About My Life and the Kept Woman: A Memoir - Hardcover

Rechy, John

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0802118615 ISBN 13: 9780802118615

Publisher: Grove Press, 2008

Synopsis

The untold personal life story of the novelist whom Gore Vidal has hailed as one of the few original American writers of the last century.” John Rechy’s first novel, City of Night, is a modern classic and his subsequent body of work has kept him among America’s most important writers. Now, for the first time, he writes about his life, in a volume that is a testament to the power of pride and self-acceptance. Rechy was raised Mexican-American in Texas, at a time when Latino children were routinely discriminated against. As he grew older and as his fascination with a notorious kept woman from his childhood deepened Rechy became aware that his differences lay not just in his heritage but in his sexuality. While he performed the roles others wanted for him, he never allowed them to define him whether it was the authoritarians in the U.S. Army during the Korean War, the bigoted relatives of his Anglo college classmates, or the men and women who wanted him to be something he was not. About My Life and the Kept Woman is as much a portrait of intolerance as of an individual who defied it to forge his own path.

About this title

From Publishers Weekly:

Reflecting on his long life with a calm, clear eye, novelist Rechy (The Life and Adventures of Lyle Clemens) probes his nascent self-identity as a Mexican-American and a homosexual. Growing up during the Depression in El Paso, Tex., the youngest son of a Mexican woman who spoke no English and a Scottish musician father, Rechy recalls his early fascination with beauty, especially in his older adored sister, Olga, who married early, and in the cool, glamorous regard of the notorious kept woman of Mexican politician Augusto de Leon, Marisa Guzman, whom the young narrator glimpsed briefly and memorably at his sister's wedding. Moreover, amid a society that excoriated Mexicans, young Rechy grew into a beautiful, fair-skinned young man torn between feeling proud of his Mexican roots and shame because of them. Fleeing the restricted prospects of El Paso and the depressive rages of his father, Rechy, a budding writer, attended college, then joined the army during the Korean War and began traveling, to Paris, New York City and Los Angeles, where he found hustling for sex from anonymous men suited him. The memoir meanders through years of drifting among jobs and numerous sexual encounters, which became the fodder for his acclaimed City of Night (1963) and other works. Self-adulation aside, Rechy's memoir possesses many fine stylistic vignettes.
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Review:

"John Rechy doesn't fit into categories. He transcends them. His individual vision is unique, perfect, loving, and strong." "[Rechy] tells the truth, and tells it with such passion that we are forced to share in the life he conveys. This is a most humbling and liberating achievement."

About this edition

• Publisher: Grove Press
• Publication date: 2008
• ISBN 10: 0802118615
• ISBN 13: 9780802118615
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 320