Micky Shiloah’s emotional and introspective narration is just as powerful as playwright David Adjmi’s prose in this lyrical memoir about family and identity. Adjmi writes about his Brooklyn childhood in an insular religious community of Syrian Jews, his struggles with depression, his continual sense of not fitting in—whether due to his being gay or his doubts about God—and his search for meaning through art and education. Shiloah’s narration, full of humor and pain, has a propulsive momentum that drives the narrative forward. The visceral quality of his voice captures every nuance of Adjmi’s gorgeous writing. He’s especially good at voicing the various Brooklyn accents of Adjmi’s family and friends, making this an immersive listening experience. L.S. © AudioFile 2020, Portland, Maine
Lot Six: A Memoir
Narrated by Micky Shiloah
David AdjmiUnabridged — 12 hours, 6 minutes
Lot Six: A Memoir
Narrated by Micky Shiloah
David AdjmiUnabridged — 12 hours, 6 minutes
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Overview
“David Adjmi has written one of the great American memoirs, a heartbreaking, hilarious story of what it means to make things up, including yourself. A wild tale of lack and lies, galling humiliations and majestic reinventions, this touching, coruscating joy of a book is an answer to that perennial question: how should a person be?”*- Olivia Laing, author of*Crudo*and*The Lonely City
In a world where everyone is inventing a self, curating a feed and performing a fantasy of life, what does it mean to be a person? In his grandly entertaining debut memoir, playwright David Adjmi explores how human beings create themselves, and how artists make their lives into art.
Brooklyn, 1970s. Born into the ruins of a Syrian Jewish family that once had it all, David is painfully displaced. Trapped in an insular religious community that excludes him and a family coming apart at the seams, he is plunged into suicidal depression. Through adolescence, David tries to suppress his homosexual feelings and fit in, but when pushed to the breaking point, he makes the bold decision to cut off his family, erase his past, and leave everything he knows behind. There's only one problem: who should he be? Bouncing between identities he steals from the pages of fashion magazines, tomes of philosophy, sitcoms and foreign films, and practically everyone he meets-from Rastafarians to French preppies-David begins to piece together an entirely new adult self. But is this the foundation for a life, or just a kind of quicksand?
Moving from the glamour and dysfunction of 1970s Brooklyn, to the sybaritic materialism of Reagan's 1980s to post-9/11 New York, Lot Six offers a quintessentially American tale of an outsider striving to reshape himself in the funhouse mirror of American culture. Adjmi's memoir is a genre bending Künstlerroman in the spirit of Charles Dickens and Alison Bechdel, a portrait of the artist in the throes of a life and death crisis of identity. Raw and lyrical, and written in gleaming prose that veers effortlessly between hilarity and heartbreak, Lot Six charts Adjmi's search for belonging, identity, and what it takes to be an artist in America.
Editorial Reviews
04/06/2020
A gay playwright struggles with his claustrophobic Jewish community as he attempts to define himself in this raucous if flawed memoir. Adjami recalls his upbringing among Syrian Jewish immigrants in Brooklyn, whom he paints as a close-knit tribe focused on religion and business and hostile to homosexuality. As a dreamy, uncertain youth, he wrangles with domineering figures including his volatile, narcissistic parents and a contemptuous Juilliard playwriting professor while groping for an identity by trying on new personas like outfits, including faux-French–accented fashionista, black-clad Nietzschean—“I had to become the Superman”—and, finally, a gay man comfortable in his own skin despite his clan’s unease with him. If not fictionalized, Adjami’s memoir is certainly theatricalized: he alters timelines, invents dialogue, and inserts composite characters, and thus delivers pitch-perfect Brooklynese dialogue, colorful personalities, and entertaining scenes (“By the time we were done eating, Howie had convinced himself that the only part-time job he could ever get was spraying perfume samples at Bloomingdale’s dressed as a woman”). Unfortunately, his take on his adventures often feels melodramatic (“Like the desert-trawling Jews in the Bible, my exile was transmuted into freedom,” he declaims of his transfer to a new high school) and calculated for literary effect. The result feels more like a script than real life. (June)
