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"A Memory of Fictions (or) Just Tiddy-Boom" is a modern, jazzy take on the 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, and the deconstruction of an African-American family. It is a completely unique look at race, sex, and finding redemption the hard way.
