Intriguing midpoint autobiography sure to rouse curiosity about what the next half has in store.
Chester's go-ahead-and-laugh debut memoir shows a difficult adolescence evolving into a successful independent-film career.
The author reflects on his youth with a bleak, steady wryness. His family is standard-issue dysfunctional: Grandma’s comradely advice includes, “It's much worse to get hit in the face with your own shit than with someone else’s. Remember that”; while Mom offers, “I hope there's sex in heaven ’cause I sure do like it!” Growing up in this hapless, hopeless, yet oddly secure environment, Chester describes himself as “a socially unskilled, constipated, Christian gay child,” painfully shy and the class joke. Things can't get worse, it seems, until he begins showing symptoms of Long-Face Syndrome, a genetic disorder that tests even Chester's capacity for black humor. Painful and humiliating, endless surgery gives him a new face, and his experience out there on the margin of things presumably gave him the ability to see the comedy in his predicament that distinguishes his recollections—while asides like “the only thing better than winning in this life is proving people wrong” hint at a bilious undercurrent. Out of these ruins an actor is born, well versed in nuances and the oblique. Chester calls up choice moments in his rise as a performer, remembering an early gig at which his parents “sat quietly as their only son sang songs about eating ass.” On the politics of being openly gay in Hollywood, he comments of belatedly candid celebrities that “coming out once you have a mansion and a Range Rover isn't really the same as putting your ass on the line from the get-go,” and notes the weirdness of losing gay roles to straight actors because he’s “not gay enough” or because the people at home need to know it’s “all just pretend.”
Intriguing midpoint autobiography sure to rouse curiosity about what the next half has in store.Pub Date: Jan. 6, 2003
ISBN: 0-312-28713-5
Page Count: 288
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2002
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
This autobiography might almost be said to supply the roots to Wright's famous novel, Native Son.
It is a grim record, disturbing, the story of how — in one boy's life — the seeds of hate and distrust and race riots were planted. Wright was born to poverty and hardship in the deep south; his father deserted his mother, and circumstances and illness drove the little family from place to place, from degradation to degradation. And always, there was the thread of fear and hate and suspicion and discrimination — of white set against black — of black set against Jew — of intolerance. Driven to deceit, to dishonesty, ambition thwarted, motives impugned, Wright struggled against the tide, put by a tiny sum to move on, finally got to Chicago, and there — still against odds — pulled himself up, acquired some education through reading, allied himself with the Communists — only to be thrust out for non-conformity — and wrote continually. The whole tragedy of a race seems dramatized in this record; it is virtually unrelieved by any vestige of human tenderness, or humor; there are no bright spots. And yet it rings true. It is an unfinished story of a problem that has still to be met.
Perhaps this will force home unpalatable facts of a submerged minority, a problem far from being faced.
Pub Date: Feb. 28, 1945
ISBN: 0061130249
Page Count: 450
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1945
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