Do something Coming of age amid the glitter and doom of '70s New York

Guy Trebay is an elegant wordsmith who writes for the style section of the New York Times. Born in the Bronx and raised on Long Island, Trebay found himself on the chaotic and seedy streets of Manhattan in the 1970s, where glamour and grit went hand-in-hand. As a young man, he had "no coherent career plan," but because he was tall and thin, he managed to do some modeling. He also did a short stint as a busboy at the trendy nightclub, Max's Kansas City. New York at the time, he notes, was "astoundingly cheap" as well as "filthy" and "lawless." It was also where one could sit next to Jackie O. at a counter one minute and then walk over to the Horn & Hardart automat, insert a token, and retrieve a "delicious" slice of pie. He also describes his friends and acquaintances, including "freaks," "the provisionally famous," and "the Warhol-adjacent." Trebay doesn't romanticize the city, but it was where someone with little education and no journalistic experience could get hired at the Village Voice. A quirky and engaging memoir.

A young man leaves his fraying suburban family to find a new one among New York City's gay demimonde in this fascinating memoir from New York Times style reporter Trebay (In the Place to Be). Trebay opens the narrative with an account of his family's disintegration in the 1960s and '70s under a variety of pressures, including his parents' marital problems, which the children responded to by developing a taste for drugs and petty theft. It all fell apart in 1975, when Trebay's mother died of cancer and the family house on Long Island burned down due to an electrical fire. The 22-year-old author fled to Manhattan, where he fell in among the city's rebels and outcasts, including queer Downtown figures Candy Darling, Jackie Curtis, and drag queen Dorian Corey. Trebay chronicles his salad days busing tables and posing for illustrators before he found his place as an editor at the Village Voice ("If you ever change a comma of mine again, I'll throw you out the window," one writer raged after Trebay's edits). The rambling anecdotes don't always move the narrative forward, but they coalesce into a rich portrait of the city and its characters. The result is an engrossing story of family dysfunction redeemed by self-reinvention. Photos. Agent: Lynn Nesbit, Janklow & Nesbit Assoc. (July)

A New York Times style reporter and critic recounts his colorful upbringing. Trebay opens with an account of a visit to his Long Island childhood home, where he lived when it caught fire in 1975. Although ostensibly in search of a suitcase of salvaged pictures, he writes, "What exactly I was looking for was not altogether clear." The same might be said of his memoir, driven not by narrative but searching emotion, namely, the desires to reckon with his youth and family and to record them, with photographs. His sentences are long and often languid, rife not with verbiage but the voice of a skilled and patient storyteller. He offers nuanced personal recollections, such as these about his mother, who died the same year as the fire: "I sometimes think perhaps she was less brave than indifferent to danger"; "What did she sound like? I strain to recall." By virtue of the fact that Trebay filters everything through his introspective gaze, it's occasionally difficult to feel present in the scenes he describes; that distance sometimes results in a formality heavier on facts than immediacy. While his father struck gold in the fragrance business, the author portrays him as untrustworthy, and the lack of steadiness had seismic, character-determining effects on the family. Writing about the time he spent as a teenager doing drugs with his sister, now estranged and in prison, he notes, "If no memory of transformed consciousness survives from those brief hallucinogenic years…it is clear at least that we were going to some lengths to attract the attention and, by inference, love of our self-absorbed and otherwise distracted parents." The most affecting part of this quest to piece the past together is the author's longing--and literal search through the ashes--for proof of love. A generous and deeply felt memoir. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.