Customer Reviews

Truth Serum: A Memoir

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Bernard Cooper has a reputation for genre-bashing. His first collection of non-fiction essays, Maps to Anywhere, won the 1991 Hemingway Prize for Fiction. His first novel, A Year of Rhymes (1993), bristled with the snap of non-fiction. So if his approach to truth in his new memoir is somewhat, well, casual, why be surprised? "I'll remember a situation," Cooper says, "and then try to write what the people probably would have said." Must a memoir be truthful? Factual? Does it matter if the memories it contains are "reinvented"?

Truth Serum is the story of a young man who grew up in a middle-class Jewish family in Los Angeles in the 1950s and '60s, son of a divorce lawyer and a housewife: escapades with school friends, shopping trips, adolescent crushes, failed attempts at heterosexuality, bouts with various therapies, an inability to come out to his father, AIDS.

Like most children, he once thought it possible to divide the world into male and female columns: "Blue/Pink. Roosters/Hens. Trousers/Skirts. Such divisions were easy, not to mention comforting, for they simplified matter into compatible pairs. But there also existed a vast range of things that didn't fit neatly into either camp: clocks, milk, telephones, grass. There were nights I fell into a fitful sleep while trying to sex the world correctly." Soon he's old enough to realize what it means to be a homosexual, "to invite ostracism and ridicule, and I would have done just about anything to escape my need to masturbate to images of men." He makes bargains with himself ("If you don't touch yourself till Saturday, you can go to Woolworth's and buy that model of a '65 Corvette"), but he's as out of control as the fire he sets to destroy his collection of pornographic magazines.

Cooper is a gifted writer, armed and extremely dangerous. Every page of Truth Serum gives evidence to an almost sacramental reverence for the evocative power of words, and his no-net approach to language is exhilarating, spectacular, much the way a fireworks display is-you hold your breath until the next glorious image blossoms onto the night sky, then fades slowly to the sound of oohs and aahs from the gratified crowd below. He's been known to spend hours on a single sentence before moving on to the next, an obsessive attention to detail that belies a visual arts background in assemblage (a mix of painting and sculpture) and a lifelong love of poetry. Indeed, some of the shorter essays in Truth Serum read as prose poems. "The Fine Art of Sighing," for example, examines precisely that. "It's a reflex and a legacy, this soulful species of breathing. Listen closely: My ancestors lungs are pumping like bellows, men towing boats along the banks of the Volga, women lugging baskets of rye bread and pike. At the end of each day, they lift their weary arms in a toast; as thanks for the heat and sting of vodka, their aahs condense in the cold Russian air."

Cooper's skill with language can spin even a list of tricks into gold: "I met a truck driver with one tan arm; his vigorous kisses tasted like coffee; he held me with the grip of a man who watches cities slip past a windshield. I met an accountant who wore his reading glasses to bed; during nights of slow, methodical sex, the luminous numbers of a digital clock were reflected in his lenses. After purchasing seed packets at a Pasadena nursery, I was led by the owner to a house behind an arbor; his bedroom smelled of turned earth; his body felt as hard as mahogany." And of intimacy with his lover Brian (to whom Truth Serum is dedicated): "We collided in bouts of breathless sex, and when it was over we fell away, sweating and incredulous, sometimes laughing at the sheer ferocity of our hunger for each other." It's because so much of the author's life had been spent believing he might never touch a man "that the sight of Brian naked beside me, beneath me, above me, has never lost its power to surprise. At last, a voice within me says, relieved by his proximity, grateful for his eagerness and heat."

It's no wonder Cooper loves this line from Provincetown poet Stanley Kunitz-"The end and the beginning fall into each other's arms"-so filled is his own work with an ever-present sense of life and death. His mother dies (unknown to him) as he's strolling along cruisy Santa Monica Boulevard in West Hollywood: "The night was warm, impending, alive, as if longing itself were an aspect of the air, like humidity or wind." Even when he learns the sad news, gentle memory softens death, makes it live: "Once I saw a photograph of a woman who had jumped off the Empire State Building and landed on the roof of a parked car. What is amazing is that she appeared merely to have leapt into satin sheets. Deep in a languid and absolute sleep, her eyes are closed, lips slightly parted, hair fanned out on a metal pillow. Nowhere is there a trace of blood, her body caught softly in its own impression."

