Firebird

<p><strong>A beautifully written hallucinatorily evocative memoir of growing up gay in baby-boom America. -- <em>Newsweek</em></strong></p><p>In his powerful autobiography <em>Firebird </em> 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!</p><p><em>Firebird</em> 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 <em>Firebird</em> 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.</p>