A Mad Bent Diva

Like a semi-autobiographical novel in over forty chapters, the stories that make up A Mad Bent Diva range from intimate portraits of a queer childhood, to lengthy narratives about a group of friends who engage in annual holidays at a favourite beach property where ‘bitchiness’ prevails, carnal knowledge raises its frequently campy head, and life affirming camaraderie reigns supreme. These interconnected narratives sneak up on you when you may least expect it, in a single name or a highly charged, fiery event that lives and resurfaces in your memory from all of the fleeting and memorable stories that have come before. Including a dialogue for two divas, a monologue for a streetwise madcap malcontent, as well as a child’s memory of being sent to buy very personal products for his mother at the local drugstore, images of Tampax, talking bulls, and multi-limbed Elephant gods mingle with visions of an inanimate reindeer in drag sitting on the edge of a stage silently watching the performance of a seriocomic AIDS monologue. The blend of great tragedy and ecstatic joy marks this collection with the turn of every page. Culminating in the tragically quintessential ending for any lifetime, the final section delicately recounts the writers knowledge of a series of eleven suicides and suicide attempts that stand as life-affirming testaments to the epigraph used from a notorious writers repertoire. A line from Dorothy Parker’s famous short poem Resume – “you might as well…” begins the final quarter of the book, and stands as an over-arching theme for the entire collection. A testament to the bittersweet, dry, at times hilarious way of looking at all of the events that collaborate to make life worth examining, celebrating, living, loving, and enduring. A book that could only be written by ‘A [self-professed] Mad Bent Diva’ who was well past middle age before he realized that his name formed the anagram for what he would come to be and what he would come to cherish.