I have an especially soft spot for queer memoirs that are old enough to use “gay” and “coming out” in their original senses. Valentine Ackland’s For Sylvia: An Honest Account (written in 1949 and published in 1985) delivers on both fronts: In that year [1923] I was really ‘out.’ In May of the year I had given a coming-out dance, and now my mother’s insistence that death was nothing to care a straw about gave us a license to live in a riot of dances and parties; more than license — it forced upon us (upon me at any rate) a strange desperation of enjoyment — as though I owed it to her as a duty to be as reckless and assertive as I could manage. That is how it seemed sometimes, at least. And the period favored it.
Often when I encounter earlier written accounts of queerness I feel this hollow sort of sadness that some other feeling echoes inside. Something very much akin to "as if water remained stored in layers!" but in terms of how I think about history.
Lbr if queer memoirists didn't write so frequently of their own afflictions with alcohol it would have taken me way longer to recognize it or feel comfortable acknowledging it in myself so another big soft spot there, yes we love to see it! thanks for sharing
This is so beautiful.
Often when I encounter earlier written accounts of queerness I feel this hollow sort of sadness that some other feeling echoes inside. Something very much akin to "as if water remained stored in layers!" but in terms of how I think about history.
Lbr if queer memoirists didn't write so frequently of their own afflictions with alcohol it would have taken me way longer to recognize it or feel comfortable acknowledging it in myself so another big soft spot there, yes we love to see it! thanks for sharing
I read two of Sylvia Townsend Warner's books last year and loved them, so this is *delightful*.