The excerpt describes the terrifying moment when Judy Shepard and her husband Dennis found out that their son was in a coma. Because Dennis was working Saudi Arabia, the couple had to wait nearly a day before they could return to the US to see Matthew. Shepard writes,

Dennis and I had only limited information about the extent of Matt's injuries, and absolutely no information about the circumstances surrounding his attack. We knew he was critically injured and that his hold on life was tenuous, at best. Still, our highest hope at that point was for Matt's complete recovery. Our most basic, and perhaps most realistic, hope was that he would hold on to life until we could be with him, by his side.

Unfortunately, Matthew Shepard died on October 12, 1998. In an interview, his mom talks to Newsweek's Kate Dailey about her son, a young man like any other whose death has made him a symbol for a cause. She emphasizes that Matthew wasn't perfect, saying,

We get so much mail and e-mail from young kids who say how much they admire Matt and want to emulate his life, and how they wish they could straighten out their drug use or their depression or whatever. They seem to have the misconception that Matt never went through all that angst, and he totally did. [...] I just want people to know that he just wasn't that angelic young man that some have tried to portray him as or want him to be. It wouldn't be fair to Matt to not remember him with all the foibles and wrinkles of his real life.

On the other hand, Matthew Shepard is now the namesake of the Matthew Shepard Foundation, which Judy Shepard directs and which conducts a variety of initiatives aimed at reducing LGBT discrimination. Judy Shepard says,

We thought there was a small amount of time, this window of opportunity for maybe our name, Matt's name, could make a difference. We wanted to take advantage of that.

One way she and the Foundation are trying to do so is through the Matthew Shepard Act, which the Foundation's website calls a "response to the unrelenting and under-addressed problem of violent hate crimes committed against individuals based on actual or perceived sexual orientation, gender, gender identity and disability." The bill — championed, Judy Shepard mentions, by Ted Kennedy — would expand existing hate crime laws to prosecute crimes based on "actual or perceived sexual orientation, gender, gender identity, or disability." Current law recognizes a hate crime only if the victim was targeted because of race, color, religion or national origin.

The Matthew Shepard Act could impose stiffer penalties not only on homophobes like Shepard's killers Russell Henderson and Aaron McKinney, but also on criminals like George Sodini who target women. As Judy Shepard points out, it also includes a provision for anti-hate-crime education. She says,

If we find people doing basic things like graffiti on a synagogue, where there's no actual person that's the victim, you can educate them about what diversity is and how respect moves our country forward. If we could change one person's mind, that's brilliant.

The hate crime legislation that bears Matthew Shepard's name was passed as part of the Senate's defense spending bill this July. Since the House and Senate versions of this bill differ, it's still in committee — and Sen. Jeff Sessions introduced an amendment to allow the death penalty for hate crime murders, which Michael Cole of HRC Back Story calls "a poison pill designed to kill the bill." So it still remains to be seen what Matthew Shepard's legacy will be.

A Phone Call That Changed Everything [Newsweek]
The Meaning of Matthew: Judy Shepard On Her New Memoir, Her Son's Lasting Legacy, And Moving Forward While Looking Back [Newsweek]
Matthew Shepard Foundation [Official Site]

In a terrific review on the Daily Beast, writer Megan Hustad draws a contrast between the recent rash of "bad-girl" tell-alls - stories of substance abuse and regrettable relationships and youthful misdemeanors - and Carlene Bauer's new Not That Kind of Girl, which upends the formula. Whereas most of these stories are tales of redemption, Bauer's is of someone who's found herself and needs to hang onto it. She's not a zealot or a prisoner of a narrow upbringing; she's an intellectual who happens to be a practicing Christian from a conservative home. As Hustad puts it,

She aspires not only to be truly hip, she also wants to be taken seriously in New York's snobbish literary scene. And she seeks to accomplish both of these goals while hanging on to her fervent faith in Jesus Christ. If life maneuvers received scores for technical difficulty, Bauer would be competing for gold.

