Fetch Stories For Boys: A Memoir Illustrated By Gregory Martin Presented As Copy

loved Greg Martin's first memoir, Mountain City, but I love this one even more, It's a beautiful book about how, despite a long marriage and seemingly happy life, the author's father attempts suicide when his wife the author's mom learns that he is gay.
Like life, what follows is painful, messy, confusing, funny, and real, It asks the thoughtprovoking question: what happens when the parent you thought you knew turns out to be hiding the truth Full of humor, sadness, and ultimately love, this is a finely written and deeply satisfying memoir.
I couldn't put it down, A phenomenal memoir, full of pain, heartache, and redemption, I loved it. Well worth the read, but a very quick one, Just a heads up, there are some moments where the stories lull and draw parallels to psychology, even music, Other than that, I loved it, Gut wrenching

I found myself mudded reading this book, I imagine its the perspective as a child would need to wrestle through understand a gay parent, It brought a lot of clarity to light, I would strongly recommend this to anyone who wishes to reconcile with their parent and get over the emotional road blocks we build for ourselves.
Yet another disappointing Seattle Reads selection, In, only a few months after gay marriage was legalized in Washington, it feels really retrograde to read the story of a closeted gay man filtered through the voice of his selfrighteous, selfpitying straight adult son.
The author was clearly hurt by his father's deceptive behavior and the pain it caused his mother and their family, and he certainly has a right to those feelings.
But hurt feelings alone do not make a compelling narrative, Indeed, this book read more like a series of personal journal entries haphazardly strung together

than a memoir, The father's story a gay man who was sexually abused by his father as a child and spent most of his adult life in the closet, slipping out of the house at night to cruise for anonymous sex was much more interesting than the son's, but we only catch it in glimpses, through the searing lens of the son's harsh judgment of his father.
I think that judgmental, hectoring tone was what bothered me the most about this book, Not only is Martin angry at his father for betraying his mother and his happy childhood memories, he is angry at his father for not displaying his queer self once he is outed in a way that suits Martin's smug liberal selfsatisfaction.
Martin is extremely annoyed with his father's evasiveness concerning his sexual partners, his dating activities, and other aspects of his personal life once his father is separated from his mother and is technically "out of the closet.
" He is constantly pushing his father to acknowledge his sexuality as a crucial perhaps the crucial piece of his identity but it is not clear from the snippets of his father's emails and dialogue that are included in this book that his father necessarily regards that part of himself as the key to who he is.
We will never really know the father's story, however, since as Martin acknowledges in one chapter, this is not his father's memoir, Too bad, because that story, fully told, would have been much more memorable than the one contained in this slight, selfindulgent, and heterosexist book.
After the chapter dedicated to the author's triumph in building a treehouse bohring!, I'm done, My kindle shows I've readand that's a fair trial, The book started out promising, even inspiring, It could have been an interesting tale of a closeted older man coming out after a suicide attempt, Instead the author, the son, blathers on about his FEELINGS about how it affected him, I get he was trying to be honest, struggling with his true ugly feelings but he came off unlikable, And not the good unlikable like a narrator who is untrustworthy, but interesting, Just charmless. Also at times it got too writerly, if you know what I mean, Writeywritewrite. We get it. You can write. Bummer. 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 thirtynine 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.

MartinOCOs memoir is quirky and compelling with its amateur photos and grabbag social science and literary analyses, Gregory Martin explores the impact his fatherOCOs 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" Somehow I missed this last year as theSeattle Reads the Same Book pick.
So glad it crossed my path in, It's an important reminder, especially for those of us who imagine and write the romantic side of m/m relationships, of how far our society has come in such a short span of time, and of the very human price paid in our culture by those who struggle with being “other.
” Coming out and living openly as a gay man was not an option for the authors father when he was young, by time or geography, and he seems like a deer in the headlights when he suddenly, at an older age, finds himself “out” in a rapidly changing world that he cant seem to fall into step with.
He seems stunned, and lonely, and lost, and wonderful, and wonderfully human, What a brave man to allow his son to write his story, His son does him the credit of writing about him in an inquisitive, insightful, profound and intelligent way, turning, as the best memoirs do, his lens as much on himself and his own sense of judgement as on his fathers decadeslong duplicity.


The author, a father to two boys, as his own father was, says, “There was a difference between the story my children needed to hear and the story I needed to tell them.
Those were two different stories, ” I am glad the author told this story, Greenwood library book club Apriland Seattle Reads,

Wish I could give this,. The first few chapters I was instantly emotionally vested, Along the way I lost connection with the characters, Go read this book now, Yes, it's true, it is the Seattle Reads book for, but all the more reason you should pick it up, It's a great read, movingly told and extremely well written about a man who gets a phone call one day about his father having just attempted suicide and the fallout from that moment as everybody picks up the pieces.
It's honest and hard to read at times: sadness, loss, anger, etc, are not great subjects for bright summer days, but put it on your toread list and do it, Absolutely extraordinaryI gobbled it as much as read it, As the gay son of a laterinlife lesbian mom, I'll admit STORIES FOR BOYS may strike chords for me that are different than for other readers, but I can't imagine somebody not being sucked in by Martin's engaging, heartfelt prose.
Won't spoil it by saying much more than thatbut it is an incredible read, Lovely, sad, personal and universal, . . just read it. .