An incisive, nuanced inquiry into gender and body.
A searing, deeply personal story about the author’s emotional journey of self-discovery.
“This is the question of my body and my story about it: is it just mine?” So writes Whitney (Creative Writing/Goddard Coll.; Ghost Box, 2014) early on in the narrative, which is fragmented, elliptical, and consistently provocative. The author tells their story in three parts, each beautifully poised and composed of brief paragraphs, some only one short sentence. Piecemeal, like snapshots, Whitney slowly reveals an early life of uncertainty, pain, and suffering: “I grew up knowing fear as an inheritance of femininity.” The story washes back and forth in time as the author reflects on their sexuality and family: Mom and Hank, two brothers, Tye and Gunnar; and Grammy. Along the way, Whitney interjects bits of literature and psychology, wisdom gleaned from a variety of sources, including Freud, Lacan, Allen Ginsberg, Johanna Hedva, Robert J. Stoller, Luce Irigaray, and Eli Clare. Mom is the key to this story. “As a kid,” writes Whitney, “I was a flame in the corner lighting up all of Mom’s mistakes.” Chronicling their mother’s drinking, being physically abused, splitting with her husband, and moving around as she tried to raise her family, Whitney does a fine job uncovering their complex relationship. “This book,” they write, “isn’t about individuation or even coming of age…it’s about ways to find a response, to respond to her.” About Grammy, the author writes, “I love this woman for throwing me into deep water….My heritage is her hopefulness and the complexity of a body that looks, in parts, like hers.” The author recounts adolescent years filled with questions, fears, drinking, drugs, cutting, boys, girls, and homelessness—as well as a bad reaction to testosterone. Upon meeting other trans kids, writes Whitney, “I was the happiest around them I’d ever been.” In 2011, the author underwent breast removal surgery: “I’ve edited my body, mixed my skin around with some money.”
An incisive, nuanced inquiry into gender and body.Pub Date: April 14, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-944211-76-9
Page Count: 200
Publisher: McSweeney’s
Review Posted Online: Jan. 1, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2020
PERSPECTIVES
PERSPECTIVES
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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