While the romance of childhood repression - be it the mysteries of Catholicism, the strictures of evangelism or the tangles neuroses of the Jewish home - have always been literary gold, there's nothing quite so romantic about, well, a measure of contentment. Says Bauer, "Neither class anxiety nor Christianity were considered real, or fashionable, torments." And the memoir draws a sharp contrast between theoretically open-minded sophistication on the one hand, and the literary milieu's shock and disbelief when she admits to being a virgin.

Of course, this is nothing new. With the exceptions of those intellectual movements defined by their "moral seriousness" (think Transcendentalists, here) literary scenes from the Enlightenment through Bloomsbury have been characterized by a blithe scorn for the earnest - even as they dealt in the currency of emotion. While pre-Vatican II Catholicism actually became highly fashionable in British literary circles of the 20th Century, Americans - perhaps burdened by a need to throw off recent puritan antecedents? - tend to need a certain level of defiance to justify modern faith. Walker Percy and Flannery O'Connor were conscious - not to say proud - Catholic writers, but in O'Connor's case this led to an uneasy relationship to much of the New York intelligentsia. (Paul Elie's The Life You Save May Be Your Own is great on this.)

This is not to say that, person by person, there aren't all kinds of "literary types." Any world is made up of a myriad of individuals, and doubtless the New York "scene" has always seemed more frustratingly hermetic than in fact it is. We've heard horror stories - and as this memoir shows, the milieu's as prey to provincialism as any other - but at the end of the day, Bauer concludes, people are kind. That Bauer's story has a happy ending - she is, by any standard, a gifted and accomplished writer - is a testament, ultimately, to the power of talent. Bauer evolves, of course, in the memoir - but it's not the reflexive abandonment of a narrow girlhood that we've become used to. And no one who reads Bauer's book can doubt that it's variety of experience and, yes, worldview that makes for true vibrancy in writing as in life.

Girl Gone Mild [Daily Beast]
* I drew on The Life You Save May Be Your Own and Megan Marshall's The Peabody Sisters in this post.

From an early age, Frank Bruni says, he was an over-eater. Although he was naturally big-boned and had legendarily hearty appetite from early childhood, his relationship to food was always more about excess than satisfaction, and he routinely continued to eat after he was full. What is distressing about his account is that he was clearly someone who naturally loved and appreciated the tastes and experiences of food, but this natural love was tainted by his feelings about his weight and the connection that developed in his mind. The fact that he and his mom started going on diets as a child can't have helped. It's clear that Bruni and his family accepted being a "fat kid" as a bad thing, to be cured - and while clearly he was developing an unhealthy relationship to eating, the two things were conflated in a depressing and all-too-common way. (Indeed, this still seems to be the author's POV.)

The extra weight was the confirmation: once a fat kid, always a fat kid, never moving through the world in the carefree fashion of people unaccustomed to worrying about their weight, never as inconspicuous. It was the stubborn thing I seemed least able to control, and I often felt that all my shortcomings flowed from it - were somehow wrapped into and perpetuated by it. If only I could fit into pants with a waist size of 31 or 32 instead of my 33s and 34s, I could walk briskly and buoyantly into a crowded school party instead of hovering tentatively at the door, unable to decide whom to approach and questioning whether my approach would be welcome.

As a young man, Bruni becomes bulimic. While he thought of his habitual vomiting as mere weight management rather than an ED, his description tells a different story.

To be a successful bulimic, you need to have a firm handle on the bathrooms in your life: their proximity to where you're eating; the amount of privacy they offer; whether - if they're public bathrooms with more than one stall - you can hear the door swing open and the footfall of a visitor with enough advance notice to stop what you're doing and keep from being found out...You need to be conscious of time. There's no such thing as bulimia on the fly; a span of at least 10 minutes in the bathroom is optimal, because you may need 5 of them to linger at the sink, splash cold water on your face and let the redness in it die down. You should always carry a toothbrush and toothpaste, integral to eliminating telltale signs of your transgression and to rejoining polite society without any offense to it. Bulimia is a logistical and tactical challenge as much as anything else. It demands planning.

