Like Son

Pursuing a PhD has left me less time to do a kind of reading I really enjoy. Especially now, it feels wrong to take a day, let alone a few hours, to read something unconnected to my dissertation. But, that's exactly what I did today.


I had picked up Felicia Luna Lemus' latest book, Like Son, shortly after
she and T Cooper were brought to my university for an event, and I had the pleasure of having them both speak in my Intro to LGBT Studies course. Having known Lemus in what feels like a previous life as undergraduate students at the University of California, Irvine, it was a treat to have our paths cross once again.

I won't go on about the book--better literary critics than I have already sung the praises of the book better than I could here. Still, I wanted to share one of my favorite passages here...

Time to get a reality check, Frank—that’s what you’re thinking, right? Point taken, but wouldn’t you freak out a little too if you suddenly realized you were necrophilia? Personally, I’d never thought that particular perversion was my cup of tea, but really, when it comes down to it, isn’t retrospection, sentimental or otherwise, ultimately romancing the dead? I mean, of course it’s important to learn from the past…but I’d spent far too much time coddling what once was and wasn’t and what might have been. Id’ done this in regards to my father, my mother, the life I’d been born into, Nahui, my relationship with Nathalie, everything. Hell, it was probably this very devotion to the past that led me to open my shop. I mean, really, who but a nostalgic fool wants to buy and sell dead people’s things for a living? Point is, I was tired of feeling alternately depleted and sustained by the memories I kept pulsing alive with each breath I took in. I’d had enough. I wanted to get on with my life, unhindered by all the things I’d never be able to recapture or change.

Lemus, Felicia Luna. Like Son. New York: Akashic Books, 2007. 257

Can't wait to see her next book!