“Do I contradict myself? Very well then I contradict myself, (I am large, I contain multitudes.)” ― Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass 

 The problem for any memoirist—who am I. Whitman famously pointed out we are all many things. Different moments may call upon us to be one self or another. But at any given moment, we are mostly one thing. Otherwise we are madness—self contradicting. Reading DO SOMETHING I felt caught up in contradictions and frankly was somewhat mad about it. Mad because there is a lot of interest here that could have been quite compelling. Opportunity lost. 

 There are two books here. There is the family memoir of tragedy and pain and there is the search for selfhood in 1970’s New York amidst the “Glitter & Doom” alternative families centered around drag, fashion and art. The cover and promotional push of the book is focusing on the “Glitter & Doom” portion of the book—and admittedly why I entered and won my copy from a Goodreads Giveaway. The author’s heart however is clearly with the family memoir. The “Glitter & Doom” portion almost feels like bait to get the publisher interested—and it feels like there was pressure to push that part of the book closer to the beginning than it should have been. In the early part of the book the author foreshadows the trauma of his mother’s death and when she ultimately does die—we suddenly cut to another world without a moment to feel the loss. The whole book feels oddly cut and pasted like all the paragraphs fell on the floor and then were hurriedly put back on an available page. There are no chapters. Few natural transitions. The narrative felt like someone else writing your biography based on the random conversations you’ve had over time. 

This structure is confusing enough—then throw multitudes of dizzying run-on sentences and constant throw backs and forwards (WHAT I DIDN’T KNOW THEN, LATER WE WOULD KNOW, BUT THAT’S A STORY FOR LATER) and it all starts to blur. People come and go with some getting mini biographies but many barely remarked upon. I still don’t know who Paula was and he apparently lived with her for many years (was it one or two or ten who knows). I had a similar experience where I left a family that had kind of just dissolved and transitioned to a new diverse found family. I knew at the time and certainly know now in retrospect what was happening. This may have been referenced once late in the book as a throwaway but certainly is not the spine of the book as it could/should have been. I loved meeting all his glam friends and feeling the world they lived in but it all felt episodic and disconnected. 

Maybe this book was whittled down to its slim 240 pages. That would explain passages like his discussion of working at Andy Warhol’s InterView magazine and saying he never became close to Warhol but of course he wanted to. This made me scream, “what do you mean of course?” He had barely spoken of Warhol specifically before that or after so there is no context for such a statement. I know there is a certain flightiness of youth—flitting from one thing to the next but that shouldn’t be reflected in the narrative discussing that youth. 

At the beginning of the book a lot of time is put into setting up the recovery of some family photos as if these would be referred to throughout the book. There are photos throughout the book, would have loved more, but only a couple are from this cache. One more disjointed aspect of the book. It’s as if the stories are stones that the author is skimming on the water from the shore. Some stories go straight into the water never gaining air. Others skip along the surface, some for quite a while, taking the reader along but all ultimately sink at the hands of a sudden transition or confusing dead end.