Mama's Boy
A Story from Our Americas
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- 10,99 €
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- 10,99 €
Beschreibung des Verlags
This heartfelt, deeply personal memoir explores how a celebrated filmmaker and activist and his conservative Mormon mother built bridges across today’s great divides—and how our stories hold the power to heal. • Adapted as an HBO documentary now streaming on HBO Max.
“A beautifully written, utterly compelling account of growing up poor and gay with a thrice married, physically disabled, deeply religious Mormon mother, and the imprint this irrepressible woman made on the character of Dustin Lance Black.” —Jon Krakauer, bestselling author of Missoula and Under the Banner of Heaven
Dustin Lance Black wrote the Oscar-winning screenplay for Milk and helped overturn California’s anti–gay marriage Proposition 8, but as an LGBTQ activist he has unlikely origins—a conservative Mormon household outside San Antonio, Texas. There he was raised by a single mother who, as a survivor of childhood polio, endured brutal surgeries as well as braces and crutches for life. Despite the abuse and violence of two questionably devised Mormon marriages, she imbued Lance with her inner strength and irrepressible optimism.
When Lance came out to his mother at age twenty-one, she initially derided his sexuality as a sinful choice. It may seem like theirs was a house destined to be divided—and at times it was. But in the end, they did not let their differences define them or the relationship that had inspired two remarkable lives. This heartfelt, deeply personal memoir explores how a mother and son built bridges across great cultural divides—and how our stories hold the power to heal.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
A gay man and his disabled, homophobic mother bond despite their differences in this sometimes overwrought, sometimes luminous memoir. Black, the Oscar-winning screenwriter of Milk, centers his life story on his mother, Anne, a Louisiana share-cropper's daughter whose legs were paralyzed by polio when she was two; thanks to her dogged work ethic and stoicism, she defied doctors' predictions by learning to walk on crutches and bearing three children, weathered abusive husbands, and became a laboratory supervisor. Black's emotional attachment to his mother was deep, but their membership in the Mormon Church made him hide his homosexuality from her; going on to film school, Hollywood, and marriage-equality activism, he worried that the gulf between him and his conservative clan might be unbridgeable. Black devotes much space to tremulous fretting over his blue-on-red coming-out saga, but the results are not very dramatic: his family even the Texarkana Baptist branch takes the revelation well, and Anne, despite a few previous homophobic comments, is soon socializing with his gay friends. (Black's bigger problem is with gay moderates who wanted to slow-walk the marriage movement.) But the book shines in its portrait of the vibrant, indomitable Anne trudging determinedly over every obstacle, and in intimate scenes of everyday family heartaches and triumphs against the odds. Photos.
