A Boy Named Phyllis: A Suburban Memoir - Softcover

Decaro, Frank

3.72

177 ratings by Goodreads

9780140255379: A Boy Named Phyllis: A Suburban Memoir

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0140255370 ISBN 13: 9780140255379

Publisher: Penguin Books, 1997

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A memoir of gay coming of age offers the amusing and touching tale of one man's memories of growing up as a gay child in suburban Little Falls, New Jersey. Reprint.

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From Kirkus Reviews:

DeCaro, a humorist, newspaper columnist, and contributing editor of Martha Stewart Living, offers an insistently breezy memoir of growing up gay in New Jersey. DeCaro was born in 1962, the only child of a propeller-factory worker and a beautician. He demonstrated a precocious predisposition to camp and an aversion to traditional boyish pastimes. Athough he played Little League baseball for a season to try to please his somewhat surly father, he was more in his element dressing in drag for Halloween and enticing his fellow ten-year-old boys into tentative sex play. There were family trips to Florida, where the author dreamed of catching a glimpse of the actor who played the cute older brother on the TV show Flipper, and less ambitious winter excursions to a local ski slope, where the family would sit in the car and watch. A ribald grandmother, a dishy aunt, and the free-spirited mother of a friend, not to mention the examples of such performers as Elton John and Paul Lynde, fed DeCaro's desire to escape the boredom of suburbia. At school his chubbiness, intelligence, and fledgling alternative sexuality made him a target for abuse. DeCaro dwells sadly and with some bitterness on the insults of his peers and the failure of his teachers to discourage homophobic slurs. Happily, by his senior year a combination of dieting, a precocious love affair, and theatrical talent (DeCaro got the Paul Lynde part in Bye Bye Birdie) had vanquished his insecurities and his classmates' hostility. Unhappily, whenever DeCaro's narrative threatens to become emotionally involving, silly one-liners tend to intrude; while the jokes can be hilarious when focused on inconsequential details of suburban taste and habit, they act as irritants in the passages describing adolescent pain, as if the author were frantically attempting to dissipate any incipient solemnity. While DeCaro can be an incisive observer, his book has about as much lasting resonance as one of his newspaper columns. -- Copyright �1996, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

From Publishers Weekly:

Peppered with one-liners and pop-cultural references ranging from a mention of the TV series H.R. Pufnstuf to one of the film The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert, DeCaro's memoir of growing up gay in an Italian Catholic family in Little Falls, N.J., sweetly and vividly recalls the bonds and breaches of parent-child relationships, a theme that provides the backdrop to his anecdotal chronicle of childhood tormentors and of recognizing, accepting and eventually celebrating his difference. Ostracized by classmates who knew he was gay before he did ("I'd always put the 'boy' in 'Flamboyant'") and an enigma to his loving if somewhat inept parents, a young DeCaro finds hope in the extravagance of role models Elton John and Paul Lynde and ensuing validation in his high-school theater department. All this is revealed in ironic turns of phrase, deadpan wit and pinpoint characterization, sparing not his mother: a "pear shaped bundle of Aqua Net"; his father: "a big lug who hated only two things in the whole world: dogs sniffing his crotch, and stepping in chewing gum"; his live-in grandma: "With upper arms that hung like parade-float bunting, the constitution of a battleship, and the salty vocabulary of a sailor on shore leave"; and not, least of all, himself. Growing up gay in the suburbs was a trial for DeCaro, a contributing editor to Martha Stewart Living, yet he renders the experience with ease and humor in this laudable memoir. Author tour.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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