Catherine McCall (1)

A much more accurate title for this memoir would be Water is A Metaphor I Overuse: My Dad is an Alcoholic and I'm Rage-Filled and Ashamed of Myself For Being Gay. This book is split between those two themes, over two decades. I foolishly thought, "Ooh, she will talk about being gay in 1983! She's gonna talk about learning about the AIDS crisis and how it was in Kentucky!" Uh, she whined about her -feeeeeeliiiiings- for women. A lot. And used a lot of stilted, juvenile language to describe semi-encounters with other girls. Seriously, I was keeping a Das_Sporking Static Shock count, and a bunch of other Das_Sporking 50SoG language counts as I was reading, -without meaning to-, and -they kept going-. She tried to spin this as adult romance, I think, but I laughed and wistfully thought of much, much better stories I've read with these themes. They often took place in the 1950s, when the taboo of homosexuality showed up a little differently. None of these stories were supposed to be romantic--they were sad. Here, I have no idea what she was trying to do--shame herself out of being gay? "If I whine enough at my readers about it, somehow I can be straight?" No. I wasn't nearly as bitter or judgmental about the decade in which she addresses her father's alcoholism--I was bored. Very little of this book is actually about swimming or lifeguarding: said activities are used as chapter transitions for no reason.… (mere)