Becoming a Man: Half a Life Story
(Libby/OverDrive eBook, Kindle)

"I don't know whether I'll live to finish this" is the first sentence of Monette's superb memoir of his lover Roger's last years with AIDS, Borrowed Time [BKL Je 1 88]. Live he did, though, finishing that book and two excellent novels also concerned with AIDs, Afterlife [BKL F 1 90] and Halfway Home [BKL Ap 1 91]. And now there is this autobiography of his closeted, self-denying youth, a book in which virtually every gay man will see himself; with which virtually every lesbian and bisexual will empathize, often pain~fully; which will powerfully move the parents, sib~lings, and friends of gays; and which may even cause a few habitually hardened antigay hearts to soften. Not that Monette's experience has been utterly typical. His family included a brother crippled since birth, a circumstance that increased his own guilt over being abnormal and the pressure to make good (which was relieved as that intelligent brother became a resourceful young man). The same guilty drive to excel (so as to distract--to cover up) propelled him into Ivy League prep school and college scholarships and spurred his nascent literary career. But he found he had nothing real to write about, for he had lived an entirely closeted youth. He went into therapy, tried to form relationships with women, playing the field extensively if not very potently, and started to come out and play that field. And then he met Roger. The reader's relief at this outcome is as great as Monette's, for no other writer writes with as powerful an emotional charge, so that completing this book confers the kind of purgation that perhaps Aristotle had in mind. Very frequently as witty as it is anguished and as full of understanding as of anger, this is Monette's best book, maybe one of the great American autobiographies. ~--Ray Olson

Monette responds to readers of his first memoir, Borrowed Time, by providing the flip-side expository of his life in the closet until he met his soul mate--the laughing man, Roger Horwitz. This memoir (which might more aptly have been titled Wasted Time ) is a bitter reproach of the 27 years Monette spent searching for himself. He explains that it took him years to realize that the homophobe is the deviant. Reading this beautifully written book, one feels as trapped by its dark mood as the author was by the closet. The writing is occasionally marred, however, by repetitive phrases, such as ``playing courtier,'' ``the closet'' and the endless search for ``the laughing man.'' The story also unfolds choppily due to frequent references to the future. Nevertheless, the book is a heartfelt illumination of how a gay person overcame the self-reproach that societal condemnation enacts. (June) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

In this prequel to his Borrowed Time ( LJ 8/88), Monette has written a poignant, bittersweet memoir of growing up a closeted gay man and later coming to accept his gay persona. It is a story of a man struggling half his life to come out. Monette recounts in vivid detail his early life in Andover, Massachusetts, his college years at Yale University, his teaching career at a prep school, and the struggle between his gay identity and society's homophobic attitudes. Each stage of his personal journey is described at an intimate, insightful, human level. Monette states in the first chapter, ``I still shiver with a kind of astonished delight when a gay brother or sister tells of that narrow escape from the coffin of the closet . . . . It was just like that for me.'' Recommended for public and academic libraries.-- Michael A. Lutes, Univ. of Notre Dame Lib., Ind. (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

From ``the cauldron of the plague'' comes a bitter memoir by the author of Borrowed Time: An AIDS Memoir (1988) and six novels (Halfway Home, 1991, etc.). ``Twisted up with rage,'' Monette is urgent to tell his story: ``the fevers are on me now, the virus mad to ravage my last hundred T cells.'' He begins with his straight-A childhood, darkened by his brother being crippled by spina bifida. But the source of Monette's fury comes from growing up in ``the coffin world of the closet,'' losing a ``decade of being dead below the belt,'' and now finding himself a victim of what he calls ``the genocide by indifference that has buried alive a generation of my brothers.'' Clearly, Monette wants to berate and shock this ``Puritan sinkhole of a culture'' with crude language (``Roger was up to his tits in therapy'' is a printable example) and explicit accounts of his homosexual encounters, starting as a nine-year-old. After describing a one-night stand, he mockingly asks, ``Is this more than you want to know?'' and then explains that a late lover advised, ``rub their faces in it.'' Monette does. Later, he writes, ``I was so sick of hearing myself talk about sexuality--hetero, homo, and otherwise.'' But despite the pose of no-holds-barred honesty, the author's diatribe offers only a predictable view of his elite schools (Andover and Yale) and little on gender theory beyond the statement that ``gay is a kind of sensibility.'' The offhand prose veers from the flip (``I try not to be gayer-than- thou about bi'') to the melodramatic (``I have to keep my later self on a short leash as I negotiate those hurricanes of feeling that propelled my time with women''). A deliberately self-absorbed manifesto from the AIDS battlefield, angrily slicing the world into us and them.