Firebird

A beautifully written hallucinatorily evocative memoir of growing up gay in baby-boom America.  — NewsweekIn his powerful autobiography Firebird Mark Doty tells the story of a ten-year-old in a top hat cane and red chiffon scarf interrupted while belting out Judy Garland''s Get Happy by his alarmed mother at the bedroom door exclaiming Son you''re a boy!Firebird presents us with a heroic little boy who has quite enough worries without discovering that his dawning sexuality is the Wrong One. A self-confessed chubby smart bookish sissy with glasses and a Southern accent Doty grew up on the move the family following his father''s engineering work across America-from Tennessee to Arizona Florida to California. A lyrical heartbreaking comedy of one family''s dissolution through the corrosive powers of alcohol sorrow and thwarted desire Firebird is also a wry evocation of childhood''s pleasures and terrors a comic tour of American suburban life and a testament to the transformative power of art.