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Possibly my favorite memoir, this book has really amplified my yearning for more big city literary and artistic community and experience. More than that, I appreciated how Delany isolated various strands of his life only to twine them together again, constructing clear narrative paths through time then showing how they are each messy and inseparable from one another, and how difficult it is to locate causality and correspondence in memory. Also get this: in the early 60s Delany paid $58 rent for
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Delany is a master. What else need be said?
The sheer honesty with which he writes about his sexual encounters tells quite a bit about the sexual mores of the time. To read about the openness possible during repressive times, and the prevalence of sexual encounters at the time now, in this day and age, is remarkable. Every chapter left me feeling that the struggle for "normalcy" has perhaps taken away the honesty of sexual intent that was so unique to gay male culture then. Perhaps this was some ...more
The sheer honesty with which he writes about his sexual encounters tells quite a bit about the sexual mores of the time. To read about the openness possible during repressive times, and the prevalence of sexual encounters at the time now, in this day and age, is remarkable. Every chapter left me feeling that the struggle for "normalcy" has perhaps taken away the honesty of sexual intent that was so unique to gay male culture then. Perhaps this was some ...more
A flashback to another time (the sixties) and another literary style (the eighties), giving you ample opportunity for literary exploration. I was sometimes a little bored by Delany's stories but was fully immersed in his final tale - an extended story of his menage a trois with his wife and Bob. And Delany is fully aware of the shortcomings of his own personal narrative, and converses with us through the ongoing commentary in the book. In this era where so many of us are struggling with fragment
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I found this interesting as a chronicle of New York pre-Stonewall for a young gay man, and interesting for its relative inattention to Delany's fiction. There's a fair bit about one lost novel, but far less about the others (as advertised in the title, I guess.)
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Jan 16, 2008
Lawrence
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Apr 30, 2013
Kriss
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Jamie
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Beamish13
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Heather scarlett victoria
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Mars R
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Dana
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May 27, 2016
Akiva ꙮ
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Jan 25, 2017
Jesse
marked it as queer-research
Dec 14, 2017
Celeste
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Jun 23, 2018
Emmett Racecar
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Nov 02, 2018
Andrew Austin
marked it as to-read
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review of another edition
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2019-kindle-reading
Jun 10, 2019
Rachel
marked it as to-read
Jul 14, 2019
Jennifer
marked it as available-at-multcolib
