Oh, Manchester, So Much To Answer For

Finished reading Keith Fleming's The Boy with the Thorn in His Side today, a lovely piece of memoir. Fleming is the nephew of novelist and man of letters Edmund White, and after a his parents' divorce and a stay in a psychiatric hospital, was taken in by White in his NYC apartment in the mid-'70s. Fleming charts the course of his hospitalization (which was largely for no good reason, except for the fact that his stepmother was a nasty woman), his romance with a young Latina two years his junior, and most of all, the (two) years living with "Uncle Ed." It's a fascinating window on one of (gay) America's greatest living novelists, and a fascinating coming-of-age story of a midwestern hetero teen in the '70s. And, of course, it's titled after a Smiths song, generally a sign of quality (or at least good taste). This Boy has both.