A Memoir: Stories for Boys
A Memoir
Gregory Martin
On Sale: 08/28/2012 | $16.95
9780983477587 | Paperback 5-1/2 x 9 | 274 pages
Book Description
In this memoir of fathers and sons, Gregory Martin struggles to reconcile the father he thought he knew with a man who has just survived a suicide attempt; a man who had been having anonymous affairs with men throughout his thirty-nine years of marriage; and who now must begin his life as a gay man. At a tipping point in our national conversation about gender and sexuality, rights and acceptance, Stories for Boys is about a father and a son finding a way to build a new relationship with one another after years of suppression and denial are given air and light.
Martin’s memoir is quirky and compelling with its amateur photos and grab-bag social science and literary analyses. Gregory Martin explores the impact his father”s lifelong secrets have upon his life now as a husband and father of two young boys with humor and bracing candor. Stories for Boys is resonant with conflicting emotions and the complexities of family sympathy, and asks the questions: How well do we know the people that we think we know the best? And how much do we have to know in order to keep loving them?
Praise For This Book
Praise for Stories for Boys"With clean vivid descriptions, and ruthless soul-wrenching self examination, Greg Martin bravely tells a story he never imagined having to tell. The reader is privileged here, to be allowed to watch as he wrestles with his sons, his own belief systems, his urge toward forgiveness and even Walt Whitman. This finely made, deeply felt memoir restores our faith in the power of language and story to make sense of a broken world." —Pam Houston, author of Contents May Have Shifted
"Stories for Boys is a charming and moving coming-of-age story, its narrator situated in the pivotal position between being his father's son and his sons' father. So refreshing and unique is Martin's treatment of the material that the reader will never mistake this book for its inferior competitors dealing with similar subjects (suicide, latent homosexuality, child abuse). One hopes this is the new wave of memoir: stories of people whose lives are not easily categorized nor dismissed. It is a sweet read." —Antonya Nelson, author of Bound
"Gregory Martin's Stories for Boys is a magnetic meditation on what happens when a decades-long lie is brutally revealed. Moving, brave, and unforgettable, this deeply personal book pushes us all further into the light." —Cheryl Strayed, author of Wild
Praise for Mountain City
A New York Times Notable Book of the Year
Library Journal, A Best Book of 2000
Seattle Post-Intelligencer, Best Northwest Books
"Crystalline . . . Mountain City, part elegy, part defiance of the elegiac, is the winter view from northern Nevada." —The New York Times Book Review
"Well written, sweet, yet unsentimental, telling the shared history of a community that's vanishing." —USA Today
“Martin’s is a melancholy song, lovely and heartfelt.” —The San Francisco Chronicle
"Mountain City celebrates the alternate Western seasons of promise and pessimism, arrival and abandonment. Hardened like the place he sketches against the vagaries of life, Martin writes sensitively without being maudlin, as if pity were something he discovered late in life." —The Denver Post
“Life in a dying Western town has found its worthy chronicler . . . A poetic, tender look at Mountain City, Nevada (population 33), and its denizens . . . Martin deftly illuminates the soul and characters behind the crumbling facades.” —Seattle Post-Intelligencer
"A crisp elegy to an almost vanished American West." —Entertainment Weekly
"A keen and witty observer . . . Martin shows how frailty is woven into the fabric of relations; he maintains an immediacy that highlights the humanity of his subjects . . . gorgeously written, meticulously observed." —Publishers Weekly
"Describes the relationships between people...with precision and care. Highly recommended for all libraries." —Library Journal
