Sad Old F****t
A Novel
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- $11.99
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
A daring foray into the groundbreaking genre of autobiographical fiction
Sad Old F****t is the absorbing, sometimes embarrassing, always entertaining story of a lonely, self-obsessed, selfish, deluded, impotent 62-year-old gay man named Sky Gilbert who — despite his best intentions — cannot help but become a stereotype.
Sky’s main claim to fame is founding Buddies in Bad Times Theatre in 1979. But since leaving Buddies, he’s fallen on hard times. Sky Gilbert is no longer even remotely famous. He has to fight off his own bitterness as audiences for his plays steadily dwindle. Theatre people dismiss his work as old news and point to the fact that he teaches at the University of Guelph as proof: his descent into academia clearly signals his failure as an artist.
All along the way, the book questions our truths and celebrates their mutability. What is really true about each of us? What do we actually know about ourselves? And how much, it asks, of our own personal truth is based on fact — and how much is rooted in fiction?
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Prolific playwright and novelist Gilbert unsuccessfully steps into autobiographical fiction with this mixed bag of 16 monologue-like bursts of prose. As the subject, narrator, and author, he creates a semi-fictional double who is lonely, resentful, alcoholic, prone to over-sharing, seething, and often explosive with complaint. Aside from repeatedly listing the indignities of being 62 years old, the narrator expresses an overwhelming sense of bitterness because he has been cheated of deserved fame and recognition. He rails against heterosexual male critics who avoid reading his books because they fear the seductiveness of his homosexuality and gay reviewers who have panned his work because they are threatened by his talent. He vents about overrated playwrights, actors, and musicals, theater-world homophobia, monstrous nurses who mistreated him during his recovery from an operation, and newly "bourgeois" Toronto (because "all the people who live there now are stupid rich suburban people"). Other, funnier anecdotes from this loudly self-proclaimed "out slutty drag queen faggot teacher" detail sexual adventuring, including complicated bathhouse trysts, literally scatological mishaps, and a surreal trip into the U.S. Abrasive, self-pitying, and furious, the wearying narrator seems intent on self-marginalization. It's a counterintuitive strategy. And when he quips, "I mean, who cares?" the reader will likely agree.
