Darling: A Spiritual Autobiography
*Starred Review* Paradox has always been at the heart of Rodriguez’s brilliant personal essays, whether he was pondering, in Hunger of Memory (1982), the conflict between public and private selves; or defining, in Days of Obligation (1992), the split in his multicultural soul between his American faith in the future and his Mexican sense of the tragic past; or dissecting, in Brown (2002), the incendiary topic of race in America, “in hopes of undermining the notion of race of America.” In Brown, Rodriguez described himself as a “Queer Catholic Indian Spaniard in a temperate Chinese city in a fading blond state in a post-Protestant nation.” Now he digs still deeper into all those contradictions, examining his continuing belief in God and in the Catholic Church in the context of his life as a gay man in the early years of the twenty-first century, years, he says, that have been defined by religious extremism, rising public atheism, and what he calls “digital distraction.” And, yet, in the wake of September 11, Rodriguez found himself searching for commonality rather than difference between the “religions of the desert” and traveling to Jerusalem, “the corrupt model of the eventual City of God,” to find in the “uninhabitability of the desert” the shared heritage that leads Jews, Christians, and Muslims to seek another place, a green paradise. Rodriguez continues to find meaning in both the desert and the idea of paradise, and while his wide-ranging, erudite, passionate, and thought-provoking essays range over a wealth of seemingly disparate topics (gay marriage, Las Vegas, women, California, newspapers, technology), they all reflect his remarkable ability to penetrate the contradictions of our lives, reveling in them as much as understanding them. “We gather,” he says of his congregation, “in belief of one big thing: that we matter, somehow.” --Bill Ott