A powerful blazingly honest memoir told with humor and panache
about a mother and son finding each other again after years of
estrangement. A coming-of-age story of outrageous excess, glamour,
entitlement and grand delusion, lived above the fray and over the
top. A gay man's journey through the joys and perils of his
generation, coming out in the early eighties in the shadow of a
terrifying of disease that would devastate so many, surviving
tremendous loss and culminating in his decision to adopt a child as
a single parent.
When Sergei, a psychotherapist who has been living in Paris for the
past decade, discovers that his mother is terminally ill, he
decides to leave his practice and his life to be by her side, in
the hope of healing the bitterness and discord before it is too
late. Alternating between a narrative of Dollsie's last months as
she battles cancer, interwoven with poignant and hilarious and at
times shocking scenes from their outlandishly privileged lives,
DAMAGE CONTROL is a story about exile and loss, searching and
escape. From the mountain villages of Gstaad, Switzerland, to New
York and Miami and Cuba, the narrator revisits the chateaux and
chalets of his childhood, exploring the emotional and geographical
landscapes of a mother and son whose lives are revealed to be
poignant parallels of each other. After avoiding his mother for a
lifetime, seeking shelter from her destructiveness and her drinking
and her rage, Sergei comes face-to-face with this narcissistic
woman confronting mortality for the first time, and through his own
experiences as an activist and a therapist and a man who has faced
his own mortality at young age, he helps her to come to terms with
all her guilt and regrets and fear of dying.
This memoir offers a fascinating and disturbing portrayal of a
glamorous woman whose life has been one of great elegance and
luxury, along with disillusionment, grandiosity, seduction and
self-destruction: her childhood in pre-Castro Cuba, a mythical
island paradise; her marriage at the age of eighteen to a dashing
young Swiss man and their subsequent exile; her frantic and
desperate resolve to create a mythical life of her own and pass on
the traditions of aristocracy to her children, all the while
leading a double life and suffering feelings of intense longing and
frustration and guilt which eventually cause her to destroy and
walk away from everything that she has been raised to want and
expect out of life.
DAMAGE CONTROL is ultimately a rendering of the cycle of life,
saying goodbye to a parent so you can say hello to a child, and
finding grace and redemption through a mother's love.
General
Is the information for this product incomplete, wrong or inappropriate?
Let us know about it.
Does this product have an incorrect or missing image?
Send us a new image.
Is this product missing categories?
Add more categories.
Review This Product
No reviews yet - be the first to create one!
Welcome to Loot.co.za!
Sign in / Register |Wishlists & Gift Vouchers |Help | Advanced search
