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In a world where everyone is inventing a self, curating a feed and performing a fantasy of life, what does it mean to be a person? With his grandly entertaining debut memoir, playwright David Adjmi explores how human beings create themselves, and how artists make their lives into art.
Brooklyn, 1970s. Born into the ruins of a Syrian Jewish family that once had it all, David is painfully displaced. Trapped in an insular religious community that excludes him and a family coming apart at the seams, he is plunged into suicidal depression by the age of eight. Through adolescence, David tries to suppress his homosexual feelings and fit in, but when pushed to the breaking point, he makes the bold decision to cut off his family, erase his past, and leave everything he knows behind. There's only one problem: who should he be? Bouncing between identities he steals from the pages of fashion magazines, tomes of philosophy, sitcoms and foreign films, and practically everyone he meets--from Rastafarians to French preppies--David begins to piece together an entirely new adult self. But is this the foundation for a life, or just a kind of quicksand?
Moving from the glamour and dysfunction of 1970s Brooklyn, to the sybaritic materialism of Reagan's 1980s to post-9/11 New York, Lot Six offers a quintessentially American tale of an outsider striving to reshape himself in the funhouse mirror of American culture. Adjmi's memoir is a genre bending Künstlerroman in the spirit of Charles Dickens and Alison Bechdel, a portrait of the artist in the throes of a life and death crisis of identity. Raw and lyrical, and written in gleaming prose that veers effortlessly between hilarity and heartbreak, Lot Six charts Adjmi's search for belonging, identity, and what it takes to be an artist in America.
Author: David Adjmi
Hardcover Published 23 June 2020 400 pages
"Every single page of Lot Six has truths on it that I had never articulated to myself, and that I recognized immediately from my own crazy head, and felt so grateful for. It feels like reading Proust. David Adjmi is a genius." -Elif Batuman, author of The Idiot and finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction
"David Adjmi has written one of the great American memoirs, a heartbreaking, hilarious story of what it means to make things up, including yourself. What do you do if you don't get the nurturing you need at home? Is it possible that art could help fill in the gaps? A wild tale of lack and lies, galling humiliations and majestic reinventions, this touching, coruscating joy of a book is an answer to that perennial question: how should a person be?" -Olivia Laing, author of Crudo and The Lonely City
"Lot Six is a deeply moving, completely riveting tour de force. With searing wit and heartbreaking honesty, Adjmi writes about the agonizing work of building an identity, and in doing so has crafted a shimmeringly beautiful love letter to art and those of us who need it to survive. Reading it I wept with recognition, and when I finished I felt more alive--as if the book had worked some kind of magic spell on me." -Heidi Schreck, author of What the Constitution Means to Me and finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for Drama
"David Adjmi has written one of the great American memoirs, a heartbreaking, hilarious story of what it means to make things up, including yourself. What do you do if you don't get the nurturing you need at home? Is it possible that art could help fill in the gaps? A wild tale of lack and lies, galling humiliations and majestic reinventions, this touching, coruscating joy of a book is an answer to that perennial question: how should a person be?" -Olivia Laing, author of Crudo and The Lonely City
"Lot Six is a deeply moving, completely riveting tour de force. With searing wit and heartbreaking honesty, Adjmi writes about the agonizing work of building an identity, and in doing so has crafted a shimmeringly beautiful love letter to art and those of us who need it to survive. Reading it I wept with recognition, and when I finished I felt more alive--as if the book had worked some kind of magic spell on me." -Heidi Schreck, author of What the Constitution Means to Me and finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for Drama