Firebird: A Memoir

Firebird: A Memoir
by Mark Doty

Firebird: A Memoir
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Book Summary Information

Author: Mark Doty
Edition: Paperback
Published: 2000-10-01
ISBN: 0060931973
Number of pages: 228
Publisher: Harper Perennial

Book Reviews of Firebird: A Memoir

Book Review: Rising from the ashes
Summary: 5 Stars

Firebird is another tour de force by Mark Doty. The power in this book comes from two sources - the writing and the story. Mark Doty is first and foremost a poet. He uses language to paint pictures, using metaphors that speak to the imagination and causes the reader to consider the power of language. Metaphors cause us to go deeper into the story and make it our own. Mark Doty is a master of language. He can make even the ugliest realities beautiful and personal.

The story in Firebird is also very powerful. It is a story of longing and discovery. In some ways, Doty centers his story on the line from Petula Clark's classic Downtown -"Maybe you know a little place you can go to / where they never close - Downtown." He searches for that place where he can go and be himself, a whole person not torn apart by insecurity and loneliness. How well so many of us can relate to this!

It is interesting to note that Firebird was written after Heaven's Coast, a memoir about Doty's later life and the death of his partner. Maybe he needed to delve into the meaning of the present before he could unearth the pains of the past. Both books are very much worth reading. They will remain with you long after you finish reading them.

Summary of Firebird: A Memoir

"Childhood's work is to see what lies beneath," Mark Doty writes in his memoir, Firebird. And adulthood's work, he suggests, is to make sense of what the child-self once saw. Doty, a poet, does this remarkably well, capturing the peculiar talismans of youth--"little cars of fragrant plastic whose wheels turn on wire axles that can be popped loose and examined; hard candies; sweet, chalky wafers strung together into wristlets and necklaces"--as well as a child's experience of sin:
I am standing paralyzed by what I've done, there's a rush and roar from the direction of the living room, my father rising from the couch, he's coming down the hall, I'm afraid he's going to spank me, I remember the last time, the humiliation of it, him pulling my pants down on the porch and whaling me, his red face filled up with blood and rage, striking at me because what have I done? Now I've done something plain and sharply lit like the big shards of glass on the floor...
It's clear from the start that the author's home life was not happy. His father's job with the Army Corps of Engineers kept the family crisscrossing the country; his older sister got pregnant at 17--"these girls knew what they were doing, these girls married to get out"--and ended up, eventually, in prison; and his mother, a frustrated artist, sank eventually into depression and alcoholism. As if growing up in this family during the 1950s and '60s weren't difficult enough, Doty's homosexuality provided additional anguish. A confrontation over his long hair led to a humiliating scene at a barbershop where Doty's father had dragged him and ended up with his attempted suicide at the age of 14. There are plenty more heart-wrenching episodes like this, and at times you might wonder why you'd want to put yourself through the ordeal of reading about them. Doty himself seems aware of this. "Why tell a story like this, who wants to read it?" he demands near the end of the book, then responds, "Even sad stories are company. And perhaps that's why you might read such a chronicle, to look into a companionable darkness that isn't yours." That may be one reason for reading Firebird; the other, undoubtedly, is Mark Doty's precise and lyrical prose, his acute perception, and his compassionate heart. --Alix Wilber

In Firebird, Mark Doty tells the story of a ten-year-old in a top hat, cane, and red chiffon scarf, interrupted while belting out Judy Garland's "Get Happy" by his alarmed mother at the bedroom door, exclaiming, "Son, you're a boy!"

Firebird presents us with a heroic little boy who has quite enough worries without discovering that his dawning sexuality is the Wrong One. A self-confessed "chubby smart bookish sissy with glasses and a Southern accent," Doty grew up on the move, the family following his father's engineering work across America-from Tennessee to Arizona, Florida to California. A lyrical, heartbreaking comedy of one family's dissolution through the corrosive powers of alcohol, sorrow, and thwarted desire, Firebird is also a wry evocation of childhood's pleasures and terrors, a comic tour of American suburban life, and a testament to the transformative power of art.

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