It’s closing in on 1 a.m. here in San Francisco, and I’m tired but happy to tell you that a second excerpt of my book-in-progress has just been published, this time in The Sienese Shredder, a pretty damn gorgeous art and literary magazine in New York City. From their site:

Each issue brings together poetry, critical writing, visual arts, unpublished rarities, oddball ephemera and other culturally significant material in a way that is exciting, contemporary and fresh. Contents can include writings by visual artists; art by writers; poets as installation artists; photographers as poets, and the range of contributors moves from the well-known and up-and-coming to the unknown or forgotten.

As an archival project, each issue of The Sienese Shredder comes with a CD recording of a well-known poet reading or a musician presenting a retrospective sampling their work.

Issue number 4 weighs in at 253 pages, with 40 contributors both living and dead including Mark Doty, Hannah Hoch, Joan Mitchell, and R. Crumb.  Blog reader Jon reminded me that you can find this issue of the Shredder for sale on Amazon.

I realized that I’ve usually talked about my book on this blog obliquely, for some reason reluctant to answer the first question any sane person would have: what the hell is it about? That reluctance, which I think I tried to attribute to modesty, doesn’t serve me well. It’s not easy to summarize a 300 page book, but it’s a necessary part of sharing it with others. So here’s the blurb I give agents:

My book is a memoir that follows my family after my parents split up and, within a few months of each other, both come out of the closet. I was ten, my brother five. He turned out to be the only straight one among us. This took place in a suburb of the Twin Cities, in 1981. My parents later ended up with same-sex partners who were also previously married, with kids.

The book covers the next 20 years, as we splintered apart and took new shape. It details the fallout of our so-called “blended” family, a family that resembled no other at that time and place, a family that both my brother and I fled. I ran away to college, where I tried to come to terms with my sexuality at an age when the last thing I wanted was to be like my parents. Back home my brother struggled with his black sheep status, and found a family among his friends. In the final chapters my mother’s illness brings me home again.

The excerpt published in The Siense Shredder comes from the second half of the book, when I arrive at college, 1700 miles from home, attracted to boys but still hoping to turn out straight. The next few weeks change all that, as first years at college often do. I’ll write a little update on the progress of the book itself this week, since people keep asking, but in the meantime here’s a little sample from the excerpt:

“‘A public school with a private school-feel’ is how the New College’s catalogue described itself. U.S. News and World Report consistently ranked it as one of the country’s top ‘Best Buy,’ a major selling point, no doubt, for my father. But little of that mattered to me. New College satisfied my own special requirements. It was seventeen hundred miles away from home, in a tropical climate. It had an unusual curriculum (no grades, massive amounts of critical paperwork, an emphasis on the ‘self-designed’ education, and a required undergraduate thesis).

But the other reason I kept to myself. A dog-eared page in the middle of the catalogue featured a black and white photograph of a student, a young man, shirtless, bent over a notebook in the school cafeteria. The image of his bare chest had burrowed within me and taken root. The black-and-white shot, and the young man’s short hair cut, gave both him and the photograph a timelessness; he could have been anywhere between twenty and thirty, the shot taken any time in the last three decades. No doubt he had long ago graduated. No doubt he liked girls. But he’d crept up on me whenever I imagined the Sarasota campus. I heard the sweep of his dusty heels as he ambled beneath palm trees, the air echoing with tropical birdcalls.

The thought of a college where men sat shirtless in the cafeteria – nursing bad coffee, lost in liberal-educated thoughts – seduced me. The thought of meeting him, or men like him, the thought of my own seat in that cafeteria, surrounded by brooding, bare-chested men, soon consumed all other reasons for attending New College. A most impractical reason – hidden down deep within me, feeding off dim-lit dreams, as my last year of high school came to an end.”