My Lush Life

I can appreciate how "My Lush Life" by Douglas McEwan may frequently, if not almost always, be under-appreciated, undervalued, even trivialized and minimized. The book, however, is brilliant. McEwan reminds me of Barry Humphries...but a Barry Humphries who has not yet caught on to his audience. McEwan's points are perhaps if anything more subtle than those presented by Dame Edna. Both like and unlike Dame Edna, McEwan exposes hypocrisy and prejudice with a wit and humor and intelligence that does not stop. To view his work as tailored for the gay population, which I suspect it almost always is, misses the point of this extraordinary writer entirely. He is addressing issues that deeply touch us all - alcoholism, depression, denial, superficiality, bias, abuse - and he does this in as creative a way as I have seen. I am most impressed with this first novel and sincerely hope that McEwan succeeds in finding a wide audience to benefit from what he has to contribute. I'm eagerly awaiting his next novel.

In his novel novel, MY LUSH LIFE, author Douglas MacEwan delivers his wit straight-up with a humor chaser. After his tie-loosening preface created to fend off dreary, would-be litigators, Mr. MacEwan promptly whisks us away to the improbable, but hysterical world of Tallulah Morehead (all 47,000 puns in the book are mercilessly intended),whose career, legend and antics spans the 20th century astride two swizzle sticks in this laugh-out-loud bio-"agog"-graphy.In this book, though, everybody works. No innocent by-reading allowed. Bring to the table your own knowledge of movies, gossip and history before parting these pages. You'll need it. The pace is fast, the jokes are frequent and, after reading the first few footnotes, your brow will furrow with disappointment when you see a page which DOESN'T have one.MY LUSH LIFE is a vacation on paper....a cocktail napkin, to be specific. Once I started, there was no turning back and certain pages, due to their density of enjoyment from line-to-line, I read 2-3 times. All I can say is that if you don't "get it", don't get it but, to the other 4 billion or so of us who do, do.