Customer Reviews

Close to the Bone: Memoirs of Hurt, Rage, and Desire

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This is a book where I found a lot of great writers! This is the book that first published JT LeRoy under the pseudonym "Terminator". His story "Baby Doll" is as powerful, moving and unforgettable as his novel "Sarah" which I bought after reading this book. Jerry Stahl's story in here is genius, anyone that knows a fledgling drug addict will benefit greatly by reading Stahl's story. Anyone interested in writing that is honest, moving and inspires self-examination, this THE book to get!

Close to the Bone is one of the best anthologies of its kind and it is a wonderful sampling of the modern personal essay. "We could all go on Oprah for some reason or other," editor Laurie Stone writes. "It's not enough that creepy things have happened, since everyone's life, prodded enough, looks like a crime scene with chalk outlines." In this collection, Stone includes authors who have found "the story in their experience."

This is the first appearance of young J.T. LeRoy (here credited as Terminator). LeRoy is the author of the autobiographical novel Sarah, about a pre-teen transvestite prostitute who hustles with his mother at West Virginia truck stops. The essay "Baby Doll" functions as a prequel to that novel.

There are other great essays by authors such as Phillip Lopate, Peter Trachtenberg, and Stone herself. Close to the Bone can be funny and disturbing by turns, but it is never boring.

For those who like to read and write quality memoirs, the best thing about the book was its introduction -- which makes the point that quality memoirs are "post-therapeutic" and dwell in ambiguity. Too bad too many of these memoirs fail to live up to the guides Stone set for herself.

The best memoirs here were the least sensational -- Lopate and Texier's detailed, anticlimactic stories of their fathers and families were head and shoulders above the rest. Some inclusions, like Lois Gould's, were well-written but did not really stand on their own. The worst were the most sensational -- Terminator's silly cartoon sex comedy, which sounds too fabricated to ring true. Stone's own entry is credible, but when she starts going into her own sex life, I just went into snooze-a-thon mode and flipped the pages until she started talking about human nature again. Why do these "hip" writers love sex so much and do such a bad job writing about it?