Truth Serum: A Memoir (Paperback)

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Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Cooper's memoir of growing up gay in Los Angeles has at its center the title piece, "Truth Serum," and it is Cooper at his best: exquisite, funny, wise and blessed with a novelist's gift for the epiphanic image. The sodium Pentothol and amphetamine "cocktail" administered to Cooper by his therapist so that he can reduce his attraction to men ironically empowers him to accept his homosexuality, which he does while huddling out of the rain in a doorway in Greenwich Village, newly emboldened to leave his girlfriend. Cooper is a likable sort, and very bright company, if a bit solipsistic (though he is often a solipsist in a sea of narcissists). But the aftereffects of the sodium Pentothol manage to pervade the whole book: it is endlessly chatty and rambling and makes the deadly assumption that an emotional life is necessarily interesting once expressed. And the corollary assumption, that such expression is heroic because it is in a homosexual key, grates. Still, Cooper's writing talent (he wrote the well-received novel A Year of Rhymes) and his alert and often graphic portrait of gay life among professionals in L.A. will find its appreciative readers.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

From Booklist

Cooper tells a now familiar life story: growing up with homosexual feelings, first denying but eventually accepting them, coming out to friends and family, taking a lover, and getting AIDS. Yet he offers some gems of self-revelation that will strike evocative chords with gay readers and their families. Cooper, an only child, was very close to his mother--a relationship that filled mutual deep needs but from which Cooper recalls many distinctive moments of mixed comfort and resentment. Also unique is his recollection of reaching out to a close friend in high school, knowing that sexual rejection would be likely but being unable to postpone or control the moment. Scenes of Cooper's adult life don't come across with the same intensity, although some of his AIDS memories are quite wrenching and may prove cathartic for many readers. Paul Monette's National Book Award^-winning Becoming a Man (1992) and Marlene and Christopher Shyer's Not Like Other Boys cover similar ground and are more compelling. Charles Harmon --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 225 pages
• Publisher: Mariner Books (June 18, 1997)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0395859948
• ISBN-13: 978-0395859940
• Product Dimensions: 8 x 6 x 0.7 inches
• Shipping Weight: 9.6 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 4.7 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (7 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #199,173 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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Customer Reviews

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5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Shines as an Iconoclastic Memoir Model of Form and Language, April 15, 1997

By A Customer

This review is from: Truth Serum: Memoirs (Hardcover)

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.

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Intense Focus, August 19, 2000

By	Douglas Shumaker (Columbus, Ohio) - See all my reviews

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.

4 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Wonderful, April 27, 1999

By	Jon Miller-Carrasco (Austin) - See all my reviews

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.