Every single page of Lot Six has truths in it that I had never articulated to myself, and that I recognized immediately from my own crazy head [from my own life?], and felt so grateful for. It feels like reading Proust. David Adjmi is a genius.” — Elif Batuman, author of Pulitzer Prize finalist The Idiot
"Vibrant, edgy, scenic and exciting. . . . Adjmi also emerges as a sensitive and faithful—and funny!—narrator who is keen to notice his own reactions to particular moments and perceptive about how his early experiences fostered a kaleidoscopic inner life that informed both the formation of his identity and the art he would later make.” — BookPage (starred review)
“Every page of Adjmi's memoir, his life story thus far, is stamped with the gifts of the awardwinning playwright he would become. . . . So suffused with Adjmi's skill for drama and spectacular vocabulary is this gimlet-eyed personal history of making and being made by art, it is emotionally vast and utterly triumphant.” — Booklist
“Lot Six is a deeply moving, completely riveting tour de force. With searing wit and heartbreaking honesty, Adjmi writes about the agonizing work of building an identity, and in doing so has crafted a shimmeringly beautiful love letter to art and those of us who need it to survive. Reading it I wept with recognition, and when I finished, I felt more alive—as if the book had worked some kind of magic spell on me.” — Heidi Schreck, playwright of Pulitzer Prize for Drama finalist What the Constitution Means to Me
“David Adjmi has written one of the great American memoirs, a heartbreaking, hilarious story of what it means to make things up, including yourself. What do you do if you don’t get the nurturing you need at home? Is it possible that art could help fill in the gaps? A wild tale of lack and lies, galling humiliations and majestic reinventions, this touching, coruscating joy of a book is an answer to that perennial question: how should a person be?” — Olivia Laing, author of Crudo and The Lonely City
“David Adjmi has written a transfixing, hilarious, and devastating memoir that is wholly unique. Like a match struck in the dark, it set me afire, illuminated aspects of my own self that I'd never faced. It is not often a book possesses this much pain, humor, and power. It is a tremendous artistic achievement and truly one of the best books I’ve ever read." — Melissa Febos, author of Whip Smart and Abandon Me
Lot Six is a deeply moving, completely riveting tour de force. With searing wit and heartbreaking honesty, Adjmi writes about the agonizing work of building an identity, and in doing so has crafted a shimmeringly beautiful love letter to art and those of us who need it to survive. Reading it I wept with recognition, and when I finished, I felt more alive—as if the book had worked some kind of magic spell on me.
"Vibrant, edgy, scenic and exciting. . . . Adjmi also emerges as a sensitive and faithful—and funny!—narrator who is keen to notice his own reactions to particular moments and perceptive about how his early experiences fostered a kaleidoscopic inner life that informed both the formation of his identity and the art he would later make.
David Adjmi has written a transfixing, hilarious, and devastating memoir that is wholly unique. Like a match struck in the dark, it set me afire, illuminated aspects of my own self that I'd never faced. It is not often a book possesses this much pain, humor, and power. It is a tremendous artistic achievement and truly one of the best books I’ve ever read."
Every single page of Lot Six has truths in it that I had never articulated to myself, and that I recognized immediately from my own crazy head [from my own life?], and felt so grateful for. It feels like reading Proust. David Adjmi is a genius.
Every page of Adjmi's memoir, his life story thus far, is stamped with the gifts of the awardwinning playwright he would become. . . . So suffused with Adjmi's skill for drama and spectacular vocabulary is this gimlet-eyed personal history of making and being made by art, it is emotionally vast and utterly triumphant.
David Adjmi has written one of the great American memoirs, a heartbreaking, hilarious story of what it means to make things up, including yourself. What do you do if you don’t get the nurturing you need at home? Is it possible that art could help fill in the gaps? A wild tale of lack and lies, galling humiliations and majestic reinventions, this touching, coruscating joy of a book is an answer to that perennial question: how should a person be?