Astonished by a Day-Glo shirt, his mother had once remarked: "They can do anything these days. Anything. I don't even try to understand anymore. You blink and the world is entirely different." Later, when AIDS becomes part of his world, Cooper is left blinking, unable to understand: "As for the rest of us at [the gym], the physiques we tried to strengthen and perfect became increasingly alien to us, capable of every failure and betrayal....And then the big blonde lawyer disappeared. And the lanky carpenter nicknamed Driftwood. The friendly incessant whistler. The limber old man who counted aloud. The boy whose back was tattooed with aircraft. Maybe they went to other gyms. Maybe they moved to other cities. Maybe they died in the night. One day someone awoke with a sore neck and the next with meningitis. Someone bit his tongue and it wouldn't stop bleeding. Blindness, dementia, paralysis. Anything could happen. Anyone might vanish. Fate took sudden, improbable turns, all of them unjust. One man, despite all the evidence to the contrary, was afraid to drink from the water fountain at Weight Lifter's. Another wanted to tempt the disease he'd grown to hate for robbing him of his friends, and bragged about fucking himself to death."

The title of the book comes from the author's experiences in 1974 with a psychiatrist who mainlined him with a heady combination of sodium pentathol and Ritalin intended to "reduce the frequency and intensity" of the his sexual fantasies involving men. It didn't work, this truth serum. How could it have? What does truth mean when "you blink and the world is entirely different"? When "anything can happen"? When every time he glances at his lover's body, Cooper feels "like one of those game show contestants who's been put inside a glass booth and given only so many seconds to grab at a blizzard of one-dollar bills. The clock was ticking, there were countless sensations still left to try."

Tony Kushner astutely notes that "reading Cooper is like reading Chekhov...his words instruct, ennoble, entertain." Yes, but maybe Bernard Weissman gets closer to it (in Bomb Magazine) when he says: "His writing has a way of making you freak out with glee about American English. It's erudite and gentle, then he squirts you with a trick daisy." And that's why each time I read a new book by Bernard Cooper, I hesitate at the last page, reading it over and over again, never wanting it to end.

At the close of Truth Serum, the author remembers a moment inside a soundproof room at the Museum of Science and Industry, when he became aware of a persistent hum he swore was coming from inside him. "It was as if my restless, impressionable body had hoarded sounds since the day I was born, only to let loose with them in a room designed for absolute quiet. I felt phosphorescent with noise, like an amplified Fourth of July sparkler, sitting along and emanating, or so it seemed, the rustle of my first blanket, the surf at Santa Monica beach, the ignition of every car I've ever driven."

Wondrous sounds fill the pages of Truth Serum. I recommend its glories to you unreservedly.

I checked this book out of the library and read half of it before I realized that I had to own it, so I bought a copy the next day and picked up where I'd left off in the other copy. It's not a book-length memoir as much as it's a series of shorter memoirs. And what I find the most compelling in this book is his sense of focus. He writes a rather extensive essay about high school called "101 Ways to Cook Hamburger," and it essentially consists of three scenes. But from those scenes, I get a strong sense of his high school experience as a whole.

Also, he covers his entire life in this relatively short book. He has an essay on his mother that centers on the freezer she coveted, and an essay on his father. He talks about joining the gym, and the various gyms of his life, and that leads him to a discussion of AIDS. He has a short essay that categorizes all of the different kinds of sighs.

One of the greatest compliments I can give a book is to say that I wish I'd written it. I'm going through this book again, underlining passages and studying his use of scene, description, and exposition. He's a writer to learn from, in a lot of ways.

Far and away the strongest material Cooper has written, "Truth Serum" is one of the best memoirs I've ever encountered. It ranks with Theodore Dreiser's "Dawn" as a stunning evocation of early life. His language is fluid and beautiful. He writes about childhood as vividly as if he were watching intimate scenes from his past on a movie screen. Except that he describes feelings and thoughts-- unfilmable-- so freshly. The reader enters into the child Cooper's head and perceptions in astonishing ways. This is exceptional writing and the sense of immediacy (with the exception of the abstract final piece) is wonderful.

