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The boy with the thorn in his side : a memoir / Keith Fleming.
Van Pelt Library PS3573.H463 Z68 2000
Available
- Format:
- Book
- Author/Creator:
- Fleming, Keith.
- Language:
- English
- Subjects (All):
- White, Edmund, 1940-2025--Family.
- White, Edmund.
- Fleming, Keith.
- White, Edmund, 1940-2025.
- Authors, American--20th century--Family relationships.
- Authors, American.
- Families.
- Gay men--Family relationships--United States.
- Gay men.
- Gay men--Family relationships.
- Uncles.
- Young men.
- United States.
- Young men--New York (State)--New York--Biography.
- Uncles--New York (State)--New York--Biography.
- New York (State)--New York.
- Genre:
- Biographies.
- Physical Description:
- 205 pages ; 25 cm
- Edition:
- First edition.
- Place of Publication:
- New York : William Morrow, [2000]
- Summary:
- This very moving memoir tells the story of a dramatic adolescence: Sixteen-year-old Keith Fleming's life is literally saved when his young uncle Ed, the writer Edmund White, impulsively agrees to "adopt" him.
- Installed in the maid's room of his uncle's busy apartment on Manhattan's Upper West Side where the phone never stops ringing, Keith soon finds himself transformed as Uncle Ed whirls into action--arranging treatment for Keith's disfiguring acne; enrolling him in prep school despite huge gaps in Keith's academic record caused by time spent in mental hospitals and a hippie "free school"; and instructing his nephew in a worldly view of life and love (an early assignment: reading Lolita and Lord Chesterfield's Letters to His Son).
- Five months later Uncle Ed, who is both strapped for cash as well as completely caught up in the beehive of social and sexual activity of 1970s gay Manhattan, must decide if he can afford to "adopt" another child--Keith's fourteen-year-old Mexican girlfriend, the beautiful Laura, who has just run away from her convent school.
- Contents:
- Chapter 1 The Flemings and the Whites 5
- Chapter 2 Mom and the Free School 37
- Chapter 3 The Horrors to Come 62
- Chapter 4 Dr. Schwarz and Laura 81
- Chapter 5 Life with Uncle Ed 108
- Chapter 6 Playing House 147
- Chapter 7 Back in the Provinces 184.
- ISBN:
- 0688168396
- OCLC:
- 42780547
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