Do Something
Coming of Age Amid the Glitter and Doom of '70s New York
3 of 3 copies available
“In his beautiful memoir, Do Something, Guy Trebay paints a picture of a vanished, pre-AIDS Gotham that’s both gritty and dazzling.” —The New York Times Book Review
Born in the Bronx, Guy Trebay was raised in an atmosphere of privilege on Long Island’s North Shore after his entrepreneurial father struck business gold with Hawaiian Surf, a wildly successful cologne company that capitalized on the optimism of the 1960s as marketed to “an adventurous new breed of men.’’ But behind the facade of material prosperity lay the emotional disarray of a household dominated by a charismatic, con artist father, a glamorous yet lost and careless mother, a family haunted by tragedy. By the time Trebay established a foothold at the fringes of Andy Warhol’s Factory and the diverse artistic tribes that thrived in Manhattan in that pre-digital era, his father had lost his fortune, his younger sister had been arrested for armed robbery and fled underground, the family house was in ashes, and his mother was dead.
Unschooled and on his own, Trebay became a striver, wending his way through a seemingly apocalyptic landscape populated by a vibrant cast of characters, including washed-up Hollywood screenwriters of the ’30s; Warhol superstars like Jackie Curtis and Candy Darling; fashion geniuses like Charles James; and emerging artists, filmmakers, writers, designers, photographers, and deejays who would powerfully influence mainstream culture in the decades to come.
-
Creators
-
Publisher
-
Release date
June 25, 2024 -
Formats
-
OverDrive Listen audiobook
- ISBN: 9780593741627
- File size: 186962 KB
- Duration: 06:29:30
-
-
Languages
- English
-
Reviews
-
May 6, 2024
A young man leaves his fraying suburban family to find a new one among New York City’s gay demimonde in this fascinating memoir from New York Times style reporter Trebay (In the Place to Be). Trebay opens the narrative with an account of his family’s disintegration in the 1960s and ’70s under a variety of pressures, including his parents’ marital problems, which the children responded to by developing a taste for drugs and petty theft. It all fell apart in 1975, when Trebay’s mother died of cancer and the family house on Long Island burned down due to an electrical fire. The 22-year-old author fled to Manhattan, where he fell in among the city’s rebels and outcasts, including queer Downtown figures Candy Darling, Jackie Curtis, and drag queen Dorian Corey. Trebay chronicles his salad days busing tables and posing for illustrators before he found his place as an editor at the Village Voice (“If you ever change a comma of mine again, I’ll throw you out the window,” one writer raged after Trebay’s edits). The rambling anecdotes don’t always move the narrative forward, but they coalesce into a rich portrait of the city and its characters. The result is an engrossing story of family dysfunction redeemed by self-reinvention. Photos. Agent: Lynn Nesbit, Janklow & Nesbit Assoc. -
Novelist Richard Powers calls narrator Edoardo Ballerini the very best, and many listeners would agree. Ballerini's range is impressive, but he excels with the difficult, the literary, the opaque, and the autobiographical. He brings particular ease and purposefulness to this memoir by NEW YORK TIMES style critic Guy Trebay portraying his early years in Manhattan in the 1970s. Wonderfully rendered and richly detailed, this is a story many narrators would be tempted to overplay. Ballerini's great skill is that the more polished and subtle the narrative, the more natural and at ease he sounds. Effortlessly, it seems, Ballerini captures the essence of Trebay's tone and sense of perishability in a narrative that seems loosely connected yet passes to the ear in an unbroken current. D.A.W. Winner of AudioFile Earphones Award © AudioFile 2024, Portland, Maine
-