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Gay/Lesbian/Feminist Bookstores Around the Country
The Mostly Unfabulous Homepage of Ethan Green
Broken Fever
Reflections of Gay Boyhood
By
James Morrison
What are the roots of personal identity? In this collection of vividly imagined, beautifully crafted essays, James Morrison searches for answers within the experiences and emotional reality of his own childhood in an attempt to pinpoint the beginnings of his self-identity.
"Although from the vantage point of my present self, I do not remember a time in my life when I was not 'gay,' I know that the arrival at any avowed identity is always a complex process of affirmation and negation, refusal and identification." It is this process, and in particular the ways gay identity circulates before it is ever spoken, that Morrison seeks to distill from specific experiences. From the beginnings of questioning his religion and religious beliefs to exploring his first boyhood attraction, Morrison's experiences are chronicled honestly and compellingly.
Broken Fever crosses the traditional boundaries of essay, memoir, and fiction, and the result is a revealing and intriguing look at one happy childhood. It is an exploration that anyone -- gay or straight, young or old -- can identify.
"Broken Fever isn't an easy book to place, but it belongs on your bookshelf -- somewhere between Marcel Proust and David Sedaris."
-- Eve Kosofsky Sedgwich"Broken Fever is a wonderfully thoughtful (and sometimes comic) memoir about the way a gay childhood created in this author a passionate attention to the things of this world, and to his own subjectivity. A very intelligent and moving account of James Morrison's early youth, the book is also a portrait of the artist, and a brilliant meditation on the dangerous attractiveness of illness-as-a-cure for a psychic and worldly malady. In many senses at once, the book is a triumph."
-- Charles Baxter"Rarely does a book make you laugh to the point of guffawing, continue to provoke the rhapsodic delight in your memory of it days later, and linger with the kind of moving intensity that Broken Fever does. Morrison brings the authorial power of a fiction writer, philosophical density, and cinematic drive to these pages. Morrison is a master stylist, and this is literary non-fiction at its best."
-- Mary Cappello
James Morrison is an Associate Professor of Film and English at North Carolina State University. He is the author of Passport to Hollywood: Hollywood Films, European Directors (SUNY, 1998) and his work has been widely published in anthologies, magazines, and journals. He lives in Raleigh, North Carolina
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Table of Contents Preface: He
Wasn't There Again Today |
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