Firebird: A Memoir

"A beautifully written, hallucinatorily evocative memoir of growing up gay in baby-boom America."  — Newsweek

In his powerful autobiography, Firebird, Mark Doty tells the story of a ten-year-old in a top hat, cane, and red chiffon scarf, interrupted while belting out Judy Garland's "Get Happy" by his alarmed mother at the bedroom door, exclaiming, "Son, you're a boy!"

Firebird presents us with a heroic little boy who has quite enough worries without discovering that his dawning sexuality is the Wrong One. A self-confessed "chubby smart bookish sissy with glasses and a Southern accent," Doty grew up on the move, the family following his father's engineering work across America-from Tennessee to Arizona, Florida to California. A lyrical, heartbreaking comedy of one family's dissolution through the corrosive powers of alcohol, sorrow, and thwarted desire, Firebird is also a wry evocation of childhood's pleasures and terrors, a comic tour of American suburban life, and a testament to the transformative power of art.

In Firebird, Mark Doty tells the story of a ten-year-old in a top hat, cane, and red chiffon scarf, interrupted while belting out Judy Garland's "Get Happy" by his alarmed mother at the bedroom door, exclaiming, "Son, you're a boy!"

Firebird presents us with a heroic little boy who has quite enough worries without discovering that his dawning sexuality is the Wrong One. A self-confessed "chubby smart bookish sissy with glasses and a Southern accent," Doty grew up on the move, the family following his father's engineering work across America-from Tennessee to Arizona, Florida to California. A lyrical, heartbreaking comedy of one family's dissolution through the corrosive powers of alcohol, sorrow, and thwarted desire, Firebird is also a wry evocation of childhood's pleasures and terrors, a comic tour of American suburban life, and a testament to the transformative power of art.

"With Firebird . . . Doty has written his most satisfying book . . . . [He] has elevated the story of his troubled family to the stature of myth, and in the process he has written an American classic." - Salon

"The poet's beautifully written, halucinatorily evocative memoir of growing up gay in baby-boom America." - Newsweek

"Doty writes with the characteristic Zen-calm you find also in his gorgeous poetry." - Los Angeles Times Book Review

"A lyrical, heartfelt and ultimately haunting account. . . . It is a pleasure to read a memoir that eschews the outsized dramas of recent confessional volumes. . . .Firebird convincingly evokes the isolation and cruelty of childhood, the potent blend of torment and pride experienced by those who sense, from an early age, that they are different." - Washington Post Book World

"By the end of Mark Doty's exquisite memoir. Firebird, you'll have trouble believing you haven't read a brilliantly plotted novel by a master of fiction. But no made-up story could ever be as gripping as the one Doty tells, And few novelists could tell it this well." - San Francisco Chronicle

"By turns lyrically comic and deeply sad." - Out Magazine

"Supple, powerful reading. . . .[Doty] immerses his readers—at first in a leisurely manner, then with gathering intensity—in a gay coming of age complicated by complete family meltdown." - New York Times Book Review