Ambivalence by Brian Dillon

Irish Memoir

Source – Subscription book

I have had a Fitzcarraldo subscription for several years. I have always picked the mix of fiction and non-fiction because I see the white Fitzcarraldo as books that are culturally important and challenging, and also as books I would never normally buy, so they are there to remind me to be more daring as a reader and to read books in translation.  So I have a few other Brian Dillon books.  But the reason I picked this one up is that it follows Brian growing up in Dublin in the late eighties and early nineties, and since he is three years older than me, I knew the events in the book and the times I could relate to. Plus, I am a sucker for coming-of-age literature, whether fiction or non-fiction.

4 He is not always alone on his excursions into town.

For at least a year he has been in love with his best friend,

S: his blue eyes and his blue hair, an androgyny that was once flagrant and recently is becoming fixed into a mode of being that is more obviously gay (still secretly gay) and from which, once they have left school, he will feel himself slowly excluded. For now they keep to a near-nightly routine of long gossipy phone calls in which classmates and teachers are torn apart for their dullness, poor taste and pitiful efforts at wit. On evenings when S does not phone, or fails to return B’s calls: agonies of abandonment. Since their early teens they have shared an expanding star-chart of camp coordinates: girl groups of the 1960s; via Boy George (the singer who to their schoolfriends they insisted was not gay) the autobiography of the movie star Frances Farmer, incarcerated and abused at a psychiatric institution; the vicious-affectionate tone of TV comedians (Julian Clary, Victoria Wood) they imitate on their annual visits to the Ideal Homes Exhibition.

Boy George was a groundbreaking figure in many ways

I think I am maybe far below the likes of Dillon in my ability to talk about books and my life, but this book is about his growing up, and for me, it is hard not to compare this life to my own. I didn’t lose my parents at the age he did.  But I did have them split when I was young. I have two sides to my life: my mum and stepfather,  a man who, if still alive, would be a Reform Party voter, a vile man who, in many ways, ruined my teen years with the way he got in my head.  Then my dad and my stepmom.  My dad is a very clever man in his field, an expert. He has, ever since I can remember, had a book in his hand.  He is a leisure reader, a fan of thrillers and westerns, but between him and my grandmother, an English teacher like Brian, I grew up in a world of books.  But for me, I read the old white men of American Lit: Updike, Roth, Hemingway, Steinbeck, and Bellow, and, of course, I have always loved Graham Greene and Anthony Burgess.  But for me, I never was adventurous enough to read people like Brian Read as a young man: Barthes, Benjamin, et al  .  Seeing those years in his eyes, and his journey in books, reminds me of how much I need to read, but also of how life takes us on our own paths. I say this as whenever I mention things like this it sounds as though I am putting myself down; no life is life; you can’t turn back time.  Anyway, back to the book, I really have not even spoken about it yet.  Anyway, another parallel is when Brian, as a young man, connects with Bowie, hence the title of the book and how Bowie helped people with the ambiguous nature of their gender and sexual identities at a time this was rarely touched upon. Of course, being a few years older, my Bowie was, dare I speak his name, Morrissey, a man I defended for too long, thinking that the 80s persona was the real persona of this singer. Anyway, he talked about gender roles back then.

• An idea of androgyny is the guiding principle of his aesthetics-and politics. He has never been so certain of anything as he is of the necessity of this and all related terms-ambiguity, ambivalence, equivocation, paradox, etc.—which sound weak and boring compared to the god or goddess androgyny. He tries to imagine what it would mean to translate this way of being into prose, into the texture of response to the world, into a morality to replace the one he has been taught but not believed in since the age of twelve. He believes in a kind of abstract androgyny, which would render the world somehow more subtle, less sure of itself, but also irradiated with style, an affront to settled states of being.

I remember Morrissey saying something similar back in the 80s to this sad the change anyway

Anyway, I haven’t really said much about the book; it is a great personal Bildungsroman about a man I need to read more from, which makes me want to renew my Fitzcarraldo subscription to read his other books.  Another thing I may do is go back and draw a reading list of books mentioned by Brian in the book as a small project as all us readers know there is nothing better than making a list even if it ends with the list or even if I get the books for a future date it will make me remeber this book and how life is full of books books form so much of our lives alongside family and music. from a singer to a book from a family member it all inter.  connects and then connects with us as readers, thus forming a never-ending chain of connections.  Well, that is how it feels to me, as that is the sort of reader I am a reader of memoirs, of times of music, of connections we all make. I think this is a must-read for anyone like me in love with books and being a reader.