This work movingly renders the complex emotional landscape of living in and out of the closet.
A gay woman recounts her experiences during the 1960s and onward in this debut memoir.
Anderson was raised in a working-class Detroit neighborhood by loving, practical, and devoutly Baptist parents. As a teenager, she was shocked to realize she felt an attraction to her worldlier friend Gina. The concept of gay rights didn’t exist in Anderson’s world, and she dreaded the label “lesbian.” Determined to be “normal,” she pursued relationships with men in college. Yet she developed another crush on a female friend, Nicky. Nicky reciprocated, and the two began a relationship that appeared platonic (at first) to outsiders, including Anderson’s boyfriend. A dorm room confrontation showed Anderson that her “friendship” was raising eyebrows, and the two drifted apart. As sexual liberation swept the nation, Anderson befriended other gay women and enjoyed tentative self-acceptance. Yet she continued to hide her true identity from her parents. She eventually met Linda, a woman in an open marriage, and what started as a fling became something more. After Linda left her husband, Anderson wrestled with a new role: parental figure to her lover’s daughters. Anderson regretted never coming out to her father before his sudden death. Determined to not repeat her mistake, she wrestled with how to tell her mother about Linda. As the years progressed, Anderson’s romantic, family, and professional lives continued to shift as American attitudes about homosexuality changed and homophobia lessened but didn’t disappear. The author writes compellingly about the burden of the closet—not only the threat of physical violence and social censure, but the constant emotional labor required to hide her full identity, first just from herself, then from loved ones and the outside world. She writes stirringly, too, about the genuine love between her and her parents and about the ecstasy and terror accompanying sexual awakening (“I seemed to be going through a kind of gay adolescence, discovering myself attractive on multiple levels to the women around me.…So hungry for physical connection after years of stuffing away my emotional and sexual feelings for women, it was like unleashing a spring-loaded can of confetti”). She skillfully executes emotionally weighty scenes, such as coming out to her mother, though some readers might crave a few more full episodes capturing the rhythms of daily life to balance out the psychological introspection.
This work movingly renders the complex emotional landscape of living in and out of the closet.Pub Date: Oct. 17, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-63152-314-4
Page Count: 280
Publisher: She Writes Press
Review Posted Online: July 31, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2017
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
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