Review written for ClubReading.com by Bill
In Mark Doty’s memoir, Firebird, we are taken on a beautifully written, poetic, dark, disturbing and uplifting venture into the life of a gay boy growing up in the post-world war II, baby-booming 60’s.
The authors background in poetry is clear. The book is written in such a lovely lyrical style that often, the beauty of the words will carry you on to the next page, the next chapter.
The book’s style reminds me of just waking up. A semi-conscious, just waking, liquid, dream-world where Mark s memories echo on the pages like an inner-monologue . . . so personal and real.
A portion of the book takes place in a late 60’s Tucson, AZ. Stark color contrasts from the desert provide an excellent backdrop to the childs disturbing memories. A distant father who is always on the go, dragging the family from one Army Corp. of Engineers job to the next. A mother who searches for self and spirals into a self-destructive flaming crash-dive of alcoholism and drug abuse, taking as many with her as she can.
There are two sections of the book that stood out, almost asking to be quoted. The first, as the young author is just starting to distinguish sexual feelings and attractions:
The origins of sexual feeling don’t interest me much; they seempermanently shrouded anyway, as resistant to explanation as any form of desire: why, exactly, do you like strawberries? From whence springs your affection for the cello, your attraction to blue? I don’t mean to be facetious; it’s merely that by the time desire manifests itself it is there, a fact of the self, one of our well-springs. Genetics, hypothalamus, environment, chance, some inscription encoded in the DNA or the soul: your choice. Or no choice; doesn’t the need to understand the origins of desire arise from the impetus to control it?
A far more productive field of inquiry is the way in which sexual feeling makes itself known, and how we negotiate with our sense of desire, and with the dawning awareness of difference.
. . .
Message: there are private forms of loveliness, there are things about you no one should know. Should you be ashamed, to see what others cannot? Does the delight - your new, secret possession - outweigh your sense of singularity?
Or does the shame simply commingle with the pleasure, infusing it with something airless, covetous, irremediably solitary: the boy alone in the hothouse of his loves?
The other quote, near the end of the story, his mother on her death bed, the author questions telling the story:
“Your father”, my mother says, trying to sit up in the hospital bed, raising her head to look me directly in the eye, urgent, confiding, “has nailed my hands to these boards.”
Why tell a story like this, who wants to read it?
A writer I know says, ‘Say it clearly and you make it beautiful, no matter what.’ Sometimes I think that’s true; difficult experience can be redeemed by the powers of language, and words can help us to see what is graceful or human where loveliness and humanity seem to fail.
But other days I believe it’s the other way round: say it beautifully, or at least precisely, say it as exactly as you can, and you will make it clear. Clarity isn’t in the service of beauty; it’s the other way around. The older I get, the more I distrust redemption; it isn’t in the power of language to repair the damages. Here is a sentence which cannot be redeemed: “Your father has nailed my hands to these boards.”
An excellent book! The depth and strength of the story and writing will touch anyone who enters the writer’s world.