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UNSEXED

MEMOIRS OF A PROSTITUTE’S DAUGHTER

A feminist daughter of a sex worker redefines herself in this searching remembrance.

DelVecchio charts her path to autonomy in this wrenching memoir.

As a young girl raised in the milieu of sex work, the author was plagued by questions about female bodies—what value they possess, how they are used, and who controls them. Such questions filled her with trepidation and vigilance regarding her own body. Born in Greece, DelVecchio experienced an early childhood marked by hunger, homelessness, abuse, abandonment, and neglect. After her birth mother stabbed her father in the eye with a red stiletto, he left the family, and her mother’s extramarital sexual relationships gained a new purpose beyond pleasure. A man named Kristos, as DelVecchio recalls, was the pimp under whose direction her mother first sold sex to another man—who paid her with a roasted chicken. Kristos told DelVecchio, “I will teach you to be a woman. A good woman. Like your mother.” An orphanage, though it had its own perils, offered an escape. At the age of 8, the author was adopted and raised in the United States by an American Greek woman (characterized by DelVecchio as a “virgin”) whose sexual compass pointed in the opposite direction from her birth mother’s. The memoir dissects how, as the author was caught between these two extremes, she came to consider herself “unsexed.” In a prologue, DelVecchio writes an achingly earnest and disheartening open letter to the body that she has struggled to feel at home in, almost as if speaking to a lover whom she has equally controlled and spurned. This introduction sets the tone for the excoriating exploration of how that relationship came to be. While the narrative’s structure, centering around her birth mother, adoptive mother, and husband (in order of appearance), is a serviceable setup for this exploration, within each section, chapters often rehash and repeat passages and events. Still, the work remains an eye-opening take on sexuality and the intractably complicated politics of a woman’s body.

A feminist daughter of a sex worker redefines herself in this searching remembrance.

Pub Date: July 16, 2024

ISBN: 9781647426941

Page Count: 264

Publisher: She Writes Press

Review Posted Online: April 3, 2024

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THE MESSAGE

A revelatory meditation on shattering journeys.

Bearing witness to oppression.

Award-winning journalist and MacArthur Fellow Coates probes the narratives that shape our perception of the world through his reports on three journeys: to Dakar, Senegal, the last stop for Black Africans “before the genocide and rebirth of the Middle Passage”; to Chapin, South Carolina, where controversy erupted over a writing teacher’s use of Between the World and Me in class; and to Israel and Palestine, where he spent 10 days in a “Holy Land of barbed wire, settlers, and outrageous guns.” By addressing the essays to students in his writing workshop at Howard University in 2022, Coates makes a literary choice similar to the letter to his son that informed Between the World and Me; as in that book, the choice creates a sense of intimacy between writer and reader. Interweaving autobiography and reportage, Coates examines race, his identity as a Black American, and his role as a public intellectual. In Dakar, he is haunted by ghosts of his ancestors and “the shade of Niggerology,” a pseudoscientific narrative put forth to justify enslavement by portraying Blacks as inferior. In South Carolina, the 22-acre State House grounds, dotted with Confederate statues, continue to impart a narrative of white supremacy. His trip to the Middle East inspires the longest and most impassioned essay: “I don’t think I ever, in my life, felt the glare of racism burn stranger and more intense than in Israel,” he writes. In his complex analysis, he sees the trauma of the Holocaust playing a role in Israel’s tactics in the Middle East: “The wars against the Palestinians and their Arab allies were a kind of theater in which ‘weak Jews’ who went ‘like lambs to slaughter’ were supplanted by Israelis who would ‘fight back.’” Roiled by what he witnessed, Coates feels speechless, unable to adequately convey Palestinians’ agony; their reality “demands new messengers, tasked as we all are, with nothing less than saving the world.”

A revelatory meditation on shattering journeys.

Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2024

ISBN: 9780593230381

Page Count: 176

Publisher: One World/Random House

Review Posted Online: Aug. 2, 2024

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2024

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TANQUERAY

A blissfully vicarious, heartfelt glimpse into the life of a Manhattan burlesque dancer.

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  • New York Times Bestseller

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

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