Firebird: A Memoir [Paperback]

Mark Doty (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: September 19, 2000

In Firebird, Mark Doty tells the story of a ten-year-old in a top hat, cane, and red chiffon scarf, interrupted while belting out Judy Garland's "Get Happy" by his alarmed mother at the bedroom door, exclaiming, "Son, you're a boy!"

Firebird presents us with a heroic little boy who has quite enough worries without discovering that his dawning sexuality is the Wrong One. A self-confessed "chubby smart bookish sissy with glasses and a Southern accent," Doty grew up on the move, the family following his father's engineering work across America-from Tennessee to Arizona, Florida to California. A lyrical, heartbreaking comedy of one family's dissolution through the corrosive powers of alcohol, sorrow, and thwarted desire, Firebird is also a wry evocation of childhood's pleasures and terrors, a comic tour of American suburban life, and a testament to the transformative power of art.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

"Childhood's work is to see what lies beneath," Mark Doty writes in his memoir, Firebird. And adulthood's work, he suggests, is to make sense of what the child-self once saw. Doty, a poet, does this remarkably well, capturing the peculiar talismans of youth--"little cars of fragrant plastic whose wheels turn on wire axles that can be popped loose and examined; hard candies; sweet, chalky wafers strung together into wristlets and necklaces"--as well as a child's experience of sin:

I am standing paralyzed by what I've done, there's a rush and roar from the direction of the living room, my father rising from the couch, he's coming down the hall, I'm afraid he's going to spank me, I remember the last time, the humiliation of it, him pulling my pants down on the porch and whaling me, his red face filled up with blood and rage, striking at me because what have I done? Now I've done something plain and sharply lit like the big shards of glass on the floor...

It's clear from the start that the author's home life was not happy. His father's job with the Army Corps of Engineers kept the family crisscrossing the country; his older sister got pregnant at 17--"these girls knew what they were doing, these girls married to get out"--and ended up, eventually, in prison; and his mother, a frustrated artist, sank eventually into depression and alcoholism. As if growing up in this family during the 1950s and '60s weren't difficult enough, Doty's homosexuality provided additional anguish. A confrontation over his long hair led to a humiliating scene at a barbershop where Doty's father had dragged him and ended up with his attempted suicide at the age of 14. There are plenty more heart-wrenching episodes like this, and at times you might wonder why you'd want to put yourself through the ordeal of reading about them. Doty himself seems aware of this. "Why tell a story like this, who wants to read it?" he demands near the end of the book, then responds, "Even sad stories are company. And perhaps that's why you might read such a chronicle, to look into a companionable darkness that isn't yours." That may be one reason for reading Firebird; the other, undoubtedly, is Mark Doty's precise and lyrical prose, his acute perception, and his compassionate heart. --Alix Wilber --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From Publishers Weekly

Doty, an award-winning poet (Atlantis) and memoirist (Heaven's Coast) has penned an autobiography of his early years that, while beautifully and sensitively written, is more moving intellectually than emotionally. Using his family history and personal recollections to create a snapshot of the artist as a young child and beyond, Doty portrays the rocky emotional and psychological domestic terrain of his youth and adolescence: his family moved frequently; his mother was severely alcoholic; he hid his crushes on other boys from his homophobic parents while his sister became embroiled in a bad marriage and was imprisoned for breaking into and burglarizing a pharmacy. Doty's personal material is sometimes wrenchingAat the story's climax, his mother, drunk, holds him at gunpointAbut he is at his best when describing his relationship to the idea of beauty and how it influenced his growth as an artist. From watching monster movies and listening to classical music as a child to participating in drama class and singing along to pop songs such as Petula Clark's "Downtown" as he grew older, Doty details his evolution as a poet. Through it all, he casts his tragic relationship with his mother as a touchstone for his love of art, relating how he moved from his childhood recognition that "my relationship with my mother is immense... and occupies so much space I can barely see around it" to an adult understanding that she "taught me the things that would save me, and then... she taught me I wasn't worth saving." In the end, Doty's story illuminates his poetry, but it doesn't match its power. (Oct.)
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 228 pages
• Publisher: Harper Perennial (September 19, 2000)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0060931973
• ISBN-13: 978-0060931971
• Product Dimensions: 8 x 5.2 x 0.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 7 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (15 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #516,413 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
  • #69 in Books > Gay & Lesbian > Biographies & Memoirs > Gay

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

38 of 38 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars We voted Mark Doty "Most Likely to Succeed", October 24, 2000

By 

Julia Smith Grossman (Santa Monica, CA USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Firebird: A Memoir (Paperback)

For several years I had read favorable reviews of Mark Doty's work and wondered if this writer was "that Mark Doty"--the smartest boy in my junior high school, the one we voted "Most Likely to Succeed."

My curiosity got the better of me when Firebird was released, since it is autobiographical, and yes, it is that Mark Doty. Those junior high years were but a blip on the screen of Mark's life (chapter seven), but his memories and descriptions of the place and the same people I knew are spot on. This book, however, is so much more than a snippet of shared history. There is nothing I could say about this book that would accurately describe its impact on me--all of my words would be an understatement.

