Title: Johnny Golightly comes home
Description: "For years I'd been struggling with an identity crisis", says the slight, immaculately dressed Boerma as he plunges a fork into a slice of carrot cake topped with a blob of cream and a pink bougainvillaea petal. "My mother was English, my father Dutch; I was gay, while the Nelspruit community I grew up in was macho; I had fabulous visions of Parisian glamour, but I lived in Hicksville; and I had privilege, while my black friends were oppressed." When John-Anthony Boerma, in exile in Holland, put down Truman Capote's Breakfast at Tiffany's, his checkerboard life fell into place - Holly Golightly, the central character, was him. This was the first of several identities that the artist assumed. Pat Hopkins tells the story of this eccentric man in a personal story that at times becomes intertwined with his own story. The result is a very personal and intriguing memoir of a writer describing an artist who leads him on a dance of discovery.
Subjects: Authorship, Conceptual art, Artists, Biography, Eccentrics and eccentricities, Self-realization
Places: South Africa
People: John Anthony Boerma, Pat Hopkins (1954-)