num_pages: 224
description: "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.
language: English
title: Firebird
titlecomplete: Firebird
genres: LGBT, Autobiography, Gay, Biography Memoir, Biography, Coming Of Age, Memoir, Poetry, Nonfiction, Queer
ratings_count: 540
awards: awardedAt: 946713600000
name: Stonewall Book Award
category: Nonfiction, awardedAt: 915177600000
name: Lambda Literary Award
category: Gay Biography/Autobiography
publisher: Harper Perennial