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Adult Books - Nonfiction - Social Sciences
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Becoming a Man: Half a Life Story.
Monette, Paul (author).
June 1992. 304p. Harcourt, hardcover, $19.95 (0-15-111519-2). 305.38.
REVIEW.
First published May 1, 1992 (Booklist).
“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 (1988). Live he did, though, finishing that book and two excellent novels also concerned with AIDs, Afterlife (1990) and Halfway Home (1991). 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 painfully; which will powerfully move the parents, siblings, 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
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Features That Discuss This Work:
1. Stonewall Honor Books : 1993
2. National Book Award Winners : 1992
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