Secret Frequencies: A New York Education

American Lives

by John Skoyles

In this compelling memoir, John Skoyles guides us through 1960s New York. Caught between his uncle Fred, a mob associate and man-about-town, and his aunt Linda, a secretary at Paramount Pictures on Times Square, the sixteen-year-old finds himself exploring everything from the bars and swank apartments of Manhattan's Upper East Side to the flophouses and haunts of Forty-second Street. Secret Frequencies spins in graceful turns from deadpan hilarity to unflinching bleakness as Skoyles encounters New York’s most comic, absurd, and sometimes dangerous seductions.

248 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2003

About the author

John served as the poetry editor of Ploughshares from 2007-2025. He has published seven books of poems, A Little Faith; Permanent Change; Definition of the Soul; The Situation; Inside Job; Suddenly It's Evening: Selected Poems, and Yes & No. His work has appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Times, Poetry, The American Poetry Review, The Atlantic, Harvard Review, Slate and the Yale Review, among others. He is also the author of Generous Strangers, a collection of personal essays, several of which were broadcast on public radio; and a memoir, Secret Frequencies: A New York Education. His awards include two grants from the National Endowment for the Arts as well as fellowships from the New York and North Carolina Arts Councils. In 2003, he became a member of the Order of the Occult Hand while reviewing books for the Associated Press. He has taught at Southern Methodist University, Sarah Lawrence College, Warren Wilson College, where he directed the MFA program, and at Emerson College. His autobiographical novel, A Moveable Famine, has been published by The Permanent Press. In 2017 Quale Press brought out his fiction/nonfiction hybrid, The Nut File. Driven, a memoir in travelogue form, was published by MadHat in 2019. His 7th book of poems, Yes & No, was published in 2021. Two books will be published in October of 2026: That's Where You Come In, with Carnegie-Mellon University Press and All the Question Marks with Unbound Edition Press.

Reviews

[Janice]

1/26/10

[Jamey]

An effortless read. A touching memoir of growing up.