John Rechy's About My Life and the Kept Woman

    
How could the pioneering writer of such direct, memorable, and gay titles as City of Night, Numbers, Rushes, and The Sexual Outlaw call his memoir About my Life and the Kept Woman? Banal, disjointed, and  straight-sounding. Worse still, for the autobiography of a Mexican-American gay man who early on embraced his sexuality for fun and profit, Grove inexplicably put a photo of a 1940s escandalosa alone on the cover. (The photo above is Rechy at 40; picture a cover photo of him in his 20s.) Not to worry, the best read man on DList says it's good. And finally the media is beginning to give it some attention. Rechy, 74 next month, granted interviews to the Los Angeles Times and Bay Windows, and reviews appeared this week in the Daily News and the Chronicle. He says the theme of the book is "accepting your identity," and he also says he made details up, inventing what wasn't there in order to clarify what was. For the record, the woman of the title was a notorious local mistress, and a beacon of glamor and independence (or, sex and freedom) to an extremely poor kid coming up in El Paso.

Comments

[Steve N.]

The Kept Woman and the cover confused me, too, at first. On reflection, I like that his memoir didn't put right out in front the "youngman"-Rechy, instead choosing a mystery. His life has always been about mystery and passing for something else: the writer passing as a hustler; the Chicano passing as blanco; the mamacita's muchacho passing as tough and hard; the poor boy passing as middle class. The cover and title is sort of Rechy dropping one veil – the character of his novels – only to reveal another, more revealing, veil. And true to memoir style, not all the veils are removed and are still used to obscure the figure beneath. What's truth and what's fabrication? Maybe the next bio will drop another veil or two.
More troubling to me than the title alone, I’m afraid that the entire cover – title, photo, design – will not entice readers who might otherwise be interested. The Barnes & Nobles of the world will shelve it as Bio. The book will not be picked up by: the gay reader who does not browse bio; the straight bio reader who has never heard of him; the Rechy reader who doesn’t know that there’s a memoir but who browses gay lit. While a store like the Chelsea Barnes & Noble (the "gay" store) can cross-shelve it in bio and gay, few others can or would even know to. Since its release of almost a month ago, the Chelsea store has sold 2 copies – both to me. So you are, I am afraid, justified in your worries.