I speak for no one else here, if only because I don’t want to saddle the women and men of my tribe with the lead weight of my self-hatred, the particular doorless room of my internal exile. That’s how the closet feels, once you’ve made your nest in it and learned to call it home. I’d long since accepted the fact that nothing had ever happened to me and nothing ever would. Until I was twenty-five, I was the only man I knew who had no story at all. I grilled them about it whenever I could, slipping the casual question in while I did their Latin homework for them, sprawled on the lawn at Andover under the reeling elms.Īnd every year they leaped further ahead, leaving me in the dust with all my doors closed, and each with a new and better deadbolt.

First they had their shining boyhood, which made them strong and psyched them up for the leap across the chasm to adolescence, where the real rites of manhood began. Or that’s how it always seemed to me, eavesdropping my way through twenty-five years, filling in the stories of straight men’s lives. Purchase the book here.Įverybody else had a childhood, for one thing-where they were coaxed and coached and taught all the shorthand.

Paul Monette did not lead a life different from many gay men-he struggled courageously with his family, his sexuality, his AIDS diagnosis-but in bearing witness to his and others' pain, he creates a personal testimony that illuminates the darkest corners of our culture even as it finds unexpected reserves of hope.Paul Monette | Open Road Media | 1992 | 4 minutes (797 words)īelow is a brief excerpt from Open Road Media’s reissue of Becoming a Man: Half a Life Story, the National Book Award-winning autobiography by Paul Monette. This vision-poetic yet highly political, angry yet infused with the love of life-is what transforms Becoming a Man from simple autobiography into an intense record of struggle and salvation. Monette's fear and fury at AIDS and homophobia heighten the same skill and imagination he put into his fiction. Monette writes of the pain of being closeted, the effect it had on his writing, and how it shaped (and often destroyed) his relationships. Although it follows the traditional structure of the autobiography and bildungsroman-early family life, education, reflections on how art influenced the subject's view of life- Becoming a Man also filters Monette's story through two central facts: the closet and AIDS. The passion and anger that fueled On Borrowed Time surfaces again in 1992's Becoming a Man: Half a Life Story, his National Book Award-winning autobiography. In 1988 he wrote On Borrowed Time, a memoir of living with AIDS and of his lover's death. He established himself as a writer of popular fiction with three more novels before he and his lover were both diagnosed with HIV. Carroll, a comic romp with serious overtones. Paul Monette first made a name for himself in 1978 with his debut novel, Taking Care of Mrs.

Becoming a man by paul monette