Paul Monette first made a name for himself in 1978 with his debut novel, Taking Care of Mrs. Carroll, a comic romp with serious overtones. He established himself as a writer of popular fiction with three more novels before he and his lover were both diagnosed with HIV. In 1988 he wrote On Borrowed Time, a memoir of living with AIDS and of his lover's death. The passion and anger that fueled On Borrowed Time surfaces again in 1992's Becoming a Man: Half a Life Story, his National Book Award-winning autobiography. Although it follows the traditional structure of the autobiography and bildungsroman--early family life, education, reflections on how art influenced the subject's view of life--Becoming a Man also filters Monette's story through two central facts: the closet and AIDS. Monette writes of the pain of being closeted, the effect it had on his writing, and how it shaped (and often destroyed) his relationships. Monette's fear and fury at AIDS and homophobia heighten the same skill and imagination he put into his fiction. This vision--poetic yet highly political, angry yet infused with the love of life--is what transforms Becoming a Man from simple autobiography into an intense record of struggle and salvation. Paul Monette did not lead a life different from many gay men--he struggled courageously with his family, his sexuality, his AIDS diagnosis--but in bearing witness to his and others' pain, he creates a personal testimony that illuminates the darkest corners of our culture even as it finds unexpected reserves of hope.


From Publishers Weekly
Monette responds to readers of his first memoir, Borrowed Time, by providing the flip-side expository of his life in the closet until he met his soul mate--the laughing man, Roger Horwitz. This memoir (which might more aptly have been titled Wasted Time ) is a bitter reproach of the 27 years Monette spent searching for himself. He explains that it took him years to realize that the homophobe is the deviant. Reading this beautifully written book, one feels as trapped by its dark mood as the author was by the closet. The writing is occasionally marred, however, by repetitive phrases, such as "playing courtier," "the closet" and the endless search for "the laughing man." The story also unfolds choppily due to frequent references to the future. Nevertheless, the book is a heartfelt illumination of how a gay person overcame the self-reproach that societal condemnation enacts. Copyright 1992 Reed Business Information, Inc.


From Library Journal
In this prequel to his Borrowed Time ( LJ 8/88), Monette has written a poignant, bittersweet memoir of growing up a closeted gay man and later coming to accept his gay persona. It is a story of a man struggling half his life to come out. Monette recounts in vivid detail his early life in Andover, Massachusetts, his college years at Yale University, his teaching career at a prep school, and the struggle between his gay identity and society's homophobic attitudes. Each stage of his personal journey is described at an intimate, insightful, human level. Monette states in the first chapter, "I still shiver with a kind of astonished delight when a gay brother or sister tells of that narrow escape from the coffin of the closet . . . . It was just like that for me." Recommended for public and academic libraries.- Michael A. Lutes, Univ. of Notre Dame Lib., Ind.Copyright 1992 Reed Business Information, Inc.


From Kirkus Reviews
From ``the cauldron of the plague'' comes a bitter memoir by the author of Borrowed Time: An AIDS Memoir (1988) and six novels (Halfway Home, 1991, etc.). ``Twisted up with rage,'' Monette is urgent to tell his story: ``the fevers are on me now, the virus mad to ravage my last hundred T cells.'' He begins with his straight-A childhood, darkened by his brother being crippled by spina bifida. But the source of Monette's fury comes from growing up in ``the coffin world of the closet,'' losing a ``decade of being dead below the belt,'' and now finding himself a victim of what he calls ``the genocide by indifference that has buried alive a generation of my brothers.'' Clearly, Monette wants to berate and shock this ``Puritan sinkhole of a culture'' with crude language (``Roger was up to his tits in therapy'' is a printable example) and explicit accounts of his homosexual encounters, starting as a nine-year-old. After describing a one-night stand, he mockingly asks, ``Is this more than you want to know?'' and then explains that a late lover advised, ``rub their faces in it.'' Monette does. Later, he writes, ``I was so sick of hearing myself talk about sexuality--hetero, homo, and otherwise.'' But despite the pose of no-holds-barred honesty, the author's diatribe offers only a predictable view of his elite schools (Andover and Yale) and little on gender theory beyond the statement that ``gay is a kind of sensibility.'' The offhand prose veers from the flip (``I try not to be gayer-than- thou about bi'') to the melodramatic (``I have to keep my later self on a short leash as I negotiate those hurricanes of feeling that propelled my time with women''). A deliberately self-absorbed manifesto from the AIDS battlefield, angrily slicing the world into us and them. -- Copyright ©1992, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

ANNOTATION

Becoming a Man is a book about growing up gay, and about the tyranny and self hatred of the closet. One man's struggle, for half his life, to come out. It is also a book about America: from the starchy halls of privilege at Andover and Yale to the golden states of California.

FROM THE PUBLISHER

The critically and popularly acclaimed coming of age/coming out story from the author of Borrowed Time: An AIDS Memoir.

FROM THE CRITICS

LA Weekly