He stops, finally, when his friends hold an intervention of sorts. He says, "I succeeded, I think, because so many other extreme or warped weight-management regimens - including more Atkins and more fasting - took the place of bulimia as I struggled for decades to figure out how to answer my appetite without being undone by it and as I traced an unlikely route to the most implausible of destinations: professional eating."

These are accounts we normally hear coming from women, and it's always good to be reminded that EDs target men and boys, too - and a part of me wonders if a man who wasn't openly gay would feel as comfortable, even today, talking frankly about a disease which is still perniciously linked in the public mind only with young women. I'm also glad to read about someone who not only managed to recover, but seemingly managed to recover a love of food - enough that he can take pleasure in it in his career. (So one hopes, anyway - and this is certainly the impression anyone reading his food writing has always received - and I look forward to reading this memoir in full.) What is distressing, though, is that at no point does the adult Bruni seem to find much acceptance for his heavier self - just relief that the pain and loss of control is over. On the one hand, in his case, there seems to have been a clear relationship between his chronic overeating and his weight - and his resultant self-loathing. But even so, and perhaps this is unfair to ask in a personal memoir, I wish he were able to distinguish between the two - if only for the sake of changing things a little for a new generation of young boys, and girls, who feel that same self-loathing.

I Was A Baby Bulimic [NY Times]

Seltzer's whiteness is also coming up in the morning-after commentary: Seltzer's personal experiences gave her the authenticity readers desire in a memoir, while her whiteness arguably made white readers feel more at ease with her "urban" story. On her blog, Gawker alum Doree Shafrir, makes a number of salient points about Seltzer's race in relationship to the press she received. "We — the New York publishing industry, the media, my blog — wanted to believe Margaret Jones because she was a white girl who had lived with black people. Like a spy! And so she came back and reported to us what life there was really like...I don't see Sarah McGrath [Seltzer's editor] or [New York Times book critic] Michiko Kakutani or me or you buying the books they sell at the Fulton Mall or 125th Street, which are arguably more 'real' than anything Margaret Jones/Seltzer wrote, which is funny because we're supposedly so obsessed with 'reality' and 'authenticity.'"

Shafrir, of course, is not the only blogger to focus on the benefits Seltzer's race afforded her. Undercover Black Man is righteously pissed at Peggy for co-opting black experience, and his ire extends to Sarah McGrath and all the way back to Penguin publishing. "Seltzer's ignorant, tone-deaf editor - Sarah McGrath - owes an apology to the black community of South Los Angeles. McGrath's bosses at the Penguin Group should make some gesture of contrition and good will also. They were probably already counting the money they expected to make... peddling black pain and death to white readers," UBM writes. Adds the LA Times:

"There's a long American tradition of fake ethnic autobiographies that goes back to fake slave narratives in the 1840s," said Laura Browder, associate professor of English at Virginia Commonwealth University and author of "Slippery Characters: Ethnic Impersonators and American Identities."

"I think some of the authors of these memoirs have pain and suffering they don't know how to name, so they attach them to something that's universally associated with suffering," like race.

Said black L.A. novelist Gary Phillips, "We know if it were a black girl, that's not exotic, that's just another story from the hood. That's not sexy. There is no movie."

The Lure Of Made-up Memoirs [Los Angeles Times]
Bogus Memoir Sparks Criticism Of Publishing Industry [LA Times]
Tracking The Fallout Of (Another) Literary Fraud [NY Times]
Clearly This Is All I Am Going To Be Thinking About Today [The Doree Chronicles]
Fucking Liar [Undercover Black Man]

Earlier: Female Gang-Banging Memoirist Is More Fiction Than Fact
Susanna Sonnenberg Adds Another Chapter To The Unhinged Mother Canon