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!'Firebirdpresents 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,Firebirdis 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.