Darling Days

April 11, 2016
Genderqueer activist and writer Wright (Lose My Number) aims to create the next great New York City memoir, but stumbles along the way. Wright’s tale of growing up in Manhattan in the late 1980s and ’90s, is in broad strokes a tale of love and loss—both referring to her mother Rhonna, a force of nature whose fierce, unconditional love for her child morphs over years to become an abusive, substance-addicted relationship. That chaos bleeds into all theaters (sometimes literally—both Wright and Rhonna are performers) of Wright’s life. The book’s most vital aspect is its exploration of growing up gender-variant, and Wright’s passionate descriptions of her fear of gendered bathrooms and locker rooms,
self-baffling relationship with sex and sexuality, and attempts to “pass” as a boy from the age of six have never been more timely. The prose is beautiful and aches with emotion. However, Wright may put off her transgender readers with her casual use of transmisogynist slurs. Cisgender readers will derive a great deal of insight into the developing mind of a trans child.

May 1, 2016
A gender nonconforming cultural impresario recalls a life marked by drugs, displacement, a mentally ill mother, and rare but cherished pockets of solace.Nothing about Wright's three-decade life has come easy, as this eventful if narratively loose memoir has it, including her own birth--her mother endured more than 35 hours of labor and needed to be ferried through a crowd of homeless men in her scruffy East Village neighborhood. Wright's mother, Rhonna, was a head-turning model and dancer, and Wright followed in her footsteps as a child actress. Stability was endlessly elusive: Wright's parents split early, Rhonna was booted from their public-housing apartment, and she was prone to angry, overprotective rages when it came to her daughter. The term "daughter" is complicated as well. Though she was born a girl, Wright decided to "become a boy" when she was 6 and eventually dispensed with gender distinctions entirely. Externally, this created a host of anxieties regarding classmates and the boys and girls to which the author was attracted. Internally, Wright was a roiling sea, getting kicked out of various schools and slipping into drug-soaked jags of self-loathing. For all that struggle, though, rhetorically, the author puts on a brave face throughout the memoir, writing with a street-wise cool even when she discusses turning her mom in to the child welfare authorities or discovering her father's heroin habit. "The foundation of my personality is the dance of regaining my balance from slamming into rules," writes the author--which is why she's not much for delivering familiar lectures about gender identity or surviving a tough childhood. It's unclear how this engagingly reckless soul found the poise to launch a publishing, acting, and writing career; she just seemed to be doing it by her late teens. If Wright can pull it off, there's hope for just about everybody. An earnest and heartfelt memoir cloaked under a battle-toughened exterior.

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April 15, 2016

More than 2.3 million people have viewed artist/activist Wright's TED Talk, "Fifty Shades of Gay," and then there's her artwork, articles, and MTV show, Suspect. Here she revisits an Eighties childhood shaped by the heroin-laced punk/art scene of New York's Lower East Side.

Copyright 2016 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

August 1, 2016

At times, this memoir feels disjointed and frenetic, but that is mainly because Wright's life has been disjointed and frenetic. Brought up by a single mother in early 1990s New York, Wright learned to deal with a bohemian lifestyle early on. This is a story of the author's loving but frustrating relationship with a mother who marches to the beat of her own drum; it is also about the harmful effects of gentrification and drug addiction. At one point, the family is forced out of their apartment by a housing management agency, and the ensuing drama demonstrates what it's like to be displaced for the sake of higher rents. In the midst of all this, Wright struggles with gender identity, dressing as a boy called Ricky, and later, grappling with sexuality when a first crush blossoms. Bouncing from home to home, school to school, and later, parent to parent, the author eventually understands the importance of taking charge of one's own life and even more importantly, of being true to oneself. VERDICT Readers interested in studies of gender identity, seeing a different side of New York City, and memoirs about surviving difficult situations will enjoy. [See Prepub Alert, 3/28/16.]--Caitlin Kenney, Niagara Falls P.L, NY

Copyright 2016 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.