Review by New York Times Review
THOSE OF US who were raised the only child of a single parent know how intense the relationship can be. Different days you may play the role of child, parent, sibling or emotional crutch - some days all at once. As you get through it, you try to find space for yourself, to become someone outside the all-enveloping world that your parent has provided. This is the main struggle driving iO Tillett Wright's debut memoir, "Darling Days." Tillett Wright was raised in the bohemian East Village of the 1980s and '90s by Rhonna, a sometime model and fulltime "glamazon" who preferred spending money on dance classes rather than on bills or groceries. In this household, Tillett Wright knows love but also instability. "Sleep doesn't happen much in the house, what with the plays and things late at night, plus Ma is in a real bad way," the child observes. "It's like she has a night personaEty and a day personality." Tillett Wright grows up skinny and scrappy, able to score meals off neighborhood friends, then shimmy up the side of a building to get into the apartment undetected. Born female, Tillett Wright also grows up identifying as a boy. At 6 he turns to his dad, tells him he's now a boy and, for the next eight years, dresses and passes as such, avoiding single-sex bathrooms and locker rooms for fear of being found out. Neither parent objects to this rewriting of gender. "Ma doesn't think it's strange that I live as a boy. Boys have all the fun, girls have tons of restraints," Tillett Wright observes. But classmates bully him, with one student wrapping a hand around his neck in a stairwell to check for an Adam's apple. Tillett Wright, an L.G.B.T. activist and host of MTV's "Suspect," now identifies as a transgender man. It's Ma's benign neglect that is at the source of Tillett Wright's malnourishment and general malaise, yet she's the one who fights hardest for her "kitty." Their relationship, though later strained by brutal fights, is always close. "We are some kind of twins," Tillett Wright tells his mother in the letter that prefaces the memoir, "able to see each other in a room of closed eyes, able to hear each other in a world of silence." Twins or not, as a child Tillett Wright longed for regular meals and a real bed, not the broken army cot his mother finds for him on Canal Street. He fantasizes about finding a way to Eve with his "Poppa" in Europe without "stabbing my mother, my best friend, in the throat" by ratting her out to a school counselor. The emotional heart of the book lives within this tension - between taking care of his controlling and needy mother and taking care of himself. In this struggle, Tillett Wright is cleareyed but compassionate. "Darling Days" begins strong. The East Village of Tillett Wright's childhood is especially vivid: "Our building repels 'normal' people. They'd have to love cockroaches, scalding radiators and thin walls ... they would have to establish their own niche in the zoo and defend it." The menagerie includes an emaciated recluse who collects pianos, a pair of retired porn stars who reign over the building and his mother's rotating cast of boyfriends "with broken teeth and crooked minds." But as we move further into the narrative, and deeper into the trials of Tillet Wright's adolescence, his perspective narrows. Though passionately felt and described, his struggles can feel overdetailed ; they'd benefit from the insights of an older, wiser narrator. To make reference to Vivian Gornick, it's too much situation, not enough story. I sometimes wished TiEett Wright would step back from the roEer coaster of new schools and, later, new lovers to give us a broader view on the changes to his city, his community and especially his fallible but fascinating parents. While he was living his life, history was also happening, and the inclusion of that history could enlarge his memoir. Nevertheless, it's hard not to root for TiEett Wright when he finally comes into his own, and especially as he finds love with women, accepting a queer identity he'd long feared and resisted: "I don't want to wear my tragedies on my skin, in my teeth, in my walk. I want something different than what I'm inheriting, but I'm going to have to make that happen for myself." ALYSIA ABBOTT is the author of the memoir "Fairyland."
