Reviews for A husband by law

The average rating for A husband by law based on 2 reviews is 4 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2013-10-07 00:00:00 Guangchen Fu I enjoyed this most when it provided a vivid and personal glimpse into gay life in the 70s in Manhattan and especially Fire Island, though I found the author's recounting of his time spent working in bookstores also strangely compelling. If you have some sentimental connection to or interest in the gay Fire Island scene, this can be worth picking up for that reason. I docked a star because I found some passages too ego-ridden (though perhaps that's to be expected in a self-penned memoir), and I found the sections discussing the author's process of writing and publishing other books both unexpected and uninteresting. (Perhaps most so when it seemed as though he felt the need to defend those other works, set the record straight as to how they had not been fully or properly appreciated, or make sure the reader knew how successful they were.)

Review # 2 was written on 2018-08-04 00:00:00 John Giacobbi Like Edmund White's "City Boy", Picano's memoir addresses gay life in the 1970s/80s in New York City. The first half of the book focuses on his struggle (and eventual success) to become a published writer; in the second half he recalls the tremendous freedom and community he found as a full-time summer resident of The Pines, a gay-centric village on Fire Island, off the southern coast of Long Island. Picano certainly experienced the sexual and brother-loving heyday of The Pines (and of the West Village neighborhood of Manhattan) and he writes beautifully of relationships with many men that weren't exclusively "dating" or just acquaintances but rather ongoing, deeply loving friendships that sometimes included sexual components (and sometimes didn't). Picano lived through an astounding time, pre-plague, one of a small band of hard-working, upwardly mobile gay men who found themselves young, professionally successful, and increasingly happy with their sexualized lives and increasing visibility. That Picano (like White) lived to tell about these things is a wonder; it's also a bitter pill for a post-plague reader to swallow. Impossible for me as a gay man to read it and not weep for what I was too young to have known. Impossible, too, to read without knowing that virtually all of the lives Picano writes about are long-extinguished.