New and Noteworthy Books

Here are three memoirs that have caught my eye in recent weeks ...

"Dating Bradford: A Memoir" by Bradford Noble

DESCRIPTION: Dating is awkward. Sometimes it’s fun and exciting, sometimes romantic or hopeful, but often it’s demeaning and fraught with embarrassment. In New York, dates are served raw. Without the smart ‘n’ savvy sauce, one may need to choke them down with a shot of vodka for digestion. Dating Bradford is about searching for the recipe to make dating appetizing, and the pursuit of love on the long and lonely road to romance.

About the author: Frustrated with the NYC dating scene, Bradford started writing stories about his dates to share with his friends. The more stories he shared, the more stories they loved, and his audience soon grew to seventy thousand in a weekly column on Gay.com and PlanetOut. In his professional life Bradford Noble thought he was all that as an “International Celebrity, Fashion, and Advertising Photographer” for twenty years. He had a great stint of it, traveling around the world shooting all kinds of famous people and making a bunch of money until it all ran to shit and he finally stopped giving a fuck. These days Bradford lives in La Jolla, California, working as a Life Coach specializing in dating and relationships, teaching photography, and working towards his master’s degree in social work with which he hopes to continue to help people discover themselves in relation to others.

Order HERE.

"Tender" by D. Clifford Hill

DESCRIPTION: D. Clifford Hill’s first book, "Tender," is a poetic, brutally self honest and colorfully descriptive noir memoir of living through PTSD (Post Traumatic Stress Disorder) in the Tenderloin of San Francisco. After surviving a workplace shooting he just wants to feel something, anything at all; he wants to rise above the flat of medications, to move beyond depression, to be free of the constant anxiety the gunman is at hand. The men in his life ravage the carnage of his vulnerability; repeatedly he is left numbed and alone until a homeless man, Darnell, steps into his life and love, in its trembling aimless dysfunction, binds their lives together.

Order HERE.

"Damage Control: A Memoir of Outlandish Privilege, Loss and Redemption" by Sergei Boissier

DESCRIPTION: A powerful blazingly honest memoir told with humor and panache about a mother and son finding each other again after years of estrangement. A coming-of-age story of outrageous excess, glamour, entitlement and grand delusion, lived above the fray and over the top. A gay man's journey through the joys and perils of his generation, coming out in the early eighties in the shadows of a terrifying disease that would devastate so many, surviving tremendous loss and culminating in his decision to adopt a child as a single parent. When Sergei, a psychotherapist who has been living in Paris for the past decade, discovers that his mother is terminally ill, he decides to leave his practice and his life to be by her side, in the hope of healing the bitterness and discord before it is too late.

This memoir offers a fascinating and disturbing portrayal of a glamorous woman whose life has been one of great elegance and luxury, along with disillusionment, grandiosity, seduction and self-destruction: her childhood in pre-Castro Cuba, a mythical island paradise; her marriage at the age of eighteen to a dashing young Swiss man and their subsequent exile; her frantic and desperate resolve to create a mythical life of her own and pass on the traditions of aristocracy to her children, all the while leading a double life and suffering feelings of intense longing and frustration and guilt which eventually cause her to destroy and walk away from everything that she has been raised to want and expect out of life.

 Order HERE.