Truth Serum: Memoirs

Far and away the strongest material Cooper has written, "Truth Serum" is one of the best memoirs I've ever encountered. It ranks with Theodore Dreiser's "Dawn" as a stunning evocation of early life. His language is fluid and beautiful. He writes about childhood as vividly as if he were watching intimate scenes from his past on a movie screen. Except that he describes feelings and thoughts-- unfilmable-- so freshly. The reader enters into the child Cooper's head and perceptions in astonishing ways. This is exceptional writing and the sense of immediacy (with the exception of the abstract final piece) is wonderful.

I checked this book out of the library and read half of it before I realized that I had to own it, so I bought a copy the next day and picked up where I'd left off in the other copy. It's not a book-length memoir as much as it's a series of shorter memoirs. And what I find the most compelling in this book is his sense of focus. He writes a rather extensive essay about high school called "101 Ways to Cook Hamburger," and it essentially consists of three scenes. But from those scenes, I get a strong sense of his high school experience as a whole. Also, he covers his entire life in this relatively short book. He has an essay on his mother that centers on the freezer she coveted, and an essay on his father. He talks about joining the gym, and the various gyms of his life, and that leads him to a discussion of AIDS. He has a short essay that categorizes all of the different kinds of sighs. One of the greatest compliments I can give a book is to say that I wish I'd written it. I'm going through this book again, underlining passages and studying his use of scene, description, and exposition. He's a writer to learn from, in a lot of ways.

I found _My Year of Rhymes_ by accident and loved it so much I got _Truth Serum_ immediately. I loved it even more.My friends who read gay writers are increasingly crabby with all the "negative" books being currently written. I guess they mean the self-tortured protagonists of Holleran and White and Picano and Peck and Monette. I offered this book as a remedy for their pique.There is some description of the torture of growing up gay (and it is exquisite), but, in this book, I promise that you would have felt gypped without experiencing that aspect of the narrator's life. But there is also, for example, "The Fine Art of Sighing" and "Train of Thought," two short pieces that have nothing to do with gayness or angst or turmoil; "Train of Thought" made me weepy without a tragic incident anywhere in sight: the sheer beauty of the language moved me so much.It's not hard to believe that Cooper spends hours and hours over one sentence. It shows. He is a remarkable writer.

I checked this book out of the library after being intrigued by the jacket blurb on this story of a gay man's journey from childhood through adolescence and into adulthood. This is one of those satisfying reading experiences in which the reader is drawn into the writer's world. Despite few identifications with the specifics of the author's life (I'm not a gay man or from California or Jewish or ...), the beautiful and gentle writing seems to mirror Cooper's actual experiences so well that I easily recognized the human commonalities available to us all. I read this book ever more slowly as I came close to its end; I wanted to know more and more. The only thing that kept it from being entirely flawless for me was the extended use of metaphor and simile: most of the time, the prose was so elegant that these constructions sat in the background, creating visual and emotional content. But on occasion, the actual situations--strong enough to stand without embellishment or comparison--seemed diluted by the grammatical embroidery. It's a small criticism. Read this book. You'll be the richer for it.

Bernard Cooper has a reputation for genre-bashing. His first collection of non-fiction essays, Maps to Anywhere, won the 1991 Hemingway Prize for Fiction. His first novel, A Year of Rhymes (1993), bristled with the snap of non-fiction. So if his approach to truth in his new memoir is somewhat, well, casual, why be surprised? "I'll remember a situation," Cooper says, "and then try to write what the people probably would have said." Must a memoir be truthful? Factual? Does it matter if the memories it contains are "reinvented"? Truth Serum is the story of a young man who grew up in a middle-class Jewish family in Los Angeles in the 1950s and '60s, son of a divorce lawyer and a housewife: escapades with school friends, shopping trips, adolescent crushes, failed attempts at heterosexuality, bouts with various therapies, an inability to come out to his father, AIDS. Like most children, he once thought it possible to divide the world into male and female columns: "Blue/Pink. Roosters/Hens. Trousers/Skirts. Such divisions were easy, not to mention comforting, for they simplified matter into compatible pairs. But there also existed a vast range of things that didn't fit neatly into either camp: clocks, milk, telephones, grass. There were nights I fell into a fitful sleep while trying to sex the world correctly." Soon he's old enough to realize what it means to be a homosexual, "to invite ostracism and ridicule, and I would have done just about anything to escape my need to masturbate to images of men." He makes bargains with himself ("If you don't touch yourself till Saturday, you can go to Woolworth's and buy that model of a '65 Corvette"), but he's as out of control as the fire he sets to destroy his collection of pornographic magazines. Cooper is a gifted writer, armed and extremely dangerous. Every page of Truth Serum gives evidence to an almost sacramental reverence for the evocative power of words, and his no-net approach to language is exhilarating, spectacular, much the way a fireworks display is-you hold your breath until the next glorious image blossoms onto the night sky, then fades slowly to the sound of oohs and aahs from the gratified crowd below. He's been known to spend hours on a single sentence before moving on to the next, an obsessive attention to detail that belies a visual arts background in assemblage (a mix of painting and sculpture) and a lifelong love of poetry. Indeed, some of the shorter essays in Truth Serum read as prose poems. "The Fine Art of Sighing," for example, examines precisely that. "It's a reflex and a legacy, this soulful species of breathing. Listen closely: My ancestors lungs are pumping like bellows, men towing boats along the banks of the Volga, women lugging baskets of rye bread and pike. At the end of each day, they lift their weary arms in a toast; as thanks for the heat and sting of vodka, their aahs condense in the cold Russian air." Cooper's skill with language can spin even a list of tricks in