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My Life Getting Down and Semi-Dirty in Seventies New York
Doubleday
November 2011
On Sale: October 25, 2011
272 pages
ISBN: 0385527780
EAN: 9780385527781
Hardcover
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Non-Fiction Memoir
"How lucky I was, arriving in New York just as everything
was about to go to hell.” That would be in the autumn of 1972, when a very young and
green James Wolcott arrived from Maryland, full of literary
dreams, equipped with a letter of introduction from Norman
Mailer, and having no idea what was about to hit him.
Landing at a time of accelerating municipal squalor and,
paradoxically, gathering cultural energy in all spheres as
“Downtown” became a category of art and life unto itself, he
embarked upon his sentimental education, seventies New York
style. This portrait of a critic as a young man is also a
rollicking, acutely observant portrait of a legendary time
and place. Wolcott was taken up by fabled film critic
Pauline Kael as one of her “Paulettes” and witnessed the
immensely vital film culture of the period. He became an
early observer-participant in the nascent punk scene at
CBGB, mixing with Patti Smith, Lester Bangs, and Tom
Verlaine. As a Village Voice writer he got an eyeful of the
literary scene when such giants as Mailer, Gore Vidal, and
George Plimpton strode the earth, and writing really mattered. A beguiling mixture of Kafka Was the Rage and Please Kill
Me, this memoir is a sharp-eyed rendering, at once intimate
and shrewdly distanced, of a fabled milieu captured just
before it slips into myth. Mixing grit and glitter in just
the right proportions, suffused with affection for the
talented and sometimes half-crazed denizens of the scene, it
will make readers long for a time when you really could get
mugged around here.
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