A modern, jazzy bildungsroman that uses everything from personal memoir, a fugue-like structure, poetry, images, lyrics, and diaries to paint a vivid, eloquent portrait of gay, black, Jessie Vincent Grandier and the striving African American middle class that spawned him in the late 1950s. Born to a high-yellow Upper-crust New Orleans Creole mother and a lowborn, Louisiana bayou-bred, military father, Jessie steadfastly battles to reconcile his existence with expectations and preconceptions of those around him -- black and white. He shoulders the weight of his black bourgeois family’s hopes through the ‘60s and ‘70s, his mother’s death, and the resulting familial melodrama that tears him and his family apart. If not broken, then seemingly irreparably bent, he wends his way through Harvard in the ‘70s and drinks his way through the Reagan ‘80s in gay bars from the LA barrio to Beverly Hills. When Jessie’s grandiose ambitions have abandoned him -- when he’s almost beaten, and when it’s a breath away from too late, he looks back, regards the jagged shards of his life and pieces them into a remarkable whole. The post-modern writing careens from pure ribaldry, to brutal honesty, to deeply tender, to “gonzoesque,” but at the intelligent heart of the novel is the internal struggle of dislocation, disappointment, and deconstruction of an African-American family. It is a completely unique look at race, sex, and finding redemption the hard way.
“In Leonce Gaiter’s autofiction novel, black male identity is artfully examined through the personal
history of an aspiring black writer who dreams of Hollywood success. Gaiter’s wonderfully evocative language, filled with musicality, captures the complexity of Jessie’s emotions as he struggles to make sense of his sexuality and place in the world.”
“…a bold novel. Sometimes beautiful, sometimes brutal, the prose is always thoroughly engrossing.”
“If Ernest Hemingway was black, gay, and writing about growing up in the [1960s], he would have written something like Leonce Gaiter’s “A Memory of Fictions (or) Just Tiddy-Boom… Although the whole book is written in the third person, that is easy to forget since the book is so personal that Jessie and his struggles are your own.”
5 stars - "…a rich tapestry of emotions and experiences that draw you into the action as if you’re witnessing it firsthand where it happened. From the ribald humor to the raw honesty and tender moments, the novel offers a multifaceted exploration of identity, family, and societal pressures with elegant use of dialogue and intimate narrative moments of true vulnerability and pain.”
