"A beautifully written, hallucinatorily evocative memoir of growing up gay in baby-boom America." — Newsweek
In his powerful autobiography, 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.
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