Product Description

He grew up in a small town in New England in the 1950's, watching lassie, going to church, getting straight A's at school, a scholar destined for success. But he already had a secret, and his public life with family and friends was already a constant round of ventriloquism as he played the joker and pretended to be the same as everyone else. For Paul Monette was gay. BECOMING A MAN is about growing up gay, and about the tyranny and self denial of the closet - one man's struggle, for half his life, to come out. From the white-bread 1950's through the rebellious 1960's to the self-creating 1970's and beyond, it forms a passionately honest and unsparing account of the tortures of living a lie, a naked protrait of one man's fight for freedom in a time of ignorance and bigotry.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #187483 in Books
• Published on: 1994-05-19
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 288 pages

Review
'A profound tale, wrenching as it is life-affirming, poetic as it is uncompromisingly real.' VILLAGE VOICE 'A daring and heartbreaking memoir.' BOSTON GLOBE 'Affirmative and ultimately celebratory.' NEW YORK TIMES 'Everyone can learn about courage and self-discovery from BECOMING A MAN.' SAN FRANCISCO CHRONICLE 'Both seeringly angry and lyrically beautiful.' ESQUIRE 'This is a fine book.' GAY TIMES 'School and college years- most of the book- are brilliant retolf... his anger is inspiring.' THE TIMES 'Reading Paul Monette's book BECOMING A MAN, Hanks found that "this guy, as an adolescent, went through the exact same things I went through in terms of lonliness and confusion and wonder and non-guidance and all that stuff. Two different end results, yeah, but what does it matter when the human emotions are the same?"' SUNDAY TIMES MAGAZINE

About the Author
Paul Monette was the author of six novels and three colections of poems. Becoming a Man was the 1992 National Book Award for non-fiction. He died in February 1995.

Customer Reviews

A journey from a loveless closet.
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.

A book which should be read by all in secondary school...
When I reached the end of this autobiographical account of Paul's life, the only thing that I could do was turn back to the beginning of the book and start it again. I found this book one of the most powerful influence on my life. The story of a young man, who at almost thirty-years old comes out of the closet and starts to live a full life. I gained a new insight into how other gay men and women have had to suffer their own personal misunderstanding and denial. I found that the images Paul uses show how a life can start off so narrow, and then gain such width and height, such acheivement in a book is turely amazing. This book gave me a personal history; an understanding into to the way that society squach gay people into a small whole, but most especially, the way that I have allowed people around me to push me into that whole and hide my own identity, including my sexuality. Through this book, I was able to gain a great deal of courage and realised that I am no the only gay person in the world. This book should appear on everyones shelf, but especially those of us in the world that are gay...

Inspirational story of someone that could be you or me...
Each time I pick up this book I feel like I'm reading a letter from a friend. Paul Monette writes like you or I, in his most colourful autobiography, which pulls you in from the outset and doesn't let you go until the end. If you've read Borrowed Time, Monette's simple sentence at the conclusion strikes you with amazing insprition - "Paul Monette, say hello to the rest of your life" as he meets Roger for the first time, his partner of many years to come. You realise that events that change your whole life can happen in an instant, with no warning.

This is the story of his life up until that moment, filled with honest stories and no apology recollections. For anyone that has ever doubted whether it's worth it, this book is a must. If only for that brief moment at a party that changes the rest of your life, your past was definately worth it.

Read this book!

PS The boy on the cover is dead cute! :)