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Whistle Stopper - The Memoirs of a Beautiful Boy
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List Price: $23.95
Our Price: $7.99
Your Save: $ 15.96 ( 67% )
Availability: Usually ships in 24 hours
Manufacturer: St. Martin's Press
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Average Customer Rating:  
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Binding: Hardcover
Dewey Decimal Number: 813.6
EAN: 9780312361686
ISBN: 0312361688
Label: St. Martin's Press
Manufacturer: St. Martin's Press
Number Of Items: 1
Number Of Pages: 288
Publication Date: 2008-01-08
Publisher: St. Martin's Press
Release Date: 2008-01-08
Studio: St. Martin's Press
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Spotlight customer reviews:
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Customer Rating: 
Summary: Enjoyable and light
Comment: Worth the time. The author has certainly survived and thrived and what the reader gets is a very very funny story, that is poignant at times. I laughed out loud, often. Being from the south I can relate to many of the situations!
Customer Rating:
Summary: Can I Have Some More?
Comment: Like most readers of The Memoirs of A Beautiful Boy, you don't want the story to end. You feel cheated that the book wasn't 800 pages! His mother is like no other (unless they grow 'em like this in Texas!). She isn't the joy that Kevin Sessums' mother was in Mississippi Sissy (which is one of the best books ever written). Yet, you really get to understand her through all her dramatics because she truly loves that son of hers. I can't help but remember those sections of the book where Mother is at the beauty parlor and/or getting other "treatments." Leleux really has the knack for details and stretching them out until you are rolling on the floor. So, for pure joy, and a Mother out of a nighmare, get this book and pray that another one follows. Robert Leleux has earned the right with this book to join the inner circle with Augusten Burroughs, David Sedaris and Kevin Sessums. What an honor it is for us to be able to enjoy the works of these four spectacularly talented people.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Marvelous, Sparkling Fun!!!
Comment: What a charming book. Sparkling, entertaining, friendly. I had the most terrific time reading Robert--and was only sorry that it had to come to an end. It's more like a chummy chat session with a funny friend than a regular memoir. A lovely time!!!
Customer Rating:
Summary: Extremely talented
Comment: First off, I have to say that I disagree with a few of the previous reviews. Leleux's story is just that. It is his story--I LOVED the self-deprecating wit with which he described the later part of his teenage years. CLEARLY, he knows he was spoiled--and describes these troubled years in a way that allows his reader to laugh at him and with him. In other words, he's making fun of his younger self. Beyond that, I was very moved by the ending which (not to ruin it for anyone else) implies, in a very sophisticated way, that a change of consciousness is occurring and that all of the characters (each of whom is flawed in some way) might just be growing up. I found this book to be fun and poignant and look forward to reading more from this extremely talented young writer.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Unsatisfied reader
Comment: Unfortunately, I gave this book as a gift before I read it myself, based on a glowing review in The New York Times. Boy, was I wrong on this one. This is the worst example of what has become a growing trend of precocious gay boy memoirs that began with David Sedaris's essays, flourished with Augusten Burrough's book-length works Running with Scissors and Dry, turned amusing with Josh Kilmer-Purcell's I Am Not Myself These Days, and now thuds to ground with this entry. Someone should slap awake the editor at St. Martin's Press who acquired this memoir because the characters are vapid and the plot -- about a young gay man who feels abandoned by his father when he divorces his mother and seeks restitution and reconciliation in the form of money for college -- is too vengeful to be a positive role model for other gay teenagers. In fact, it's hard for me to be sympathetic at all towards Leleux because he writes about wanting to drop out of high school and avoid college when things don't go his way because his father won't pay his tuition. Leleux tries to be humorous and witty, but his character in the book comes off as a spoiled, bitter, know-it-all with a mean sense of entitlement. David Sedaris, in his essays, is something of a detached journalist, even as he is describing his own foibles. Burroughs becomes sympathetic because he writes as a confused young man and sketches out the plausible scenario that his parents might be clinically or mentally unstable. And Kilmer-Purcell has an outrageous drag queen story to tell. In this memoir, the young Leleux comes off as arrogant, conceited, and self-centered. You never feel any warmth from him or for him, and even on the rare occasion he has something sorta nice to about someone else, you feel he is saying it more about himself. Leleux is not Capote. Never will be. He's too shallow. For full disclosure, however, my friend who received this book from me as a gift liked it. In fact, he read it twice. Go figure.
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Editorial Reviews:
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In the Dear John letter Daddy left for Mother and me, on a Saturday afternoon in early June 1996, on the inlaid Florentine table in the front entry of our house, which we found that night upon returning from a day spent in the crème-colored light of Neiman’s, Daddy wrote that he was leaving us because Mother was crazy, and because she’d driven me crazy in a way that perfectly suited her own insanity.
In a memoir studded with delicious lines and unforgettable set pieces, Robert Leleux describes his East Texas boyhood and coming of age under the tutelage of his eccentric, bewigged, flamboyant, and knowing mother.
Left high and dry by Daddy and living on their in-laws’ horse ranch in a white-pillared house they can’t afford, Robert and Mother find themselves chronically low on cash. Soon they are forced into more modest quarters, and as a teenaged Robert watches with hilarity and horror, Mother begins a desperate regimen of makeovers, extreme plastic surgeries, and finally hairpiece epoxies---all calculated to secure a new, wealthy husband. Mother’s strategy takes her, with Robert in tow, from the glamorous environs of the Neiman Marcus beauty salon to questionable surgery offices and finally to a storefront clinic on the wrong side of Houston. Meanwhile, Robert begins his own journey away from Mother and through the local theater’s world of miscast hopefuls and thwarted ambitions---and into a romance that surprises absolutely no one but himself. Written with a warmth and a wicked sense of fun that lighten even the most awful circumstances, The Memoirs of a Beautiful Boy is a sparkling debut.
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