Mean boys A personal history

Spike magazine editor Mak debuts with an intellectually rigorous memoir-in-essays that pairs reflections on his difficult sexual coming-of-age with sharp musings on the digital era. Growing up gay and Asian in Southern California during the 1990s and 2000s, Mak struggled to fit in. He came out to his family at 29, and was rejected by his evangelical parents, who refused to accept that he wasn't straight. Struggling with feelings of inferiority, Mak moved to Berlin and threw himself into the city's druggy, sex-driven club culture. For years, he prayed at the altar of cool, aspiring to be part of something akin to Andy Warhol's Factory. Instead, he found self-loathing and addiction, and eventually returned home to treat "unspecified psychosis." In "My Father, the Minister," Mak recounts his father's eventual contrition for rejecting his homosexuality, and compares cruising bars to church, with "gods in all those saunas and sex clubs who had fallen short of the glory." In the title essay, he analyzes Norwegian bomber and mass shooter Anders Behring Breivik's manifesto and finds uncomfortable parallels to his own personal insecurity and desire to align himself with whiteness. Throughout, Mak delves into the 2018 Cambridge Analytica scandal, online fashion magazines, and myriad other corners of internet culture to illustrate the contemporary obsessions with status and belonging that have long plagued him. By turns heartbreaking, enlightening, and frenzied, this burrows deep in the reader's psyche and doesn't let go. Agent: Noah Ballard, Verve Talent & Literary. (Apr.)

A young, queer, Chinese American writer "well versed in the theoretical discourse" takes on fashion, social media, and urban nightlife. Mak has published nonfiction in a wide range of media, from Artforum and Art in America to the Guardian and the Nation, and he's a co-founder of a writing and performance series called Writing on Raving. Most of these pieces began as internet essays intended for friends, derived from extended Facebook posts that dealt in gossip, fashion, and sex. The author worked in the New York advertising world and then "came of age" in Berlin's club scene before drug addiction and a psychotic breakdown brought him back to his parents' home to recuperate. Mak recounts his experience in the fashion world as often being the "smartest person in any room" but also the "most invisible," and he offers trenchant observations about the emasculation of the Asian American male and identity-based rejection. His insider status gives him insight into how new-media models emerged from fashion blogs and the street, and how social media and the iPhone brought about the "collapse of fashion time." The author also writes powerfully about being sexually assaulted, describing how the traumatic experience led him to surrender to nightclub life "to distract myself" in a milieu where he felt safest in underground rooms. In Berlin, Mak introduces readers to "a lost generation who had entered an evaporated job market after the 2008 financial crisis." Throughout the book, this "skinny Chinese kid from the suburbs" offers a wealth of observations on topics ranging from transgressive literature (Jean Genet, Siouxsie Sioux) to the power of the erotic ("All fear is erotic, motivated by compulsion over reason, and perhaps the greatest fear, in the evangelical mind, is the fear of the erotic"). After fashion, career, psychosis, and recovery, a personal essayist finds "grace in the ordinary." Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.