"Vibrant, edgy, scenic and exciting… Adjmi also emerges as a sensitive and faithful—and funny!—narrator who is keen to notice his own reactions to particular moments and perceptive about how his early experiences fostered a kaleidoscopic inner life that informed both the formation of his identity and the art he would later make.
"Vibrant, edgy, scenic and exciting… Adjmi also emerges as a sensitive and faithful—and funny!—narrator who is keen to notice his own reactions to particular moments and perceptive about how his early experiences fostered a kaleidoscopic inner life that informed both the formation of his identity and the art he would later make.
09/25/2020
In an author's note in this first memoir, Guggenheim fellow and Whiting Award— winning dramatist Adjmi admits that for this account he has changed the names of family and friends because memoirs, unlike biographies, do not need to reflect the lives written about exactly. Rather, these accounts should convey the essence of the memoirist's experience, feelings, and thoughts while tracing significant life events. Adjmi, who grew up in a Syrian Jewish family in Brooklyn, began his search for belonging at a young age. Moving away from the cultural traditions of his family, he gravitated toward an eclectic world of art, books, plays, and musicals. He studied the works of the great philosophers as well as fashion magazines and foreign films, all of which would contribute to shaping the artist he would become. His vivid prose heightens a narrative that explores his search for meaning and the often challenging road to his success as an artist in America. VERDICT Highly recommended; this revealing memoir takes us beyond the facts of Adjmi's life to probe his quest for identity and his rise as a prominent playwright and author.—Morris Hounion, New York City Coll. of Technology, Brooklyn
Micky Shiloah’s emotional and introspective narration is just as powerful as playwright David Adjmi’s prose in this lyrical memoir about family and identity. Adjmi writes about his Brooklyn childhood in an insular religious community of Syrian Jews, his struggles with depression, his continual sense of not fitting in—whether due to his being gay or his doubts about God—and his search for meaning through art and education. Shiloah’s narration, full of humor and pain, has a propulsive momentum that drives the narrative forward. The visceral quality of his voice captures every nuance of Adjmi’s gorgeous writing. He’s especially good at voicing the various Brooklyn accents of Adjmi’s family and friends, making this an immersive listening experience. L.S. © AudioFile 2020, Portland, Maine
2020-03-25
Determined to be an artist, a Syrian Jew wrests himself from his past.
Growing up in a Syrian Sephardic Jewish community in Brooklyn, award-winning playwright Adjmi felt like an outsider to his culture, religion, and family. In his debut memoir, the author chronicles in visceral detail his anguished youth and laborious search for his true identity. His father, he writes, was a con man and pathological liar who never understood any of his children. “He was constantly situating his kids in stories about our lives that had nothing to do with us,” writes the author, “but somehow we ended up as characters in those stories.” Still, Adjmi wanted to please him, hoping that he could win his father’s love, “even if his love confused my sense of self.” His father left the family, cutting off contact for five years, leaving the children with their demanding, narcissistic, angry mother. Childhood, he thought, was “a sort of exhausting performance.” When he was 10, he “plummeted into depression,” which his mother considered a personal affront. He desperately wanted her love but “learned to tamp these impulses. When I did hug her,” he writes, “I sensed her flinching discomfort.” Besides depression and anxiety, Adjmi was beset by “anguish about being a homosexual.” In his sophomore year of high school, he was in “a near-suicidal depression,” and he feared becoming a “Lot Six.” Lot numbers, he explains, were part of a coded system that Syrian businessmen used to negotiate prices on cameras and Walkmans. “Lot Six was code for three, an odd number—odd, as in queer.” Lot Six “had no value,” rendering him worthless. Adjmi struggled mightily to reinvent himself, prove himself “morally superior” to his family and culture, fulfill his artistic ambitions, and, finally, believe in his own talent. Although at times the narrative reads like a long, petulant lament, the author powerfully recounts pain and self-discovery.
Raw revelations make for an engrossing memoir.
Product Details
| BN ID: | 2940172952029 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | HarperCollins |
| Publication date: | 06/23/2020 |
| Edition description: | Unabridged |
| Sales rank: | 994,239 |
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