Firebird: A Memoir - A Heartbreaking and Comic Autobiography of LGBTQ Identity, Family Alcoholism, and Art's Power

Doty, Mark

ISBN 10: 0060931973 / ISBN 13: 9780060931971

Published by Harper Perennial, 2000

Item in good condition and has highlighting/writing on text. Used texts may not contain supplemental items such as CDs, info-trac etc. Seller Inventory # 00087828174

Synopsis:

"A beautifully written, hallucinatorily evocative memoir of growing up gay in baby-boom America." -- Newsweek

In his powerful autobiography, Firebird, Mark Doty tells the story of a ten-year-old in a top hat, cane, and red chiffon scarf, interrupted while belting out Judy Garland's "Get Happy" by his alarmed mother at the bedroom door, exclaiming, "Son, you're a boy!"

Firebird presents us with a heroic little boy who has quite enough worries without discovering that his dawning sexuality is the Wrong One. A self-confessed "chubby smart bookish sissy with glasses and a Southern accent," Doty grew up on the move, the family following his father's engineering work across America-from Tennessee to Arizona, Florida to California. A lyrical, heartbreaking comedy of one family's dissolution through the corrosive powers of alcohol, sorrow, and thwarted desire, Firebird is also a wry evocation of childhood's pleasures and terrors, a comic tour of American suburban life, and a testament to the transformative power of art.

About the Author:

Mark Doty's books of poetry and nonfiction prose have been honored with numerous distinctions, including the National Book Critics Circle Award, the PEN/Martha Albrand Award, the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, and, in the United Kingdom, the T. S. Eliot Prize. In 2008, he won the National Book Award for Fire to Fire: New and Selected Poems. He is a professor at the University of Houston, and he lives in New York City.

Bibliographic Details

Title: Firebird: A Memoir - A Heartbreaking and ...
Publisher: Harper Perennial
Publication Date: 2000
Binding: Soft cover
Condition: Good