Reviews for About My Life and the Kept Woman

The average rating for About My Life and the Kept Woman based on 2 reviews is 4 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2015-01-27 00:00:00 Jason Hernandez This week I picked up John Rechy's new memoir About My Life and the Kept Woman (New York: Grove Press, 2008). The book written in his usual peculiar but engaging style details his early life in El Paso, Texas and his fascination with a woman who was a kept woman for a leading Mexican politician. The image of this woman stayed with him for the rest of his life and became a symbol of style, decorum, class and invulnerabilty. An image Rechy used to formulate the persona he developed as a hustler in New York and Los Angeles. The story charts his emerging sexuality and identity and development as a young, sexy Mexican-American man in the racist atmosphere of post war America. I have always been a fan of Rechy's work and have fond memories of discovering City of Night and Numbers in the local library and devouring them privately in my own room. Of course they were salacious and juicy (especially for a young gay boy) but they also made me aware of a magical world driven by desire outside of the confines of my own small town world. I wanted so much to taste of the pleasures Rechy described. Now as an adult, as someone who has explored my own sexuality and plumbed the depths of desire I find his memoir tinged by a control that leaves me wanting more. Rechy's remembering is too measured, too controlled and too manufactured. It seems to be lacking an honesty about his own sexual development even while trying to grapple with his own desires. It is the memoir of a posture, that of a hustler, rather than the memoir of a person. None of this diminishes Rechy's writing, or his skill as an author, indeed I still find myself unable to put down the book turning each page to see what comes next, but like any good hustler Rechy leaves me wanting more. Indeed, the book mimics the posture adopted by hustlers adopting a literary style that assumes a similar posture, a pose of indifference. It would be nice to see past the pose, what lies behind the posture, maybe there is nothing behind the pose after all? Maybe that is Rechy's point?

Review # 2 was written on 2020-07-10 00:00:00 Rodney Newkirk this read touched me on numerous levels - as a queer, as a white passing latinx, and as a writer. more specifically, as a writer that blends reality with fiction. loved recognizing so many locales in los angeles. loved, too, the meta-feeling in reading his recollections of the writing of scenes from his novels. manifique.