My Pinup
by
67/99
Critics' Rating Index
20/99
Readers' Rating Index
n/a
Scholars' Citation Index
77/99
Volume of Reviews
20/99
Volume of Reader Ratings
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About This Book
In this brilliant two-part memoir, the Pulitzer Prize–winning writer Hilton Als distills into one cocktail the deep and potent complexities of love and of loss, of Prince and of power, of desire and of race. It's delicious and it's got the kick of a mule, especially as Als swirls into his mix the downtown queer nightclub scene, the AIDS crisis, Prince's ass in his tight little pants, an ill-fated peach pie, Dorothy Parker, and his desire for true love. Always surprising and stealthily—even painfully—moving, Als plumbs longing: "I inched closer to him as he danced to you, Prince. But already he was you, Prince, in my mind. He had the same coloring, and the same loneliness I wanted to fill with my admiration. I couldn't love him enough. We were colored boys together. There is not enough of that in the world, Prince—but you know that. Still, when other people see that kind of fraternity they want to kill it. But we were so committed to each other, we never could work out what that violence meant. There was so much love between us. Why didn't anyone want us to share it?"
Reviews
"Readers are sure to find pleasure and pain in this bite-size delight."
"A journey well worth taking, this distinctive, poised, compact book is an education and more."
"a strange hybrid that blends the fragmented story of Als' fraught romance with his 'sensitive, 'understanding' white boyfriend' with dreamlike images that read more like poetry than prose ..."
"An often cryptically personal text, My Pinup occasionally addresses the late artist directly ..."
"But as an appreciation of the liberating power he had over Als as a gay Black man, it's undeniably engrossing ..."
"After finishing page 48, this reader went back to the beginning and read it again."
"It's a song, a ballad with aching techno undertones and a popular thread we can all recognize—projecting silence onto the thoughts of the dead and famous, who, when we pin them just right, are interchangeable, the carrion of our most frightening desires, souls we must devour to hide the fear that will otherwise devour us."
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