If you're paying much closer attention to my reviews than I think you are, you will recall that I gave a thumbs up to Anchee Min's coming of age in China during the Cultural Revolution story, Wild Ginger, back in July ought eight. Red Azalea covers similar territory, but this time it's openly autobiographical.
It's likely I never would have heard of, much less read this book if I hadn't gone to high school with one of its authors. We went to the same high school, but lived in different universes. However, it seems that even Liz Welch's closest friends didn't have much more of an idea of what was going on in her life than I did.
I don't usually read zines by men, not because I'm biased, although I am, but because most of my zine reading is for the Zine Collection at Barnard, which is comprised mostly of zines by women, with a few by people of other genders writing about femme identity. The author of Travesty is a cisgendered male who likes to wear women's clothes.
I don't know whether to identify this book as a memoir or autobiography. By the title, you'd think it was coming of age in college story, and it's definitely not that. Kathleen Norris writes mostly about her early, post-virgin 20s working at the Academy of American Poets under the direction of Betty Kray. Kray is definitely a subject worth reading and writing about, but I have to admit I was a little annoyed throughout the book that it didn't really deliver what I expected. I should probably get over that.
Betty intended that one of the functions of the Poets House library would be 'to gather fugitive materials such as [small-press books], magazines, chapbooks, and other ephemeral publications,' without which poets and scholars would find it "impossible to re-create the sense of a literary epoch." p.177
In my review of Welfare Brat I remarked how impressive it is when people can remember so many details of their childhood. Scully, unfortunately, doesn't have quite the mastery that Childers does, but she reports that her sister has no memory of their childhood whatsoever, so I guess she's not doing too badly. The quality is a little uneven; some of the short, poetic chapters (64 of them in a 219 page book) are far more compelling than others.
Don't tell anyone, but I've never taken a women's studies class. I knew Dworkin was a controversial figure and anti-pornography activist, but not much more than that. Unfortunately, she turned me a bit against her in the first couple of chapters, with sentiments like:
I don't review every zine I read on here, but I do try to get a few lines out about my favorites. Her Blues is one of those zines that like good poetry, art, etc. captures an experience in such a way that it resonates completely with something that you thought was yours only, and reading it you feel less like a freak, less alone.
I read a lot of autobiographies, but seldom does it occur to me to consider what a feat of memory and bravery it is to get down a rich portrait of one's life. Mary Childers does an admirable job of recalling her impoverished childhood and adolescence in the Bronx, and is pretty out there about what she endured, including her own shaming behaviors. I wonder if her telling the story in the present tense helped her with that? It kind of confused me, so I wish that even if the device helped her memory, that she'd switched it to past tense after the first draft.
He had always been a cruel and violent drunk, but when he dangled Lacey out of a window because she wasn't his kid, Mom ditched him. At least that's what she tells us. I'm glad to have a standard for where to draw the line on the kind of abuse to take from men. p.17
I wish my social studies teacher would verify what the old Irish guy told me and Paula about these crowded hills belonging to the Appalachian Mountains. But during the geography unit we only memorized and pierced with pushpins the map locations of natural resources and capitals in Africa, Asia and Central and South America, as if preparing for lifetimes of exile or plunder. p.127
"Male like me" is the general idea of Ned/Norah Vincent's year and a half undercover as a man. Vincent is a tall lesbian, who has a masculine mien. After one night out in costume accompanying a drag king friend, and experiencing how differently people respond to men, even in passing on the street, she decided embark on an intensive research project. Dressed as a man, Vincent infiltrated a men's bowling league, strip clubs, the world of online dating, a monastery, some sales jobs, and finally a men's group.
You can just imagine the fun of growing up in the Midwest with a name like Bich (not pronounced the way it's spelled) and being so tiny that your peers want to use your head as an armrest, right? That's not what this childhood memoir from a Vietnamese-American whose family moved to Michigan when she was a baby is really about, but details like provide access points for people of all backgrounds, I think. Something else that will appeal to lots of y'all is Nguyen's love for and descriptions of food, especially the 1970s/80s candy that give her in her youth both torment and succor. She is a total foodie and is enraptured by the food writing in the Little House series. Who knew?