Chronologically, this debut novel covers the author’s Petunia, Texas childhood to his acceptance into college; psychologically, it covers the author’s life from “Motherism” to “post-motherism”, an area which covers (and disturbs) a lot of sacred ground – some of it surprisingly insightful (or he spent way too much time analyzing his mother), some of it surprisingly clueless (even his readers knew he was gay before he says he did. Hmmm. Do we really believe that he went through puberty without realizing until he met Michael that he was gay? Why no, I don’t believe we do), and much of it surprisingly funny (those of us who actually kept a straight face during the lip implant disaster probably need to cut back on the Botox).
The book begins with the desertion of mother and son by the father of the household: he has left them a “Dear John” letter filled with complaints about the two of them: that SHE is insane and has made their son the same way. This bonds mother and son in an “us against the world” battle that plays out until he reaches adulthood, combined with a maternal narcissism on her part that echoes mothers who have sent their children onto lives of crime with even less emotional manipulation. So it is perhaps not surprising that the author tends to use the same voice for both mother and son for most of the book (a penchant for talking in condescending and overly dramatic sound bites) – which at times is almost wearisome in its relentless and unhappy bitchiness – or perhaps it is meant to be.
For a boy whose initial reaction to the desertion by his father is “relief”, the hatred he expresses at an attempted later reconciliation doesn’t track – we aren’t able to follow how he went from “relief” to “hatred” over someone who rarely reappears in the book at all, either in thought or in action, beyond showing up to collect his things with a pregnant mistress - and one suspects he hasn’t quite come to emotional terms with the issue of his father, even as he writes about it. On the other hand, including his father in the dedication tells you they worked it out eventually - it just doesn't happen in the pages of the biography, leaving a question mark where there ought to have been a trajectory.
That his father might have left in part because his wife found him revolting – and he tells us this in the first few pages – hasn’t quite registered with the author, nor has his father’s possible perspective of himself as the odd man out in a household where mother and son are interchangeable reflections of each other, right down to their dual pilgrimages to Neiman Marcus. He doesn’t seem to be aware of the strangeness of his emotional reaction of “You abandoned ME; I hate you” from the reader’s perspective – the idea that his father might have sought his own soul mate who was more down to earth, not likely to escape him for Neiman Marcus and denigrate him in front of his only son, even if this soul mate could only provide him a happy home in a trailer. The author has just found his own soul mate in his beloved Michael; so one would hope he could translate that into a motive for his father. If he comes to that awareness, he doesn’t share it.
My own feeling was, while he was able to “tell” the story (and he did it extremely well), he wasn’t yet ready to write the story; the emotional gaps left in the telling suggest that it probably needed to percolate inside of him a bit longer.
After this desertion, money – the loss of or the acquiring of it – then becomes the all important guiding mechanism in Mother and son’s lives, at times to the point of lunacy: his Mother’s standards for the true signs of material success in marrying back into money (a full head of hair, breast implants, lip implants) continually shift and adapt to her own set of reducing circumstances, while her standards for sneering at a lack of material success in anyone shy of Southfork seem to be set in stone: for example, she dismisses a warm, family home filled with loving, compassionate parents as disgusting, beneath her son’s dignity and “smelling like soup”. This family, contrasted against his own family of matriarchs so manipulative and nasty you suspect a genetic disorder, is the warm and supportive family of the man he falls in love with at first sight: Michael, a professional dancer and choreographer.
By the end of the story, Mother has finally found a victim to remarry; son has found true love and, hopefully, some sense of humanity, although his objection to a friend’s seeing him in a vulnerable moment is that he can’t “condescend” towards her anymore, makes one still suspect that crossing the author’s path in anything you’ve picked up at Walmart would be a bad idea. Luckily, he and Michael, according to the author’s bio, have moved to New York, which fortunately accepts even the kindness-challenged into its melting pot.
Finally, call me provincial (although preferably not to my face, thank you), but I'd like to know when it was that "memoir" lost its traditional definition. Shouldn't there be some sort of unspoken publishing rule that would have steered this author, aged 27, historically unremarkable in any sense (being gay is not really so remarkable anymore, is it?), away from being so ... aw, heck, I'll just plagiarize the Kirkus Review, "extravagantly solipsistic"? How is it that he thought his life experience such that his last gasp and swan song ought to be churned out now, before he reached the venerable age of 28?
I can think of very few people who have even collected enough memoires for a memoir at the age of 27, along with the analytical ability, the maturity and the experience to look at them without blinking, and as much talent as this author has in telling a story, it is the maturity and experience that he lacks in being able to look at his own life without blinking. In one incident, he is publicly brutalized by an Evangelical high school teacher, but retells the incident with such detachment, you suspect he hasn't quite come to terms with that episode, either.
And not only does he blink, but he tells us in the Note to the Reader at the start that he had every intention of blinking - although he calls it "correcting unbecoming camera angles", not trusting in his own readers to empathize, perhaps, when he is less than noble.
Oxford, citing the difference between a "memoir" and an "autobiography", points out that authors of a memoir have usually "played roles in, or have closely observed, historical events, and their main purpose is describing or interpreting those events". So unless we've reached the point where we consider the invention of a Burger King Cheesy Tot to be a significant historical event (you'd have to read his blog; possibly it was earth-shaking news to residents of Petunia, Texas, and that really WOULD be a story) - I spent most of this book wondering why I was reading a "memoir" rather than an enjoyable, if somewhat emotionally flawed, story. He does have a great sense of humor and his personality shines through even some of his more unpleasantly rude characterizations of the people around him.
For example, in response to Huntsville, Texas residents who have inexplicably decided that his Houston accent sounds British, he finally gives up after receiving repeated condolences for Princess Diana's death with a resigned, "Thanks, Mum."
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Note to the Publisher: Second to last sentence, last paragraph, page viii: "sYou've"
Originally published: Dec. 8th, 2007 at 2:12 AM
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