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[close] Book Review by Dr. Heath Sommer
As a phoenix is born from his own corpse And his false image dies… There is no honor in being alive Unless in his closet they still reside.
(excerpts of a passage from Left In His Closet by Mary Krome)

Left In His Closet is one of the more genuine stories I have read in years. Sad, but sincere, this multi-perspective story shreds the invisible taboo of gay versus heterosexual philosophies into a brilliant and ingenious study of human philosophy, connection, sexuality, and identity. Mary Krome, the author, is a doctorate who has won awards for her research, which she brilliantly spins into the prose without it ever feeling like an academic lecture. This reviewer has a background in clinical psychology, and therefore it was easy to identify the sound research perspective and thoughts Krome spins into the web of human frailties recorded throughout Left In His Closet, but never once did I feel I was being talked at, but rather let into a privacy and undiscovered world that so few know.

Rephrased, I felt that Krome’s subtle poetry and soft-lit inner dialogues, mixed with a story really moved more by conversations than events in a way a pointillist painter might blend the blurriness of inane color dots, that seem hazy at first glance, but from far away form into a beautiful whole that is too easy to miss if one’s review of the art at hand values Polaroid over Picasso (yes, I know Picasso was not a pointillist, it’s a metaphor).

The point is that Krome sets out in Left in His Closet to do more than tell a story, she seeks out to bleed it into your own veins, merge it into your own thoughts, press it into your own vulnerabilities, and triumph it into your own hopes, and she achieves in a glorious way the untold story of the other spouse left in the closet when a gay lover wanders into a new life, and all without demonizing human beings in general along the way. This story will trouble you, move you, make you smile, make you frown, make you cry, but in the end, make you a better person for having suffered through the darker with the lighter parts of the human landscape. (February 13, 2010)