Notes

• "This memoir tells the story of a dramatic adolescence: Sixteen-year-old Keith Fleming’s life is literally saved when his young uncle Ed, the writer Edmund White, impulsively agrees to "adopt" him." "Installed in the maid’s room of his uncle’s busy apartment on Manhattan’s Upper West Side where the phone never stops ringing, Keith soon finds himself transformed as Uncle Ed whirls into action - arranging treatment for Keith’s disfiguring acne; enrolling him in prep school despite huge gaps in Keith’s academic record caused by time spent in mental hospitals and a hippie "free school"; and instructing his nephew in a worldly view of life and love (an early assignment: reading Lolita and Lord Chesterfield’s Letters to His Son)." "Five months later Uncle Ed, who is both strapped for cash as well as completely caught up in the beehive of social and sexual activity of 1970s gay Manhattan, must decide if he can afford to "adopt" another child - Keith’s fourteen-year-old Mexican girlfriend, the beautiful Laura, who has just run away from her convent school." "Though Keith’s new life in New York forms the heart of the story, this memoir begins by tracing how young Keith evolves from being a member of a seemingly ordinary suburban family into a teen so miserably defiant that he is put in the hands of a tyrannical psychiatrist. Here, on a locked adolescent psychiatric ward, Keith meets the bewitching Laura. The two teens begin a passionate love affair - only to be separated and placed in different hospitals."–BOOK JACKET