Truth Serum: Memoirs

Rating:
Summary: Poetic memoirs of a gay LA baby boomer
Review: Bernard Cooper's collected essay-memoirs give a poetic account of the trepidations of growing up gay in pre-Stonewall Los Angeles as the child of a raging father and an oppressed housewife. Whether he's grappling with his homosexuality as an adult at the therapist's office, or worried about his parents finding his collection of "physique" magazines, Cooper's memories are presented like pressed autumn leaves, captured just after turning a fiery color. He presents both gay childhood and the LA gay scene like time capsules. These memoirs are vividly detailed and are more like being there than retrospection. Despite years of self-torture followed by years of the AIDS crisis, Cooper does more than bear witness. He also has managed to survive and overcome the demons of the past.

Rating:
Summary: Cooper's Best
Review: Far and away the strongest material Cooper has written, "Truth Serum" is one of the best memoirs I've ever encountered. It ranks with Theodore Dreiser's "Dawn" as a stunning evocation of early life. His language is fluid and beautiful. He writes about childhood as vividly as if he were watching intimate scenes from his past on a movie screen. Except that he describes feelings and thoughts-- unfilmable-- so freshly. The reader enters into the child Cooper's head and perceptions in astonishing ways. This is exceptional writing and the sense of immediacy (with the exception of the abstract final piece) is wonderful.

Rating:
Summary: Worth reading through to the end.
Review: Far and away the strongest material Cooper has written, "Truth Serum" is one of the best memoirs I've ever encountered. It ranks with Theodore Dreiser's "Dawn" as a stunning evocation of early life. His language is fluid and beautiful. He writes about childhood as vividly as if he were watching intimate scenes from his past on a movie screen. Except that he describes feelings and thoughts-- unfilmable-- so freshly. The reader enters into the child Cooper's head and perceptions in astonishing ways. This is exceptional writing and the sense of immediacy (with the exception of the abstract final piece) is wonderful.

Rating:
Summary: Worth reading through to the end.
Review: I almost didn't finish this book. My initial impression was that this guy's life is as dull and as vapid as anyone else's. He visits a department store with his mother and her neighborhood friend -- big deal. His dad finally gives in and buys the big freezer for the kitchen -- so what?

But suddenly, and quite by accident, I realized that the book had me firmly in its grip. It somehow became important to find out what happened at the AIDS clinic. The minutae of which gym he was attending -- and why -- gained a greater significance than I could have anticipated earlier in the book.

Cooper's writing style makes it easy to digest these essays. He writes with a precision that reminds me of Edmund White, or even Buckley, but without the pompous esoteric nature they sometimes employ.

The book ends abruptly. Whatever happened to Bryan, his roommate? What further progress was there in his relationship with his father, if any? But real life isn't conveniently episodic. I ended yesterday with unfinished business; I will leave unfinished business at this day's end. Just as a photograph captures only the briefest millisecond between what-has-gone-before and the unknowable what-will-be, so this book snatches Cooper midway between life's experiences, with stories as-yet unfinished. In the end, it makes his autobiography all the more real.

Rating:
Summary: Intense Focus
Review: I checked this book out of the library and read half of it before I realized that I had to own it, so I bought a copy the next day and picked up where I'd left off in the other copy. It's not a book-length memoir as much as it's a series of shorter memoirs. And what I find the most compelling in this book is his sense of focus. He writes a rather extensive essay about high school called "101 Ways to Cook Hamburger," and it essentially consists of three scenes. But from those scenes, I get a strong sense of his high school experience as a whole.

Also, he covers his entire life in this relatively short book. He has an essay on his mother that centers on the freezer she coveted, and an essay on his father. He talks about joining the gym, and the various gyms of his life, and that leads him to a discussion of AIDS. He has a short essay that categorizes all of the different kinds of sighs.

One of the greatest compliments I can give a book is to say that I wish I'd written it. I'm going through this book again, underlining passages and studying his use of scene, description, and exposition. He's a writer to learn from, in a lot of ways.

Rating:
Summary: Intense Focus
Review: I checked this book out of the library and read half of it before I realized that I had to own it, so I bought a copy the next day and picked up where I'd left off in the other copy. It's not a book-length memoir as much as it's a series of shorter memoirs. And what I find the most compelling in this book is his sense of focus. He writes a rather extensive essay about high school called "101 Ways to Cook Hamburger," and it essentially consists of three scenes. But from those scenes, I get a strong sense of his high school experience as a whole.

Also, he covers his entire life in this relatively short book. He has an essay on his mother that centers on the freezer she coveted, and an essay on his father. He talks about joining the gym, and the various gyms of his life, and that leads him to a discussion of AIDS. He has a short essay that categorizes all of the different kinds of sighs.

One of the greatest compliments I can give a book is to say that I wish I'd written it. I'm going through this book again, underlining passages and studying his use of scene, description, and exposition. He's a writer to learn from, in a lot of ways.

Rating:
Summary: Wonderful
Review: I found _My Year of Rhymes_ by accident and loved it so much I got _Truth Serum_ immediately. I loved it even more.

My friends who read gay writers are increasingly crabby with all the "negative" books being currently written. I guess they mean the self-tortured protagonists of Holleran and White and Picano and Peck and Monette. I offered this book as a remedy for their pique.

There is some description of the torture of growing up gay (and it is exquisite), but, in this book, I promise that you would have felt gypped without experiencing that aspect of the narrator's life. But there is also, for example, "The Fine Art of Sighing" and "Train of Thought," two short pieces that have nothing to do with gayness or angst or turmoil; "Train of Thought" made me weepy without a tragic incident anywhere in sight: the sheer beauty of the language moved me so much.

It's not hard to believe that Cooper spends hours and hours over one sentence. It shows. He is a remarkable writer.