7/5/2023 0 Comments Becoming a man by paul monette![]() ![]() The point is that I loved this book because I identified not only with the content but also with the emotionally-rich prose. In any event I’m getting carried away here. It would seem that writing in registers is something that is learnt but never taught. ![]() Words like ‘ heinous’, ‘ sclerotic’ and ‘ unfathomable’ simply had to go, and rightly so I suppose. ![]() So where I wrote about “ egregious inefficiencies” or ”wholesale ineptitude” this was pacified to “ clear inefficiencies” and “systemic capacity deficits”. There’s a joke in our Department that the bulk of my supervisor’s editing during the first year of my PhD was simply to delete (or at the very least tame) any adjective I used in reports for government. It doesn’t come easily and with prose it’s no different. When I write, either personally or professionally, I find that my natural style – that which comes most easily to me – is to write polemically with splashes of vitriol. Nevertheless, I wouldn’t hesitate to recommend it to anyone interested in either autobiographies or the struggles of gay men in straight America. I don’t think straight people will find it as meaningful given that it is written by a gay man, to gay people about gay men. In reading it I’ve had more than my fair share of chortles, tears and chokes – it is as moving as it is funny. Last month, while browsing through the second-hand bookstore opposite the Biscuit Mill in Cape Town I came across this autobiography by Paul Monette and quickly added it to the growing pile of books I ended up leaving with. ![]()
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