Sparse, potent, compelling
With a stark clarity, a little girl tells about her life growing up in the late 1960s and 1970s. They are poor and dark-skinned, except for her baby brother, whose skin tells a different story. Her older brother is lively and loves wearing their mother's heels, but he's shipped off to Vietnam. She chronicles her life and the world around her, about how everyone knows if you don't let someone do it to you, you'll never get married. And about how wanting to kiss your best friend and touch her doesn't mean anything, anything at all in this dark and collapsing world. "Autobiography of a Family Photo" is a spirited, poetic, and dark tale of hope in the strangling grasp of a world without love. It's about that hazy line between courage and obstinacy that few can delineate, and even fewer can balance. This novel is considered one of the 100 Best Gay and Lesbian Novels by the Publishing Triangle.

I opened the book to the first page of the first chapter and read: "I died once. And then I died again. And then, death had no hold on me. Simple. As simple as this: Yesterday I woke up and the sky was full of blues, changing, arching over themselves. Sitting there, I watched it. And this is what I was thinking: This girl sitting here with her arms wrapped around her legs is not a girl but a woman. And in the woman there are a million little girls, bottled, muted. A million half-lives, with dark arms reaching upward, others stooped into bending, still as glass. A million girls. Dark. Bellowing. Multiplying. Chaos. Hari-Kari. War. It is inevitable. And this sky is not a sky but simply the color blue, the chaos of blue, the inevitability of blue--sky, lake, mallard, sea. Sea. Simple as..."

I was captivated. After purchasing the book no one could pull me away until I had read every last word--poetic, brilliant, familiar. A work of fiction; she writes about incest, sexual abuse, losing her beloved (gay) brother in the war, sexual exploration and becoming her own woman within a complex world.

This book has found a place in my heart alongside my other favorite authors.

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