Lot Six

A Memoir

By: David Adjmi

Narrated by: Micky Shiloah

Length: 12 hrs and 6 mins

Publisher's summary

"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.

©2020 David Adjmi (P)2020 HarperAudio

Syrian experience crosses Communities

As a Syrian immigrant I hole heartedly identified with the community’s description, the family dynamic, the cultural references. No matter the religion or the region Syrians ascend from, it seems all too familiar. Thank you David.

Rama

stunned silence

i couldn’t stop listening to this book.
Having literally just finished it, I feel unable to articulate everything that moved and engaged me in David’s story.

the narrator is phenomenal. After a while o thought it was David himself.

please get this book!

Terrific, hikarious poignant story!

Excellent memoir. a terrific book.to listen to. Narrator is engaging. Love the accents. wonderful, funny, coming of age story that takes you into the world of Syrian Sephardic Jews of NYC and their son who rejects it all, comes out and becomes a playwright but sill loves his family.

A talented writer's awkward memoir

Clearly, David Adjmi is immensely talented, and so this might be a far better book than I am able to appreciate. For me, it was difficult to endure. The author is open and generous in this memoir, but he is also defensive and distant. I am tempted to say that his style is grandiloquent, but I have never used that word and it would inform few; rather than trying to impress with my vocabulary, I might better say that Adjmi tended to choose impressive words over informative words. Events and thoughts were unfortunately framed with flourishes. Is he opening himself to me? Or is he distancing himself from me? Both. And that doesn't work in a memoir. I could well imagine Adjmi, a celebrated writer, being successful with a memoir when he is genuinely ready.