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This award-winning memoir examines one tumultuous year of boyhood in the life of a gifted, gay, upper-middle-class Jewish kid (with a touch of Asperger Syndrome). Opening with a handshake with President John F Kennedy in Fort Worth, Texas, hours before his assassination, and recalling the changes and revelations of the months that followed, this is a moving account of a frail, mercurial boy's struggle to be himself, looked back upon with the wisdom and compassion of his adult self.
After John F. Kennedy’s speech in front of the Hotel Texas in Fort Worth on November 22, 1963, he was greeted by, among others, an 11-year-old Benjamin Taylor and his mother waiting to shake his hand. Only a few hours later, Taylor’s teacher called the class in from recess and, through tears, told them of the president’s assassination. From there Taylor traces a path through the next twelve months, recalling the tumult as he saw everything he had once considered stable begin to grow more complex. Looking back on the love and tension within his family, the childhood friendships that lasted and those that didn’t, his memories of summer camp and family trips, he reflects upon the outsized impact our larger American story had on his own.
In lyrical, translucent prose, Benjamin Taylor thoughtfully extends the story of twelve months into the years before and after, painting a portrait of the artist not simply as a young man, but across his whole life. As he writes, “Any twelve months could stand for the whole. Our years are so implicated in one another that the least important is important enough... Any year I chose would show the same mettle, the same frailties stamping me at eleven and twelve.”
Winner of the LA Times Christopher Isherwood Prize for Autobiographical Prose, and a New York Times Editor's Choice.
Paperback, 183 Pages, Published 2017
Author: Benjamin Taylor
"In his keen focus on the 1963 death of John F. Kennedy in Dallas, Benjamin Taylor returns to the morning of the assassination in his hometown of Fort Worth when he had the dazzling experience, as a schoolboy, of shaking the hand of the President, his hero. This acute, intense memoir achieves the stature of national as well as personal elegy, a breathtaking accomplishment, classical and impassioned. It belongs to the best American literature of idealism and loss, a profoundly eloquent reading of our mid-century history and its heartbroken legacy to this day." - Patricia Hampl
"In pellucid prose, Benjamin Taylor unties the knots in the country’s psyche and more urgently in his own life growing up Jewish and gay in suburban Fort Worth. . . . In the end, we are aware that we have been reading an exquisite portrait of the artist as a young man, the developing consciousness of our narrator abundant recompense for the suffering engendered by the long-held secrets of his childhood." - Prof. Jonathan Wilson, Tufts University
“Historic and cultural incidents dot the crackling narrative... Taylor, a lyrical wordsmith, broadens the usual boundaries of memoir writing with his analysis of time and childhood... In this skillful blend of dialogue between youth and maturity, Taylor sums up the value and quality of the years of his treasured past and unforgettable present, while stressing the sanctity of life.”
- Publishers Weekly