Firebird

A Memoir

Paperback, 228 pages

English language

Published Oct. 1, 2000 by Harper Perennial.

ISBN:
978-0-06-093197-1
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OCLC Number:
45132133

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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.

4 editions

Subjects

  • General
  • Specific Groups - Male Gay Studies
  • Family
  • Biography / Autobiography
  • Biography & Autobiography
  • Poets, American
  • Biography/Autobiography
  • Memphis
  • Family relationships
  • Childhood Memoir
  • Biography & Autobiography / General
  • Tennessee
  • 20th century
  • Biography