The Author (Mark Doty)

Mark Doty is an award-winning American poet and non-fiction writer – or, more specifically, and in the case of this particular book, he is a memoir-ist, writing about himself and his life. But while his writing here is primarily anchored in experiences of self (i.e. his memories of his childhood and youth, and his consideration of what those memories mean), there are strong resonances of universal experiences – more particularly, of experiences arguably common to many Western homosexual men of the author’s generation (that is, born in the mid-to-late twentieth century).

In his narration, the author describes himself, as a child and young man, as a “sissy,” a term used to negatively identify a male person perceived to be less than fully, functionally masculine. The term was commonly in use during the time of the author’s childhood and youth – again, the mid-to-late twentieth...