My Pinup
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- £3.99
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- £3.99
Publisher Description
Marrying the memoir and essay forms while exploring desire, Prince, and racism, Hilton Als’s My Pinup expands and delivers love.
In this brilliant two-part memoir, the Pulitzer Prize–winning writer Hilton Als distills into one cocktail the deep and potent complexities of love and of loss, of Prince and of power, of desire and of race. It’s delicious and it’s got the kick of a mule, especially as Als swirls into his mix the downtown queer nightclub scene, the AIDS crisis, Prince’s ass in his tight little pants, an ill-fated peach pie, Dorothy Parker, and his desire for true love. Always surprising and stealthily—even painfully—moving, Als plumbs longing: “I inched closer to him as he danced to you, Prince. But already he was you, Prince, in my mind. He had the same coloring, and the same loneliness I wanted to fill with my admiration. I couldn’t love him enough. We were colored boys together. There is not enough of that in the world, Prince—but you know that. Still, when other people see that kind of fraternity they want to kill it. But we were so committed to each other, we never could work out what that violence meant. There was so much love between us. Why didn’t anyone want us to share it?”
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Pulitzer winner Als (White Girls) brings serpentine prose and acerbic wit to this slim, two-part take on Prince, desire, and loss. Als fashions Prince as the avatar of his own lovers, as well as Als's many changing selves ("I saw his difference. It was like yours, Prince. Was I in love with him or with you when I met you backstage in St. Louis or saw you in Texas?"), and these strands of sexuality mingle with confusion and injustices, among them Prince and other Black artists' forfeiture of their own work to their record labels. Meanwhile, Als examines how poet and cultural critic Dorothy Parker haunted Prince as the subject of his 1987 song, and by extension Als as he tries to understand Parker's role in Prince's life and his own; she could be the lover that they both seek, or the self that they portray to others. Als also recounts watching Prince pander to white audiences and producers and then return to a more recognizable version of himself with his 2004 album Musicology. Don't be fooled by the page count, Als conjures entire worlds between these covers. Readers are sure to find pleasure and pain in this bite-size delight.
