The Greta Garbo Home for Wayward Boys and Girls

A Memoir

De: Steven Gaines

Narrado por: Steven Gaines

A sequel to the author's critically acclaimed Delphinium title, One of These Things First, The Greta Garbo Home for Wayward Boys and Girls is a poison-pen, love letter to the end of an era—Manhattan during the decadent, late 1970s.

Picking up where he left off at the end of his widely praised debut memoir, One of These Things First, Gaines recounts his hilarious, sometimes poignant attempt to forge a writing career and a successful love life in the gay world of the 1970s. He has limited success until he falls in love with an older woman dying of cancer. Meanwhile, he serendipitously begins a career as a writer when he meets a former child evangelist, and with naïve chutzpah, manages to land a book deal that leads to a whirlwind career as a biographer, rock and roll columnist, and roman à clef novelist who writes a book with a Studio 54 bartender that brings the world down around them. From inside the entertainment business in New York and Los Angeles to inside the publishing world, Gaines narrates a life of escapades and adventures and searching for love in all the wrong places. After hitting rock bottom, he writes a book about the Beatles that ends up on the New York Times bestseller list, leading to popular esteem and a feeling of momentary redemption.

©2024 Steven Gaines (P)2024 Tantor Media

Life Half Lived

This seems like such a sad story. I have a hard time understanding the point. The author talks about being taken in by hangers-on. About being an outsider looking in. But other than gossip, which has already been turned into coin of the realm in previous books, and some personal details, there seems little here. What deep thoughts about this world occurred to him? None. Apparently. He skitters along. As for personal details, two. His longtime need for psychoanalysis...the. classic Freudian lie-on-a-couch kind. Which has to cost a pretty penny, a subject he never discusses. And the pitiful image of Andy Warhol signing the scar on his wrist from when he tried to kill himself as a teen. He says he walked around with a plastic bag on his hand for two weeks to preserve the signature, so he could show people. But eventually it faded.
This book is like that fading signature. Look at the famous and "famous" people I knew. Don't they make me interesting and important?