Byron in England: His Fame and After-Fame Book

I met Claire in Key West at a workshop with Edmund White. Then I heard her read from the book in Northampton MA at the Broadside Book Store'a wonderful bit of serendipity to wind up at the same spot at the same time.

A most moving memoir. Claire tells of her coming out, but more important, she does it amid the conflict of her hectic family life in England. Beautifully realized "character," if you can say that about person in her own memoir (you can). I've never truly laughed and cried simultaneously before as I did over the scene in which her family motors to her father's funeral, seventeen miles of joke-telling and smoking and crying.
"They were impressed by the depth of our sorrow" (215). So witty, so multilayered. Not just about being a lesbian. Much broader and more literary than that. No wonder Michigan State Press published it.