![]() ![]() This is really the beginning of the end for the people who live in this building, and it seems to be the beginning of the end for Rhonna Wright, too. Or what it means to my mom, for whom comfort itself is a dirty word. I’m thinking of the red-haired, pothead leprechaun with six pianos downstairs, and what comfort might mean to him, a kind of joy inconceivable to the man now speaking in American Dream bullshit platitudes. He tries to word this carefully, but when he says “comfortable”, half a dozen people snort and snicker. All the tenants will be temporarily relocated during the renovations to equally comfortable apartments until you can be moved back into your new houses.’ …’Unfortunately for all of us, either way the city is stepping in and putting its foot down. One day we are minding our own business in the asshole of the universe, and the next day these squares are galloping in, handing out bribes or slaughter as they go. The way Ma describes it, it’s like they rode in from Fourth Street on horseback. ![]() In 1991, though, things start to change: the management of their apartment building, mindful of new city regulations, announces that the place will be gutted, and everyone will need to move: Apart from the abject poverty, the fact that they live up the block from a shelter full of homeless, occasionally violent junkies, and Wright’s desire to dress, act, and be treated as a boy, everything is pretty normal. Their official relationship might be only temporary, but both pledge responsibility for the baby.įor the first few years of Wright’s life, she lives with her mother. They promise each other that they will put her first they will care for her they will never put her through foster care or the courts system. Wright is entirely open about her parents’ intentions, or lack thereof (“they never had the intention of being a couple or building any kind of domestic life together”), but she’s equally clear about their love for their daughter. She was never married to Wright’s father, Seth Tillett, with whom she had a relationship after Billy’s death. Wright’s mother’s husband, Billy, the great love of her life, was shot in his sleep by police. Two mangy dogs roamed between the pumps, so dirty and caked with exhaust grease that one’s fur had turned green, the other one’s blue. The Bowery Hotel, now a glamorous weekend landing pad for movie starlets, used to be a twenty-four-hour gas station that served radioactive vindaloo on Styrofoam plates to my mother in the middle of the night. Wright, by contrast, produces electrifying, evocative descriptions of the Lower East Side in the 1980s, a world that gentrification destroyed so quickly that it is almost as though these places never existed. I enjoyed Just Kids for its general atmosphere of romantic bohemianism, but much of the writing on a sentence-by-sentence basis felt overwrought, emotional, and repetitive. It’s a great book.Īctually, for my money, Wright is better at prose than Patti Smith is by a considerable margin. Incredibly, almost improbably, the comparisons are apt. And so it is with Darling Days, a memoir by iO Tillett Wright (yes, iO, spelled like that) that comes garlanded with comparisons to Patti Smith’s Just Kids and Jeannette Walls’s The Glass Castle. Sometimes this results in weird and vaguely desperate combinations (hands up if you’ve ever seen a book whose jacket says something like “for fans of Stephen King and Sex and the City” and wondered what the hell kind of target demographic that is) sometimes it results in regrettable over-selling (see my review of Diary of an Oxygen Thief, which wasn’t well served by being compared to The Catcher in the Rye). The book-comparison game is a dangerous one, but it is one that people who sell and promote books have to play on a regular basis. What I’m about to do is the worst and best move I will ever make. Mummies and Daddies: Soldier Sailor, by Claire Kilroy and May We Be Forgiven, by A.M. Homes.
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