Ambidextrous: The Secret Lives of Children

by Felice Picano

Overview

Bold, funny, and shockingly honest, Ambidextrous is like no other memoir of 1950s urban childhood. Picano appears to his parents and siblings to be a happy, cheerful eleven-year-old, possessed of the remarkable talent of being able to draw beautifully and write fluently with either hand. But then he runs into the mindless bigotry of a middle school teacher who insists that left-handedness is "wrong," and his idyllic world falls apart. He uncovers the insatiable appetites of a trio of neighboring sisters, falls for another boy with a glue-sniffing habit, and discovers the hidden world of adult desire and hypocrisy. Picano exits his boyhood sooner than most, but with this sense of self intact and armed with a fuller understanding of the world he is about to enter.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9798989559510
Publisher:	Beautiful Dreamer Press
Publication date:	03/22/2024
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	296
Sales rank:	587,537
File size:	778 KB

Editorial Reviews

This fictionalized memoir recounts the adventures of an Italian-American schoolboy as he undergoes the trial of maturity in an upper-middle-class New York City suburb. One teacher hates him because he is left-handed, while another admires his ambition to become a writer and a truthful adult. In a first-person narrative, the hero describes his initiation into the rites of never-quite-innocent and sometimes harmful sex with the precocious Flaherty sisters and his school pal Ricky Hersch; later, there is his love affair with beautiful Franny Solomon whose crippled father is a voyeur. Bearing many resemblances to Doctorow's World's Fair, this novel re-creates a decadethe post-war yearsby limning the attitudes and desires of a young boy growing up and by an itemization of the toys he played with, the books he read, the friends he made and the games he played. But Picano's (The Lure hero is sometimes more sententious than Edgar Altschuler, and the narrative does not really engage one's interest until close to its end. February 22

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

A member of the Violet Quill group of gay writers, Picano founded the gay publishing house Sea Horse Press and authored The New Joy of Gay Sex in 1992. In this duo, released in 1985 and 1989, respectively, he recalls his childhood and early adulthood. Though he faced the confusion of unsure sexual preference, which drove him from the United States to Europe and then back again, Picano tells a story laced with humor. Public and academic gender studies collections will want these. Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information.

Library Journal