Daily XtraĪ highly engaging and personal peek inside the life of a gay man who is punished for and later reconciles his transgressions around gender norms. Smith's memoir is unflinching, a sobering document about family, manhood, love, striving and failing, and the lengthy quest toward self-discovery that began with a young man with a 'coat-rack figure' who was 'a poor excuse for a man by the measure of masculinity' in his unwelcoming Ontario hometown. David Weissman, filmmaker, The Cockettes and We Were Here Smith has crafted a dazzling memoir that manages to be eloquently insightful, deliciously graphic, and deeply compassionate.

He also asks: How can we know what a man is? How might understanding gender as metaphor be a tool for a deeper understanding of identity? In coming to terms with his past 'failures' at masculinity, and with an aging father he is only beginning to come to know, Michael offers a new way of thinking about breaking out of gender norms, and reconciling with a dangerous childhood. In this, his first work of nonfiction, Michael traces his early years as an inadequate male-a fey kid growing up in a small town amid a blue-collar family a sissy an insecure teenager desperate to disappear and an obsessive writer-performer, drawn to compulsions of alcohol, sex, reading, spending, work, and art as a means to cope and heal.Īs an artist whose work focuses on our preconceived notions about the body, Michael questions the very notion of what it means to be human.

Smith is a multihyphenate force of nature: a novelist, poet, improv comic, filmmaker, drag queen, performance artist, and occasional clown. A memoir about fathers and sons, breaking out of gender norms, and reconciling with a dangerous childhood.

How I Learned to Snap by Kirk Read