Patient Narratives - General & Miscellaneous, Gay Men Biographies, U.S. Authors - 20th Century - Literary Biography

Body, Remember

Name: Body, Remember
Author: Kenny Fries
ISBN: 9780525941620

by Kenny Fries

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Overview

Body, Remember is a deeply affecting memoir that revolves around a mystery: at age 35, poet Kenny Fries wanted to discover what could be learned about the history of his body, and the map of physical and psychic scars with which he had lived since infancy. He began only with a description his father had given him. At his birth "each leg was no bigger than his finger; each leg was twisted like a pretzel; each leg had no arch to separate leg from foot; each leg was dimpled above what would have been my ankle." Fries turned to long-buried medical records, reconstructing a record of his disability just as his body had been reconstructed over countless surgeries. He unearthed family secrets and looked again at the echoing memories of past relationships. In Body, Remember we meet and come to know intimately Frie's observant Jewish family and neighbors in Brooklyn; his doctor, who broke with colleagues and insisted that he needn't undergo amputation of both his legs; the brother who resented his disabled sibling; the men who awakened Frie's sexuality and initiated him into a lifelong questioning of the meaning of beauty; and the community of disabled people who prompted some difficult questions about our world's demands on human life and physical being. Body, Remember ultimately tells a story about connection. This memoir is a redemptive and passionate testimony to one man's search for the sources of identity and difference.

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Editorials

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

Fries is a 36-year-old Massachusetts poet and playwright, very much concerned with identity, and as a disabled person, gay and Jewish, he uses this memoir to locate himself. He was born with an unnamed defect that left his legs and feet deformed, and his disability commands most of his attention. He takes an appropriately complex view of his search for himself, calling into question through his own experiences the notion of gay identity when it does not seem to include the disabled, and, on a trip to Israel, the notion of Jewishness when it does not allow for homosexuality. Fries comes to no conclusions about his triple personas, or about the primacy of any one of them, though he does achieve some equanimity, and the end of the book finds him in the middle of his third long-term relationship, yet becoming less and less able-bodied with age. Fries's story is unusual, but his telling of it is clouded by a lack of perspective. (Jan.)

Library Journal

"Why are your legs the way they are?" The question haunts Fries (Night After Night, Beaux-Arts, 1984; The Healing Notebooks, Open Books, 1990), who was born in 1960 with each leg "no bigger than his father's finger; each was twisted like a pretzel." With a poet's sensibility, he interweaves memories, fragments from long-buried medical records, and imagined scenes: his trust in Dr. Milgram, the iconoclastic doctor who recommends exercises, braces, and a series of operations; how his Jewish parents "manage" his disability and, later, his homosexuality; confronting his brother Jeffrey, who as a child abused him physically and sexually (and who is also gay); the attractive men he meets on a trip to Jerusalem; the ill-fated relationships with Jason and Miguel; the publication of his poetry; and, finally, after years of therapy, happiness with his lover, Kevin. Fries powerfully and poignantly conveys the emotional truths of his journey. Recommended for general readers.-James E. Van Buskirk, San Francisco P.L.