they were on a date or the cops patrolling a cruising boardwalk. Together, they present the interior life of a person who no longer wishes to let things go unsaid. Burke’s conversational prose is often quite moving, as in the very first letter to several classmates he ate lunch with: “You were all really great guys, and I forgive you for the prejudice that a lot of people had then. If we were in school today, would you be tolerant? Most young people are. Let’s go back. I’ll be out as being gay. I bet we’ll still be friends.” The memoir rambles at times, and it gets less urgent once Burke moves into his later years. The reader sometimes wishes the entire book were composed of letters, as they provide an unusual, direct structure. Even so, the work succeeds in charting the shifting position of gay men in America over the last eight decades while also providing the specific story of one man who never got to express himself…until now.

A sprawling, open-hearted memoir of trespasses and reconciliation.