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [October 23, 2016]
Review by Booklist Review
Artist, activist, and actor Wright recalls the first 22 years of her turbulent life, focusing on her toxic relationship with her single-parent glamazon mother, whose default emotion was rage and whose life was punctuated by psychotic episodes. She also reveals that when she was six, she announced she was now a boy whom she named Ricky. She continued to live as Ricky until she was 14. In the meantime, she and her mother lived a haphazard, bohemian, often impoverished existence in New York until Wright was sent to Germany to live with her father. Once again presenting as a girl though an androgynous one she was sent to a boarding school in England where she discovered her attraction to girls as well as boys. Returning to New York, she started a magazine though how remains a mystery and became a drug runner and user. Clearly one of the book's strong points is the author's candor. However, readers will decide for themselves whether that ultimately makes her a sympathetic star in the story of her boundary-testing life.--Cart, Michael Copyright 2016 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Genderqueer activist and writer Wright (Lose My Number) aims to create the next great New York City memoir, but stumbles along the way. Wright's tale of growing up in Manhattan in the late 1980s and '90s, is in broad strokes a tale of love and loss-both referring to her mother Rhonna, a force of nature whose fierce, unconditional love for her child morphs over years to become an abusive, substance-addicted relationship. That chaos bleeds into all theaters (sometimes literally-both Wright and Rhonna are performers) of Wright's life. The book's most vital aspect is its exploration of growing up gender-variant, and Wright's passionate descriptions of her fear of gendered bathrooms and locker rooms, self-baffling relationship with sex and sexuality, and attempts to "pass" as a boy from the age of six have never been more timely. The prose is beautiful and aches with emotion. However, Wright may put off her transgender readers with her casual use of transmisogynist slurs. Cisgender readers will derive a great deal of insight into the developing mind of a trans child. (Sept.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review
At times, this memoir feels disjointed and frenetic, but that is mainly because Wright's life has been disjointed and frenetic. Brought up by a single mother in early 1990s New York, Wright learned to deal with a bohemian lifestyle early on. This is a story of the author's loving but frustrating relationship with a mother who marches to the beat of her own drum; it is also about the harmful effects of gentrification and drug addiction. At one point, the family is forced out of their apartment by a housing management agency, and the ensuing drama demonstrates what it's like to be displaced for the sake of higher rents. In the midst of all this, Wright struggles with gender identity, dressing as a boy called Ricky, and later, grappling with sexuality when a first crush blossoms. Bouncing from home to home, school to school, and later, parent to parent, the author eventually understands the importance of taking charge of one's own life and even more importantly, of being true to oneself. VERDICT Readers interested in studies of gender identity, seeing a different side of New York City, and memoirs about surviving difficult situations will enjoy. [See Prepub Alert, 3/28/16.]-Caitlin Kenney, Niagara Falls P.L, NY © Copyright 2016. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review
A gender nonconforming cultural impresario recalls a life marked by drugs, displacement, a mentally ill mother, and rare but cherished pockets of solace.Nothing about Wright's three-decade life has come easy, as this eventful if narratively loose memoir has it, including her own birthher mother endured more than 35 hours of labor and needed to be ferried through a crowd of homeless men in her scruffy East Village neighborhood. Wright's mother, Rhonna, was a head-turning model and dancer, and Wright followed in her footsteps as a child actress. Stability was endlessly elusive: Wright's parents split early, Rhonna was booted from their public-housing apartment, and she was prone to angry, overprotective rages when it came to her daughter. The term "daughter" is complicated as well. Though she was born a girl, Wright decided to "become a boy" when she was 6 and eventually dispensed with gender distinctions entirely. Externally, this created a host of anxieties regarding classmates and the boys and girls to which the author was attracted. Internally, Wright was a roiling sea, getting kicked out of various schools and slipping into drug-soaked jags of self-loathing. For all that struggle, though, rhetorically, the author puts on a brave face throughout the memoir, writing with a street-wise cool even when she discusses turning her mom in to the child welfare authorities or discovering her father's heroin habit. "The foundation of my personality is the dance of regaining my balance from slamming into rules," writes the authorwhich is why she's not much for delivering familiar lectures about gender identity or surviving a tough childhood. It's unclear how this engagingly reckless soul found the poise to launch a publishing, acting, and writing career; she just seemed to be doing it by her late teens. If Wright can pull it off, there's hope for just about everybody. An earnest and heartfelt memoir cloaked under a battle-toughened exterior. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
