The Secret Machine
I just finished a very good memoir: The Tricky Part: A Boy's Story of Sexual Trespass, a Man's Journey to Forgiveness by Martin Moran. I first heard of his story a couple of years ago when I read a New York Times review of a one-man show of the same name by Moran, who is also an actor; the play turned into this book.
It's the story of a gay 12-year-old boy (and, later, the man he grows up to be) just coming to awareness of his sexuality when a 30-year-old male camp counselor compounds his confusion by beginning a three-year sexual relationship with him.
One of the things Moran does so well is convey what it was like to be robbed of all volition to discover his sexuality on his own terms, at his own pace (complete with the inevitable bewilderment and denial he would have experienced even under the best of circumstances). He had absolutely no choice in how to handle this aspect of his being. Compounding all of that is the fact that he's a good Catholic boy.
Here's a passage I thought was particularly well drawn:
"Sometimes I felt scared and I liked it. All the concealment was a kind of strange power. An entire and buzzing inner life. A fourteen-year-old on a three-speed Raleigh, getting it every which way. I was getting away with murder, with pleasure, with crimes, and I was pulling As, I was pulling focus for all the right reasons. I got second place in the televised Rocky Mountain Spelling Bee (a joyous occasion, a prize TV!). I was spokesman for the class, top of the Catholic heap. I was oh so nice. Naughty and nice. My face was the frantic mask of a chipper boy. . . . Secrecy, my engine. A machine so loud it makes it nearly impossible to listen for what's in your soul, to hear what's authentic."
That paragraph, as much as I like it, doesn't really begin to get at the book's literary merits. Moran goes to some deep and delicate places, and he handles them extraordinarily well. The culmination is a moving yet uncomfortable confrontation between him and his abuser 30 years after the fact -- all the more powerful for its refusal to conform to the author's or our wishes that it be as neat or redemptive as a TV movie. The surprise is that it manages to be redemptive anyway, in its own way.
It's the story of a gay 12-year-old boy (and, later, the man he grows up to be) just coming to awareness of his sexuality when a 30-year-old male camp counselor compounds his confusion by beginning a three-year sexual relationship with him.
One of the things Moran does so well is convey what it was like to be robbed of all volition to discover his sexuality on his own terms, at his own pace (complete with the inevitable bewilderment and denial he would have experienced even under the best of circumstances). He had absolutely no choice in how to handle this aspect of his being. Compounding all of that is the fact that he's a good Catholic boy.
Here's a passage I thought was particularly well drawn:
"Sometimes I felt scared and I liked it. All the concealment was a kind of strange power. An entire and buzzing inner life. A fourteen-year-old on a three-speed Raleigh, getting it every which way. I was getting away with murder, with pleasure, with crimes, and I was pulling As, I was pulling focus for all the right reasons. I got second place in the televised Rocky Mountain Spelling Bee (a joyous occasion, a prize TV!). I was spokesman for the class, top of the Catholic heap. I was oh so nice. Naughty and nice. My face was the frantic mask of a chipper boy. . . . Secrecy, my engine. A machine so loud it makes it nearly impossible to listen for what's in your soul, to hear what's authentic."
That paragraph, as much as I like it, doesn't really begin to get at the book's literary merits. Moran goes to some deep and delicate places, and he handles them extraordinarily well. The culmination is a moving yet uncomfortable confrontation between him and his abuser 30 years after the fact -- all the more powerful for its refusal to conform to the author's or our wishes that it be as neat or redemptive as a TV movie. The surprise is that it manages to be redemptive anyway, in its own way.
posted by Billy at 11:00 PM
2 Comments:
wow! those are some very powerful words.
sounds revelatory in its description of the duality of the public and secret life of growing up gay with the additional complication of the violation - i will check it out too.
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