Becoming A Man Half a Life Story
Monette, Paul.
Place Published: New York:
Publisher: Harcourt Brace,
Date Published: 1992.
Description: STATED FIRST EDITION, FIRST PRINTING (A B C D E). 277 pages. The book is NEAR FINE--two pages have crimped outside edge. The dust jacket are is NEAR FINE with small (.50") closed tear on bottom front edge of jacket. NOT price-clipped. NOT remaindered. Dust jacket notes read: "'Forty-six now and dying by inches, I finally see how our lives align at the core, if not in the sorry details. I still shiver with a kind of astonished delight when a gay brother or sister tells of that narrow escape from the coffin world of the closet. Yes yes yes, goes a voice in my head, it was just like that for me. When we laugh together then and dance in the giddy circle of freedom, we are children for real at last, because we have finally grown up.' He grew up in a small New England town-Andover, Massachusetts. English on his mother's side, French Canadian on his father's. As a child of the 50's, he watched Kate Smith and Lassie on TV; went to the Episcopal church; got all A's in school. But he already had a secret, and his public life with family and playmates was a constant round of ventriloquism, pretending to be the same as everyone else. At Andover he was a Latin scholar, miserable at sports, busy keeping a white leatherette scrapbook of Elizabeth Taylor clippings. When he was sixteen his mother discovered in the back of his desk drawer copies of Playboy and Tomorrow's Man. His father later took him aside and said, 'There's nothing wrong with those girlie magazines, Paul. That's perfectly natural, you're almost a man. But the homosexual ones ... that's not good.' Becoming a Man is a book about growing up gay, and about the tyranny and self-hatred of the closet. One man's struggle, for half his life, to come out. It is also a book about America: from the starchy halls of privilege at Andover and Yale to the golden states of California. The white-bread 50's, rebellious 60's, self-creating 70's. And throughout, a breathtakingly honest and unsparing account of the tortures of living a lie; a naked portrait of a man's fight for sexual freedom in a time of ignorance and bigotry." WINNER OF THE 1992 National Book Award for Nonfiction.
Edition: First printingBinding: 1/4 cloth
Condition: Fine in Fine DJ
ISBN: 0151115192
Book Id: 17493
Price: $13.25
