SOURCE: Reichard, William. “Portrait of the Young Artist as a Survivor.” Lambda Book Report 8, no. 5 (December 1999): 20.

In the following review, Reichard compliments Firebird as a “beautifully wrought” recollection of Doty's early life experiences.

Award-winning poet and memoirist Mark Doty, in choosing to center his new autobiography Firebird on his childhood and young adult experiences, has taken a risk, and the risk has paid off. Firebird is a beautifully wrought recollection of Doty's early life as the son of an increasingly disturbed and alcoholic mother and a distant and sometimes violent father. Told in a linear yet fractured narrative style that mirrors the illogical, associative movements of human memory, Doty's memoir offers a series of recollections that reveals the complexities and contradictions of any childhood, and particularly those of a queer childhood—the furtive, awkward, and often terrifying search for identity that most queer readers will recognize.

What saves...