Well I finished John Rechy's latest, About My Life and the Kept Woman. Very enjoyable and for the most part well written.
It is what he calls a fictional autobiography meaning he is bound neither to actual events nor the order in which they may have occurred. Actually it is a pretty straightforward [well, it is John Rechy, aka "Johnny Rio"] account of his life.
The "kept woman" is a conceit he uses to tie his story together and at the end explain why he wrote about it now.
For those unitiated into the world of John Rechy, his first very controversial novel [or autobiographical novel] was City at Night the tale of a hustler in 1960's Los Angeles, which of course, is what Mr. Rechy himself was. That and his Sexual Outlaw were banned for years and provided many a young gay man, including me, with names and locations of where the action was.
While the book will have an appeal to gay men of his era, the story is well enough crafted to have universal appeal.
