Celebrate: book choices

Antwerp celebrates Pride in August and so do we, with three brilliant proposals among which to choose our queer favourite!

a) “Something That May Shock and Discredit You” by Daniel M. Ortberg, editor and founder of The Toast, isn’t a memoir. There is a very particular memoir which it isn’t, a memoir the author has carefully not written: “The fight against writing Son of a Preacher Man: Becoming Daniel Mallory Ortberg, My Journey Trekking Through the Transformative Expedition of Emergence, Voyaging Shiftward Into Form – An Odyssey in Two Sexes: Pilgrimage to Ladhood must be renewed every day.”

Raised by an Evangelical Presbyterian family (with whom he is no longer on speaking terms), Ortberg returns to the words he grew up with, looking for comfort in Paul’s letters, finding a parallel between transition and the Rapture, and seeing a reflection of himself in Jacob, whose wrestle with the angel leaves him with an altered body and a new name. That Jacob and Kirk (the Star Trek one) are treated with the same odd mixture of awe, scrutiny, irreverence and love is part of what makes this book so charming.

When writing about silly things, Ortberg finds a space in which to be very serious indeed. “The year I asked for top surgery, five years into sobriety, was the first time I admitted publicly to having a body and wanting to do something about it”: that this is somehow the natural conclusion to an analysis of the Western Destry Rides Again makes it more, not less, affecting.

b) Tomasz Jedrowski’s debut novel “Swimming in the Dark” is an affecting and unusual romance, with a political undercurrent. In 1980 Poland, a love affair begins between Ludwik, a closeted and anxious young graduate, and the more worldly Janusz.

No longer adolescents but not quite men, the two friends spend their time harvesting beet, backpacking through the countryside, gorging themselves on cherries, swimming in lakes and secretly reading Giovanni’s Room while trying to figure out what to do with the rest of their lives.

c) Essayist’s Bernard Cooper’s new memoir, “My Avant-Garde Education,” is the story of how he came to love art, to study art, to attempt the life of an artist and to ultimately abandon it after being faced with one too many blank canvases. Thankfully for us, this personal journey led Cooper to another art: the one of putting together words in a combination of funny scenes, astute observations and moments of quiet poetry.

“Longing not only persisted despite my attempts to suppress it, but grew more compelling the more it was confined — a flourishing mutant, as compact and minutely pruned as a bonsai,” he writes of coming to terms with his homosexuality.