Openly Bob, by Bob Smith (1997)
This is a collection of humorous essays by comedian and writer Bob Smith, also the author of Growing Up Gay. The jokes are more witty than hilarious ("guilting the lily" and "melo-traumatic"), and it takes a dozen pages or so to pick up the style and relax into it. After that I had about one amused snort per page, one laugh-out-loud per chapter. The jokes that fall short of funny do so because they're trying too hard, not because they're not trying hard enough. In fact, the whole book stops about one step from the edge of taking itself too seriously and/or being too clever for its own good. Some representative examples of what the book is like:
"At twenty-three, I still lived at home and had reached the age when that admission is not a statement of address but of arrested development."
"Someone had once made the unforgivable mistake of complimenting his voice and consequently, when he spoke, it sounded like he patted each word on the back with his tongue before bidding it adieu."
"Opal's hair is mousy brown with highlights of gerbil and hamster."
Though Bob Smith is a comedian, this book is not the typical transcribed comedy routine masquerading as a book. The essays are friendly and interesting, on a wide variety of topics such as sex education, bird-watching, and auditioning for a role. I enjoyed reading it and caution you away from it only if you're offended by gay issues.
Growing Up Brady, by Barry Williams with Chris Kreski (1992)
Acting talent has nothing to do with writing talent. Furthermore, acting talent has nothing to do with quality of character. Barry Williams might have been a cute Greg Brady, but his memoirs reveal him to be a bratty child, an obnoxious teenager, and a bitchy grown-up. His catty and critical comments about other actors and shows made me uncomfortable. His overdependence on italics for emphasis, overuse of slang such as "Y'see," and frequent one-sentence paragraphs made me tired. His references to the fights between Robert Reed (Mike Brady) and the show's writers made me wince. His stories about his date and near sexual encounter with Florence Henderson (Carol Brady) and his on-again-off-again romance with Maureen McCormick (Marcia Brady) made me queasy. Nevertheless, I'm recommending the book to Brady Bunch fans until a better book comes along. Skim the first 168 pages for the good parts and then go to the end where there's a synopsis of each show along with a couple of comments.
Plays Well With Others, by Allan Gurganus (1997)
Allan Gurganus has an uncanny talent for writing fiction so realistic you'll be repeatedly checking the library tag to make sure a non-fiction book wasn't accidentally misshelved. He writes in first-person singular, a style I normally dislike in fiction for its tendency to overuse colloquialisms in the misguided hopes that these will give the text a more realistic flavor. Something about the way Allan Gurganus writes eliminates all such sweeping complaints from my repertoire: it's not the writing style that's to blame, it's the authors who try it unsuccessfully. After reading this book about a gay 47-year-old North Carolinian man who lived as a promiscuous and struggling writer in a group of equally promiscuous and artistic friends in New York City when AIDS first hit---then looking at the back cover to see an author photo of a man who looks to be somewhere around that same age, lives in North Carolina, and is of course a writer---it's difficult not to leap to conclusions. Or, rather, it would be difficult if I hadn't recently read Oldest Living Confederate Widow Tells All, in which the equally convincing narrator is a woman nearly 100 years old, and an essay on a meeting in heaven that had me wondering if Allan Gurganus could possibly have the real transcript. Since A.G. can't possibly be an old woman, a middle-aged man, and an ancient Angel Imperial-First-Class, you're forced to wonder if he's any of them. Aside from my continued amazement at A.G.'s unusual writing talent, there is much also to be said for his content. Plays Well With Others is, as mentioned above, a story of the early days of AIDS. More than that, however, it's a story about the community as it was just before AIDS appeared, when the disease wasn't yet named or understood and stories of the first AIDS victims were more like urban legends. The community of friends shown in all their dogged persistence and raw deeds may make you feel a horrible deep pity as you watch from a decades-wiser standpoint, knowing how close they are to near-extinction. You may find a new, richer, stronger abhorrence for the unfortunately common "Well, it's only killing off the gays" attitude: by the time people start dying, you'll know them well enough through the first-person singular descriptions that it won't matter what they did while they were alive. Just as in Oldest Living Confederate Widow Tells All, you should be aware that Plays Well With Others doesn't avoid strong words or difficult situations.