Marek Jagusiak Jagusiak itibaren Pleasant Grove, UT, USA
i picked this up at the library because the cover design caught my eye & the front cover blurbs likened the writing to david sedaris, but a ridiculously welathy upper east side version of david sedaris. i was curious, so i pursued my curiosity. &...yeah, not much. very few similarities between this book & anything by david sedaris. first-person, kind of funny childhood stories by gay men are not all david sedaris-in-the-making, can we all just agree on that? that said, it wasn't bad. it wasn't the greatest book i have ever read, but it was all right. it's a memoir. the author was raised by his grandparents in their outrageously posh upper east side apartment because his mom was not interested in being a mom & wanted to go jet-setting around europe. as a result of this abandonment, he acted out a bit as a child. plus there was the whole burgeoning homosexuality issue, which caused some hijinks. he got kicked out a lot of fancy prep schools before being sent off to boarding school, where he actually started doing fairly well. but then his grandfather died, & his mom & uncle convinced him to move back to new york city to be closer to his widowed grandmother. then he went away to another boarding school in boston, but his grandmother wasn't doing well, she she moved down to live with him on beacon hill. then he found out that she had alzheimer's & was really too much for a teenage boy to handle. so she moved to europe to live with her daughter & matthew moved to florida for college. when his grandmother died & his mom didn't even tell him so he could go to the funeral, he cut all ties with her...& the family's money. he got a job working with jewish kindergardners, which led to a career as a teacher...& memoirist. some of it was funny, some of it was pretty sad...none of it was really mind-blowing. the kind of book that will probably slide out of my brain in a week or two. but not a bad read if you have the flu or a plane ride & want something not too taxing to sink your teeth into & you have read all your david sedaris books too many times.
The weakest of the 2001 series by far