Becoming a Man: Half a Life Story

Rating:
Summary: Amazing
Review: When I started this book, I was sort of turned off by all the intellectual-allusions but then I was drawn back. I read the rest in a weekend. Effective & honest--essential for gay & straight alike.

Rating:
Summary: Gone But Not Forgotten
Review: Why would a straight woman want to read the memoirs of a gay man, the late Paul Monette who died of AIDS in the '90s? Because all you have to be is human to appreciate the passion and conviction this man brought to his life as he neared the end of it. Monette grew up in the Ivy League albeit deeply closeted. When he finally "came out", it was to discover the love of his life, Roger Horowitz. They spent happy years together until Roger first got AIDS and then Paul got it. Paul took care of Roger while he died from AIDS. His love for Roger is recounted in BORROWED TIME, AN AIDS MEMOIR, also by Monette, which I view as the prequel to this book. With this book, Monette went back to the time before Roger and his coming to terms with the fact that he was a gay man. He spent most of his youth in total denial. Monette was a good writer before he and his longtime companion contracted AIDS but AIDS transformed him and his work to much higher levels of art. This book deservedly won the National Book Award and many people felt, including me, that BORROWED TIME should have won it as well some years earlier.

Rating:
Summary: Like boats against the current . . .
Review: Yes, it was Paul Monnette's handsome face that made me pick up the book, but it was his razor-sharp mastery of language and his gift for evoking the whole gamut of feelings from rage to lust that made me rip through it in a single sitting. It now sits on my shelf next to the other treasured book in my life - "The Great Gatsby." Like Gatsby, as I read Monnett's stunning memoir, I felt myself born back ceaseleslly into the past. He made the pain seem new and the escape from invisibility all that much sweeter. Thank you, Paul, and rest in peace.