{"id":61583,"date":"2021-09-21T14:12:39","date_gmt":"2021-09-21T14:12:39","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.mixedracestudies.org\/?p=61583"},"modified":"2021-09-21T14:26:42","modified_gmt":"2021-09-21T14:26:42","slug":"why-did-two-people-so-poorly-matched-stay-together-so-long","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/?p=61583","title":{"rendered":"Why Did Two People So Poorly Matched Stay Together So Long?"},"content":{"rendered":"

Why Did Two People So Poorly Matched Stay Together So Long?<\/strong><\/em><\/a><\/p>\n

The New York Times<\/a>
\n2021-09-06<\/p>\n

Eleanor Henderson<\/strong><\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n
<\/a>
\nChristopher Sorrentino\u2019s<\/a> parents, Gilbert and Vicki, circa 1972. Sorrentino examines their confounding marriage in his memoir, \u201cNow Beacon, Now Sea<\/a>.\u201d via Christopher Sorrentino<\/em><\/small><\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<\/tbody>\n<\/table>\n

Christopher Sorrentino, Now Beacon, Now Sea: A Son’s Memoir<\/em><\/a> (Catapult, 2021)<\/strong><\/p>\n

As I was reading Christopher Sorrentino\u2019s<\/a> \u201cNow Beacon, Now Sea<\/a>,\u201d I heard Rodrigo Garcia, son of Gabriel Garc\u00eda M\u00e1rquez, on the radio, talking about his new memoir, \u201cA Farewell to Gabo and Mercedes<\/a>.\u201d Garcia\u2019s book is a loving chronicle of the last days of his larger-than-life father and loyal mother. Sorrentino\u2019s book, too, is about his novelist father and his parents\u2019 deaths. Both have the subtitle \u201cA Son\u2019s Memoir.\u201d But \u201cNow Beacon, Now Sea\u201d is no tender tribute. Listening to Garcia speak, I realized that Sorrentino was working in a decidedly different genre: His \u201cson\u2019s memoir\u201d is more autopsy than eulogy.<\/p>\n

Sorrentino\u2019s father, Gilbert<\/a>, was an avant-gardist more prolific than famous, who died in an under-resourced hospital in Brooklyn<\/a> as his son was en route; his wife, Vicki, who is the real subject of this book and a truly fascinating one, died under even grimmer circumstances. Her decaying body, discovered by her son in her Bay Ridge<\/a> apartment, is the striking opening image of the book. An autopsy was never ordered…<\/p>\n

Read the entire review here<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Sorrentino begins with the inherited family narratives of Vicki, a daughter of Puerto Rican transplants whose birth certificate classifies her as Black but whose story of racial passing is as complicated as any other aspect of her identity. She seems determined not to be Puerto Rican, yet she vigorously disapproves of the affectations of white New York: Her son believes \u201cshe wasn\u2019t seeking a bourgeois foothold on life, but an enlightened one.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12,1245,5,414,8,6462,20],"tags":[31933,31935,31932,596,2640,2327,31934],"class_list":["post-61583","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-articles","category-biography","category-book-reviews","category-family","category-media-archive","category-passing-2","category-usa","tag-christopher-sorrentino","tag-eleanor-henderson","tag-gilbert-sorrentino","tag-new-york-city","tag-new-york-times","tag-the-new-york-times","tag-vicki-sorrentino"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/61583","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=61583"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/61583\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":61586,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/61583\/revisions\/61586"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=61583"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=61583"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=61583"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}