FACING INWARD

A radio personality looks back on her storied career and discusses her experience of suffering from chronic illness in this memoir.

Sometimes a celebrity memoir is all about the glitz and the glam, the hobnobbing with the who’s who of the media industry; Carter’s new memoir delivers on this front. She dishes on her run-ins with RuPaul, David Byrne, and a juicy fake kiss with pop star Pink among other celebrity encounters over the course of her career in television media and, especially, radio. These stories add spice to a memoir that is, ultimately, about growing up as a lesbian in the American South while suffering from chronic illness. Carter pieces together the events of her life chronologically, from a birth scene originally written in a screenplay format (a man, her father, is asked to make a “Sophie’s Choice” between saving his wife or his daughter: “M-my wife, of course”) to the near-present in the aftermath of the Covid-19 pandemic. As a child, the author suffered from mysterious gastrointestinal issues eventually diagnosed as “spastic colon” (what might now be diagnosed as IBS). As the narrative progresses and she grows older, the focus shifts to the challenges of balancing her kidney failure and dialysis with the work of talk radio. The book is also an account of coming out of the closet and navigating romantic relationships on top of all of the author’s health complications. Carter’s prose throughout is clear and well-balanced between moments of levity and sincerity. (A scene in which the author comes out to her father underneath the glow of a Wendy’s sign is particularly poignant.) While Carter’s memoir sometimes feels uneven, as the author doesn’t always manage the smoothest tonal shifts between her health episodes and her professional development, the work is valuable as a piece of well-wrought introspection and as a look at queer life in the 1990s and 2000s.

A thoughtful chronicle of illness enlivened by celebrity anecdotes.