Selected Product:
| Becoming a Man: Half a Life Story
Paperback
Author: Paul Monette
Publisher: Abacus
Release Date: May 1994
ISBN-10: 0349105499
ISBN-13: 9780349105499
List Price: £8.99
Average Customer Rating:
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Summaries and Customer Reviews are supplied by Amazon.com
profound and powerful decleration of liberty
| Customer Rating: | I guess it's easy to pigeonhole most of the gay literature, but "Becoming a man" is different. It is real. As I was reading I was able to identify with Monette almost from the outset.The surroundings might have been different,yet circumstences always the same. Secret desires, loves, hidden life...Enormous pain and nobody to share it with, just the closet...What's interesting, once in it, he starts perceiving his life through the prism of own captivity...no way-out for him, barred entrance for everyone else. Only the time and the mounting omens will slowly break his shell... Poetry plays here a profound yet unappreciated role of leading him to the light, as it is a platform for all the actions he takes, including the one at the end of the book.
The ending is extraordinary! Neither happy, nor sad, but it's enough for Paul Monette as it is finally real. |
Brilliantly Written but Disingenuous
| Customer Rating:  | | Born in 1945 to a small-town, middle-class New England family, Paul Monette--like most Americans of the era--was spoon-fed a negative knee-jerk re homosexuality. When he himself began to realize that his own sexuality was at odds with society's dictums he entered two decades of struggle: first a struggle to at least give the appearance of conformity, then a struggle to step beyond the status quo itself. And BECOMING A MAN is a very powerful testament of that struggle, of the price paid, of the self-destructive behavior that the false conformity of "being in the closet" inevitably produces. It is extremely difficult to read BECOMING A MAN without sharing the sense of fury and bitterness that Monette felt when he contemplates his life, and if ever there were an argument in favor of sexual honesty, this is it: the language, an artful mix of the literary and the hardbitten, is remarkable, and Monette pulls no punches when it comes to detailing the fear that drove him. Truly, the book deserves every accolade heaped upon it. All the same, it is a remarkably disingenuous memoir. Even as Monette displays a justifiable loathing for the social institutions that buried him alive for some three decades, he tends to disregard a basic point: he was in many ways a remarkably privileged individual who actually fed upon those same institutions, having a host of opportunities that few people--gay or straight--ever have. It was his own determination to place social advantage above personal integrity that led to his decision to remain in the closet in the first place. True, Monette (who died of AIDS not long after this book was published) was born and came of age in an era that had little tolerance for anything beyond the status quo. But Monette presents being in the closet as something forced upon him by external forces--and this is not strictly true. There was a choice, and bitter though it was for him and the many others who made it, being in the closet was actually the path of least resistance at the time. To pretend that it was otherwise does a tremendous disservice to those of Monette's generation who found the courage to select an even more difficult road of sexual honesty. GFT, Amazon Reviewer |
this book will consume you!
| Customer Rating: | | This has to be one of my best reads, I was completely absorbed by it like a sponge. The style with which it's written is beautiful and you travel with him through each chapter. I am now looking into reading all his other material. Because this is a personal memoir of his it saddens me to read of his death in 1995 which is stated in the book. It's like you almost know Paul Monette! |
A journey from a loveless closet.
| Customer Rating: | | Paul Monette's book has one overriding theme - liberation from the closet. The inescapable message that shouts itself from the pages of this book is the regret at internalising his feeling for over two decades. Monette paints a picture of a closet that is needlessly built, one that will leave his feelings and guilt buried for nearly twenty years. It is in this way that we begin to understand a little of what makes Paul Monette so assertive in his beliefs about a wasted life in the closet. Monette suggests that those of us who live in the dark and hide behind the façade of sexuality - believing it easier to be outwardly "Straight" are collaborators with those in society who seek to repress, separate and destroy gay people - although this he leaves to our own consciences, the message is clear and powerful. The books strength lies in ability to make the reader feel the frustrations of young Monette - who is unable to make the step between sex and love, firmly believing for years that the two cannot co-exist. "That as long as I kept them apart, love would be sexless and sex loveless, endlessly repeating its cycle of self-denial and self-abuse." Thus Paul sacrifices a friend he loved for another he did not - believing sex to be the greater of the two emotions. The conflict between his desires as a young gay teenager and the self-image that he constructs for those close to him leave him unable to relate - never truly getting intimate with friends or family. Monette felt that those around him had built most of his early life on a conspiratal silence. The frustration of realising that all those years of believing that he was passing as straight had actually fooled very few people. The time his mother caught him fooling around with a friend, unsure about what they were actually doing but the silence that surrounded the episode deafening. The most compelling aspect of the book is the sense of loss for wasted years and it is here that we come full circle to his belief of life in the closet. "I can't conceive the hidden life anymore, don't think of it as life. When you finally come out, there's a pain that stops, and you know it will never hurt like that again, no matter how much you lose or how badly you die." Prepare to be challenged by the strong views that Monette asserts in the first few chapters and if you are not - reread them. |
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