Review by Booklist Review
At 28, Matousek lived in the glitzy, glamorous world of Andy Warhol's Factory, working as an editor of Interview and chronicling the rich, the famous, and the wanna-bes. Ten years later, anomie shriveled him inwardly; his world had become one filled with empty sensations and the devastation of AIDS. He went to India for spiritual enlightenment and to put meaning into a life scarred early by an abusive childhood, teenage prostitution, and violence. He writes of his journey movingly, without either self-pity or preaching, and often with humor, as when, having turned obsessively to a macrobiotic diet after testing positive for HIV, he sees the chef in a macrobiotic restaurant--"the thinnest person I had ever seen outside a hospital" --keel over dead into the turnip greens and kukicha tea for no apparent reason. His panic when he develops AIDS-related conditions pushes him further spiritually: "Terror is the door to enlightenment," he says. "There's a vitality in facing death. . . . It pushes you to travel fast and deep and wide." --Whitney Scott
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Death inspires a hip young New Yorker to quest for spiritual life in this searing memoir. During a vacation in Jamaica in the mid-1980s, Matousek realized that his life was about to undergo a cataclysm. At 28, he was an editor at the chic Manhattan magazine Interview. Yet despite success, he was sickened by the meaninglessness of his work; the sight of the magazine's founder, Andy Warhol, "ghostlike, his sharp dead eyes surveying his kingdom," did little to ease his soul. As Matousek and a college friend lazed on the beach, the author saw on his friend's foot a purple spot, a symptom of AIDS. Suddenly, Matousek "knew without question that the virus was in me"and that "there was not a minute to waste." He determined to gain a glimmer of enlightenment before he died. A guiding angel arrived in the form of Alexander Maxwell, a handsome young writer. The two became lovers, and Maxwell took Matousek to India, with a detour to Germany to meet Mother Meera, a young woman believed by many to be an incarnation of the Goddess. Through the subsequent decade of pain and quest also chronicled in this brave, beautiful and brilliantly observed work, Matousek never forgot her. Finally, he returned to Germany, where he found from Mother Meera confirmation that his own life is the only real path he has ever needed. Author tour. (Apr.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Kirkus Book Review
A professional glamour hound ditches his thankless career in magazine journalism and goes on a circuitous quest for spiritual comfort in this surprisingly engrossing, cant-free memoir. As a prized writer and editor at Andy Warhol's Interview magazine in the mid-'80s, Matousek hobnobbed with celebrities. But after a few years he began to feel oppressed by the shallow, glittery milieu. He gives a mesmerizing account of the horrifically dysfunctional upbringing that underpinned his malaise: a promiscuous, unstable mother, a father who abandoned the family when the author was four, one sister a suicide, another immensely, miserably overweight, a third mildly crippled and self-loathing. After a stint as a teen hustler, he made it through college and to Andy's Factory. As AIDS continually came closer to Matousek's life, grief and fear were added to his ennui. Finally a British novelist and all-around spiritual prod named Alexander Maxwell recognized Matousek's discontent and dragged him off to India, where he began an ongoing struggle with questions of faith and spiritual practice. Matousek writes matter-of-factly about his intensely unsettling experiences with trances, visions, and the mystical energy of certain gurus, and he is persuasive when relating his trouble relinquishing doubt. The chief distinction of Matousek's spiritual journey is the harrowing background against which it is set: The traumas of his childhood and the surreal sufferings of his friends with AIDS suggest a less hallucinatory echo of David Wojnarowicz's work, as if Wojnarowicz had exchanged his prophet's fury for optimism. Matousek describes his puzzled fascination as he came to terms with both his submerged capacity for sadism and the realization that he'd been the victim of childhood incest; he suggests that all the truths that he has embraced since his quest started have been stepping stones to spiritual enlightenment. The surprise is that Matousek can get away with such New Age musings and make them seem utterly down to earth, even inspiring. (Author tour)
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