The Hurry-Up Song: A Memoir of Losing My Brother [Hardcover]

Clifford Chase (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: March 1995

Recounts the author's relationship with his older brother, their experiences of growing up gay in a Christian Science family, and his painful witness to his brother's illness and death from AIDS. Tour.

Editorial Reviews

From Booklist

Chase vividly presents the intricately woven lives of two gay brothers. Although six years apart in age, Ken and Clifford became close friends to deal with their family's frequent moves. They created a magical puppet kingdom, keeping a hostile world at bay by sewing costumes and building cardboard sets for their fantasy. As adults, they shared knowledge of their sexual identities with each other, drifted apart, but then came to rely on each other in ways different from but no less special than those of their childhood. Finally, Clifford had to endure the searing loss of Ken to AIDS in 1989. This scrupulously honest, beautifully crafted account tells not only of the ailing Ken's deterioration but also of the emotional turmoil surrounding the making of Ken's will, the brothers' parents' fiftieth wedding anniversary (which celebrated a half century of emotional inaccessibility), and their mother's compulsive retelling of family sagas. The only really weak elements in this dynamic family story are the childhood drawings Chase includes; perhaps meant to be charming, they're irritating and distracting instead. Whitney Scott

About the Author

Clifford Chase is a writer living in Brooklyn. He is the editor of Queer 13: Lesbian and Gay Writers Recall Seventh Grade and has contributed fiction to Yale Review, Threepenny Review, Boulevard, and other journals and anthologies. --This text refers to the Paperback edition.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 220 pages
• Publisher: Harpercollins; 1st edition (March 1995)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0062510193
• ISBN-13: 978-0062510198
• Product Dimensions: 8.4 x 5.8 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 15.2 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #4,282,597 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

4 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Excellent, August 14, 1997

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Been There (Ca USA) - See all my reviews

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This review is from: The Hurry-Up Song: A Memoir of Losing My Brother (Hardcover)

A very artistic memoir of a rather disconnected family and a gay brother dieing of AIDS. Chase, who himself is also gay, weaves the bond that ties the two brothers throughout his book. Mainly childhood conspiracies and special games they created together. In the end, however, as his brother's health failed, he had to face and come to terms with the separatism that one must feel when they cannot truly share something as profoundly significant as death. Like most, he was left to sort out the emotions of the living

4 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Wonderful, August 4, 1997

By A Customer

This review is from: The Hurry-Up Song: A Memoir of Losing My Brother (Hardcover)

The admirable thing about this memoir is the way that it looks honestly, even wrenchingly, at devastation, and yet never mythologizes the past or liquifies its events into the mush of sentimentality so common in reflective works. Rather than epic proportions, The Hurry-Up Song is a work of small, quotidian proportions. Chase writes of the games he and his brother would play as children, the songs they would sing, and these games and songs are striking not for their uniqueness but their commonality - these are the games and songs that all suburban children remember. Expressions like "let's not and say we did" are the kind of expressions with which we all would taunt or were taunted. Commercial culture pervades this memoir; Chase often wonders if he acts, in response to the turmoil in his life, the way he has been conditioned to act by watching T.V. The Hurry-Up Song deals with how the empty, clanking images of the commercial machine can be remade as human, but also how the consuming suburban culture disables. Throughout the novel Chase holds out for an absolution, a final, dramatic scene that never quite comes. Again, the phrase, trite at first but then profound, "let's not and say we did" rises up. Rather than a harrowing catharsis and a pat conclusion, Chase is left with a collection of loose ends that resembles the human collection we are always holding. The final chapter of the book is a moving and yet restrained, sublime, sequence in which there is an intimation that Chase's wounds will heal only because they are ready to and he had decided they will. It is a fitting, beautiful ending, a uniting of the wholes, and although it (realistically) avoids conclusion, it moves itself, slowly, towards something new.

Will Robinson Sheff