Secret Frequencies: A New York Education (American Lives) [Hardcover]

John Skoyles (Author)

Book Description

Series: American Lives | Publication Date: September 1, 2003

In this compelling memoir, John Skoyles guides us through 1960s New York. Caught between his uncle Fred, a mob associate and man-about-town, and his aunt Linda, a secretary at Paramount Pictures on Times Square, the sixteen-year-old finds himself exploring everything from the bars and swank apartments of Manhattan's Upper East Side to the flophouses and haunts of Forty-second Street. Secret Frequencies spins in graceful turns from deadpan hilarity to unflinching bleakness as Skoyles encounters New York’s most comic, absurd, and sometimes dangerous seductions.

Editorial Reviews

Review

“John Skoyles'' wistful and sensual memoir can be added to the list of works that embrace the wonder and bustle of New York. Like all good writers, he manages to carve out a little piece of the metropolis for himself.”—Associated Press

(Connor Ennis Associated Press )

From the Inside Flap

"John Skoyles is a wonderful storyteller, by turns hilarious and street-smart and wise, and he hasn’t forgotten much about what it was like to grow up in the most urban of urban environments. This is a fine and beautifully detailed book."—Charles Baxter, author of The Feast of Love.

"A deeply engaging and funny book by a marvelous writer."—Tracy Kidder, author of The Soul of a New Machine and Home Town.

"A salty, entertaining coming-of-age story with a real-life Sopranos cast. Skoyles’ evocation of gritty, unhomogenized Manhattan in the post-Beat era particularly won my heart."—Joyce Johnson, author of Minor Characters and Door Wide Open.

"No one who reads this delightful, absorbing account of a teenage boy’s summer of initiation will ever forget the brilliant characters or the remarkable city—New York in the sixties—which John Skoyles brings so eloquently to life."—Margot Livesey, author of Eva Moves the Furniture.

John Skoyles guides us through 1960s New York, a city we only thought we knew. Against a backdrop of late-night radio airwaves featuring talk-show kings like Long John Nebel, the sixteen-year-old pairs up with his Uncle Fred, a Mob associate and man-about-town who presses him into the seamy underworld of con games and call girls. At the same time, his Aunt Linda finds him a job as a messenger at Paramount Pictures on Times Square, where she works as a secretary and where Michael Caine and Jane Fonda make cameo appearances.

From the bars and swank apartments of Manhattan’s Upper East Side to 42nd Street flophouses and haunts like Hubert’s Freak Show, he comes face to face with New York’s most comic, absurd, and sometimes dangerous seductions.

As his aunt notices his transformation, she reveals a shocking side of her own that will twist and charge his journey into adulthood, and Linda and Fred engage in an escalating rivalry for his allegiance.

Secret Frequencies spins from deadpan hilarity to unflinching bleakness in graceful turns. With pathos, wit, and searing realism, this memoir joins the ranks of classic coming of age narratives.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 248 pages
• Publisher: University of Nebraska Press; First Edition edition (September 1, 2003)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0803243049
• ISBN-13: 978-0803243040
• Product Dimensions: 9.3 x 6.2 x 1.1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.1 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #3,255,187 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A really brilliant memoir, August 21, 2004

By 

Jack Harms (Washington, DC USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Secret Frequencies: A New York Education (American Lives) (Hardcover)

Skoyles's "Secret Frequencies" is extraordinarily funny and moving--his sense of character is unbelievably vivid, as is his sense of what is at once dark and comic in a scene. This is the best memoir I've ever read of growing up with the hopes for a New York City, a life of bars and restaurants and clothes and taxi cabs, a life the narrator glimpses the summer he travels each day from Queens to work at Paramount Pictures in Times Square. Totally recommended!

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars poetic, engaging and truly hilarious, February 7, 2007

By 

Greenwich St. - See all my reviews

This review is from: Secret Frequencies: A New York Education (American Lives) (Paperback)

I find it hard to understand why this book hasn't received more attention, as it is both beautifully written and a hilarious page-turner. Its teenage protagonist, an endearingly naive Queens Catholic-schoolboy, is on a desperate mission to lose his innocence to the world of oddball adults (jaded, entrancingly perverse, or psychotically needy) he encounters while working in the Paramount Pictures mail room in Times Square in l965. Skoyles portrays the seamy vivacity of Times Square right before its decent into hard-core inferno and that portrayal and his treatment of the various characters who influence the 16-year-old John are illuminated by the author's vision of the fascinating oddness of people, their individuality. John, an innocent voyeur, is a perceptive foil and his growing-up over the summer feels both satisfying and wistful. The book has many pleasures but most striking to me is its humor -- I simply couldn't stop laughing while reading it.