Firebird
Description
In 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.
Reviews / Votes
"By the end of Mark Doty's exquisite memoir. "Firebird, " you'll have troublebelieving you haven't read a brilliantly plotted novel by a master offiction. But no made-up story could ever be as gripping as theone Doty tells, And few novelists could tell it this well."-- "San Francisco Chronicle""Supple powerful reading . . . Doty immerses his readers in a gay coming-of-age complicated family meltdown." -- "New York Times Book Review""A beautifully written. hallucinatorily evocative memoir Of growing up gay in baby-boom America."-- "Newsweek""Doty writes with the characteristic Zen calm you find also in his gorgeous poetry."--"Los Angeles Times Book Review""A lyrical, heartfelt, and ultimately haunting account of his early years."--"Washington Post Book Review""His luminous portrait of the artist as a young man also illuminates the currents of his times, and contains a haunting family history."--"Booklist "(starred review)"An American classic....Doty's writing surpasses anything he's ever attempted before and achieves a depth and a clear-eyed splendor that left me bereft and exalted at the same time."--"Salon""By turns lyrically comic and deeply sad."--"Out "magazine"Incandescent....A lasting work of art."--"Time Out"More details
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Person
Mark Doty's books of poetry and nonfiction prose have been honored with numerous distinctions, including the National Book Critics Circle Award, the PEN/Martha Albrand Award, the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, and, in the United Kingdom, the T. S. Eliot Prize. In 2008, he won the National Book Award for Fire to Fire: New and Selected Poems. He is a professor at the University of Houston, and he lives in New York City.