addiction
affairs
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Category=DNB
drugs
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eq_biography-true-stories
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eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
provacative
risky
secrets
sex
writers
Product details
- ISBN 9780802135827
- Weight: 326g
- Dimensions: 139 x 209mm
- Publication Date: 17 Sep 1998
- Publisher: Avalon Travel Publishing
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Paperback
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In this provocative collection of memoirs, eight acclaimed writers go about the risky business of telling their own secrets. Collectively, they provide what amounts to a psychic map of American life, from the streets of New York’s East Village–where Peter Trachtenberg’s affair with a fragile ex-prostitute becomes entwined with scenes from an imaginary film noir, to the trailer parks of southern California–where, in a last-ditch bid for affection, Terminator dresses in drag and seduces his abusive mother’s boyfriend. in between, Jane Creighton has an affair with her gentle, sickly brother; Lois Gould recalls Businessman–the flamboyant gentleman who had a string of red-haired mistresses and who, incidentally, was her father; Philip Lopate views his pathologically schlumpy dad in a nursing home; Laurie Stone searches for the connections between her creativity and her addiction to sex; Jerry Stahl remembers his rock-bottom days doing crack in Los Angeles; and Catherine Texier, an accomplished adult, meets her father for the first time in the south of France.
In her introduction, award-winning critic Laurie Stone gives the genre an incisive once-over and explores the question: Why is memoir so dominant on the literary scene? These stories–filled with harrowing self-knowledge, as antic as they are haunting–go a long way toward answering that question.