Mark Doty's work is fine art. His prose and the structure work beautifully together. This is not another package of self-pity in which the author is intentionally pulling up emotions. Yes, I cringed and felt outrage at some of the most uncomfortable parts, but the writer soothed me and reassured me that where there is art, there is a home, a place in the world--like that which Petula Clark sings about in "Downtown."

I am proud of and pleased for Mark Doty's outstanding literary achievements. I also thank him for having the courage to write this book. Many of us who are fortunate enough to have read it are grateful and forever changed through the experience of his work of art.

I recommend it to anyone who is gay, straight, or undecided.

28 of 29 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars an outsiders baedeker, October 5, 1999

By A Customer

This review is from: Firebird: A Memoir (Hardcover)

To the ostracized, Mark Doty's "Firebird" is testament. To insiders, the frank and moving memoir of growing up gay in '50-60's America, is a lens into which a casual gaze will stun. Looking deeper, few readers will come away from "Firebird" without recognizing themselves. Fewer still will leave Doty's life story without empathy. This is the book's chief victory; while the memoir may be a personal account of a young gay man's salvation, it is a story few would find utterly foreign. Self-discovery, after all, is solitary and often pits the inner polliwog against the larger, and often shifting, societal/peer context. The gay boy; the geek; the punk with the Mohawk; the girl with the braces all belong to the same childhood tribe. En masse, outsiders separate themselves through the discovery of what, ultimately, comforts them and affords them a place in this world-and where they find others just like them. Our young "Firebird" misfit finds beauty, a place to belong, within art. First he comes to love dancing and music; later he finds solace in painting and finally, poetry (on the urging of poet Richard Shelton to whom we poetry-lovers owe a huge debt of gratitude). Through it all, the emerging Doty, the evolving gay boy, is most at home in art, not in the rule-bound world of little boys. "Most boys...who seem already possessed of forms of knowledge opaque to me, things they grasp...I do not." When Mark's mother finds him performing playful drag for a friend, "She says, with a hiss, with shame and with exasperation, Son, you're a boy." No, he is a "queer" boy-"simultaneously debased and elevated." By Doty's own definition, "inside the rejected boy, inside the unloved body, reigns the sissy triumphant, enraged, jeweled by an elegant crown of his own devising." "Firebird," opens and closes focusing on this devising, this art and how the humanities, while on the surface may manifest itself as the serenity of stilled water, dazzles and confounds the soul and marrow in the murky depths below mere appearance. The opening work of art introduced to readers (and I don't want to give it away) is a clever piece of happenstance only a poet could mine to illustrate the book's theme. While Doty says much about himself and his salvation by art, it is when art is thrust in face of recrimination that it is most potent. "The Firebird, in fact, is used to (it), and doesn't care about the difficulty of circumstance; if anything it burns brighter in a gloomy wood. Go ahead...do what you will, I'll find the music in it." I'm beautiful, dammit! Young Mark needed to find the music in his own being. Life in the Doty household was anything but pedestrian; it was full of alcoholism; self-loathing; strained relations; and the proverbial generation gap, among other human frailities. Although I found at times his regaling of familial woe to be a tad tiresome (which might say more about me than the author), readers find the dolor is followed by incredible, inconceivable moments. The banal often served as the calm before the storm. Doty's sexuality and his sister's proclivity for the wild life, both proved to be touchstones of extreme prejudice to which neither would find solace from their parents. In "Firebird," the motherly succor is poison and the fatherly guidance is doled out in dollar bills and insouciance. Readers will discover this negligence and bias nearly ends the memoirist's life. For every gay man this book should become a Baedeker; for every straight person it should be required reading. Doty, mostly known for his searingly-beautiful and evocative poetry ("Sweet Machine" being his best), has written a memoir that is startling in its revelations and oddly moving in its reportage. It differs from his previous memoir, "Heaven's Coast," in its introspection. While "Heaven's Coast" (on the death of partner, Wally) has immediacy and intimacy, "Firebird" is more assessing and inclusive. "Firebird" is raw, exquisite and prosaic in the equal proportions mirroring the natural rhythm of family life, of growing up and inward. It is a sand papering off the layers of familial varnish; it is the story of how art saved a little, sissy boy residing in a house of dysfunction, in a world not always ready for the outsider. It is a story of us all rising from our individual pyres of prejudice and to what we owe the power of flight.

11 of 11 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Evolution of a poet, August 20, 2003

By 

Peggy Vincent "author and reader" (Oakland, CA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Firebird: A Memoir (Paperback)

It's not always a pretty story, but it's always intellectually and emotionally moving. Mark Doty is one of America's finest writers of poetry and prose. That such a mind should have triumphed over his stressful growing up years is remarkable. His background would have landed many other kids in a foster home. Firebird is a coming-of-age memoir of a pre-gay geeky kid with a deranged and alcoholic mother, a passive/conflicted father, and a sister whose middle name is Trouble.
Firebird is beautifully written, revealing how a person who lives in a world of art, music, and literature rose from the ashes of his youth like the proverbial Phoenix of legend. It could easily have been titled Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, but somebody got to that one first.