



A Part of the Heart Can't Be Eaten
A Memoir
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- $29.99
Publisher Description
In A Part of the Heart Can’t Be Eaten, award-winning author, sex educator, filmmaker, and podcast host Tristan Taormino shares her coming-of-age story, revealing how her radical sexuality and unconventional career grew out of an extraordinary queer father-daughter relationship. Raised by a hard-working single mother on Long Island, Tristan got her sex ed from the 1980s TV show Solid Gold and The Joy of Sex. She spent summers at drag shows in Provincetown with her father, Bill, who had come out as gay in the mid-1970s. Her sexual identity bloomed during her college years at Wesleyan University, where she discovered her desire for butches and kinky sex.
Tristan’s world began to fall apart when her dad was diagnosed with AIDS. After a series of devastating events, she moved to the messy, glorious world of 1990s New York City. In the midst of grief and depression, she helped change queer sexual subculture with her zine Pucker Up, her infamous The Village Voice column, and her editorship of legendary lesbian porn magazine On Our Backs. After the publication of her first book, The Ultimate Guide to Anal Sex for Women, Tristan followed her own path that marked the beginning of her work as a trailblazing feminist pornographer.
After a lifetime of outrageous adventures, Tristan reflects on the bonds, loss, and mental-health struggles that shaped her. She weaves together history from her father’s unpublished memoir, exploring the surprising ways their personal patterns converge and diverge. Bracingly emotional and erotically charged, A Part of the Heart Can’t Be Eaten reveals the transformative power of queer pleasure and defiance.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Sex educator Taormino (50 Shades of Kink) traces her relationship with her gay father and the blossoming of her own queerness in this soul-baring memoir. Born on Long Island in 1971 and raised by her mother, Taormino began making visits to her father, Bill, in 1979, after he came out of the closet: the pair would spend the occasional summer together in Provincetown seeing drag shows and working in a leather shop. "Fascinated" by sex at Wesleyan University, the author fell in with the school's queer student organizations, where she discovered her own bisexuality and sexual adventurousness. After college, Taormino moved to New York City, and her father was diagnosed with AIDS. Depressed and already grieving him (he ended up dying in 1995), she decided her life's work "would be to write and teach people about sex," beginning with the zine Pucker Up in the mid-'90s and developing into regular speaking engagements and even directing and starring in pornography. Weaving in snippets of Bill's unpublished memoir, Taormino offers both a stirring tribute to her father and a moving acknowledgement that she "came of age in a time of more visibility and acceptance than he could have imagined." Her sexual frankness, while not for everyone, lends the proceedings a sting of authenticity. Open-minded readers will love this no-holds-barred portrait of family ties and personal liberation.