I checked this book out of the library after being intrigued by the jacket blurb on this story of a gay man's journey from childhood through adolescence and into adulthood. This is one of those satisfying reading experiences in which the reader is drawn into the writer's world. Despite few identifications with the specifics of the author's life (I'm not a gay man or from California or Jewish or ...), the beautiful and gentle writing seems to mirror Cooper's actual experiences so well that I easily recognized the human commonalities available to us all. I read this book ever more slowly as I came close to its end; I wanted to know more and more. The only thing that kept it from being entirely flawless for me was the extended use of metaphor and simile: most of the time, the prose was so elegant that these constructions sat in the background, creating visual and emotional content. But on occasion, the actual situations--strong enough to stand without embellishment or comparison--seemed diluted by the grammatical embroidery. It's a small criticism. Read this book. You'll be the richer for it.

I found _My Year of Rhymes_ by accident and loved it so much I got _Truth Serum_ immediately. I loved it even more.

My friends who read gay writers are increasingly crabby with all the "negative" books being currently written. I guess they mean the self-tortured protagonists of Holleran and White and Picano and Peck and Monette. I offered this book as a remedy for their pique.

There is some description of the torture of growing up gay (and it is exquisite), but, in this book, I promise that you would have felt gypped without experiencing that aspect of the narrator's life. But there is also, for example, "The Fine Art of Sighing" and "Train of Thought," two short pieces that have nothing to do with gayness or angst or turmoil; "Train of Thought" made me weepy without a tragic incident anywhere in sight: the sheer beauty of the language moved me so much.

It's not hard to believe that Cooper spends hours and hours over one sentence. It shows. He is a remarkable writer.

Bernard Cooper's collected essay-memoirs give a poetic account of the trepidations of growing up gay in pre-Stonewall Los Angeles as the child of a raging father and an oppressed housewife. Whether he's grappling with his homosexuality as an adult at the therapist's office, or worried about his parents finding his collection of "physique" magazines, Cooper's memories are presented like pressed autumn leaves, captured just after turning a fiery color. He presents both gay childhood and the LA gay scene like time capsules. These memoirs are vividly detailed and are more like being there than retrospection. Despite years of self-torture followed by years of the AIDS crisis, Cooper does more than bear witness. He also has managed to survive and overcome the demons of the past.

I just read this because I went to school with this guy (author) and was curious. It was well written, easy reading, and actually kept my interest even though I'm not that interested in the plight of homosexuals in our society. Its indeed sad and my heart goes out to them all for the added burden they face living in our society. Life's hard enough, right? Anyway, the chapters about school were of special interest to me as I knew all the people he mentions (names changed of course). Gave me a chuckle reading it. I suspect that since the school stuff seems quite believable, the rest of the book is too. I understand he's still writing and probably even better at it by now.

I almost didn't finish this book. My initial impression was that this guy's life is as dull and as vapid as anyone else's. He visits a department store with his mother and her neighborhood friend -- big deal. His dad finally gives in and buys the big freezer for the kitchen -- so what?

But suddenly, and quite by accident, I realized that the book had me firmly in its grip. It somehow became important to find out what happened at the AIDS clinic. The minutae of which gym he was attending -- and why -- gained a greater significance than I could have anticipated earlier in the book.

Cooper's writing style makes it easy to digest these essays. He writes with a precision that reminds me of Edmund White, or even Buckley, but without the pompous esoteric nature they sometimes employ.

The book ends abruptly. Whatever happened to Bryan, his roommate? What further progress was there in his relationship with his father, if any? But real life isn't conveniently episodic. I ended yesterday with unfinished business; I will leave unfinished business at this day's end. Just as a photograph captures only the briefest millisecond between what-has-gone-before and the unknowable what-will-be, so this book snatches Cooper midway between life's experiences, with stories as-yet unfinished. In the end, it makes his autobiography all the more real.