If anyone was doing a survey of the year's best gay books and asked me my opinion, I'd somehow work in a mention of Frédéric Mitterrand's strange and amazing memoir, The Bad Life. Nephew of the former president, he is currently France's Minister of Culture, responsible for the nation's museums and monuments, protecting the arts, and "maintaing the French identity." He still has that job even after this book was published, describing in detail how much he enjoys trips to Thailand to hire male prostitutes. Big scandal, squashed by President Sarkozy's steady support of him.
Episodic in the extreme, and withholding almost all the major aspects of a fascinating, public life, the book sinks readers into chapters with no set-up and no typical guidance. You are in his memory. But the writing is outstanding (despite his love of long paragraphs) and the quality of his emotions is absolutely extraordinary: I can't immediately think of any gay book of any genre that goes so deeply and wisely into the joys and contradictions of every stage of a gay man's life from early childhood and puberty through college, young adulthood, and middle-age.
Edmund White said, "Movie stars, famous artists, tycoons, powerful politicians—these characters are all present in this stunning book, which is saved from being a celebrity memoir by its moral depth, its beautiful writing and its relentless honesty. Frédéric Mitterrand (as his name might suggest) has known everyone of importance, but he approaches every subject with sensitivity and a reckless candor."
The always insightful Andrew Holleran wrote one of his best reviews about it in the September - October Gay & Lesbian Review. He liked it a little less than I did, ending his piece:
"The Bad Life is an aloof, revealing, defiant, cringing, brave, intelligent, and melancholy book—a bit affected, more often eloquent—in part a portrait of the sort of character Françoise Sagan wrote about (rich brats), in part the vision of a gay man whose loneliness gave him a sharp and wonderful eye, a moral disgust that brings to mind, somehow, the same sour French taste one finds in another accusatory classic, Hervé Guibert’s To the Friend Who Did Not Save My Life."
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