A Memory of Fictions (or) Just Tiddy-Boom
© 2024 Leonce Gaiter

A PW Booklife "Editor's Pick" - "Gaiter defies conventional prose to offer a lyrical narrative that is both tender in recollection and brutal in anger… The novel's challenges and charged insights will reward those fascinated by the pain and work of self-invention."

"Gaiter's lively prose presses against the confines of every sentence… A distinctive, fragmentary story of an artist's painful coming of age." - Kirkus Reviews

“…a bold novel. Sometimes beautiful, sometimes brutal, the prose is always thoroughly engrossing.” – IndieReader
 
5 stars “…a rich tapestry of emotions and experiences that draw you into the action as if you’re witnessing it firsthand where it happened. From the ribald humor to the raw honesty and tender moments, the novel offers a multifaceted exploration of identity, family, and societal pressures with elegant use of dialogue and intimate narrative moments of true vulnerability and pain.” - K.C. Finn, Reader’s Favorite
 
“If Ernest Hemingway was black, gay, and writing about growing up in the [1960s], he would have written something like Leonce Gaiter’s “A Memory of Fictions (or) Just Tiddy-Boom… Although the whole book is written in the third person, that is easy to forget since the book is so personal that Jessie and his struggles are your own.” - Jessica Dickenson, Reader Views
 
“In Leonce Gaiter’s autofiction novel, black male identity is artfully examined through the personal history of an aspiring black writer who dreams of Hollywood success. Gaiter’s wonderfully evocative language, filled with musicality, captures the complexity of Jessie’s emotions as he struggles to make sense of his sexuality and place in the world.” – Blue Ink Review
 
 
“A Memory of Fictions (or) Just Tiddy-Boom” is a modern, jazzy take on the bildungsroman that uses everything from personal memoir, a fugue-like structure, poetry, images, lyrics, and diaries to paint a vivid, eloquent and human portrait of gay, black, Jessie Vincent Grandier and the striving African American middle class that shaped him in the 1960s.
 
Born to a high-yellow, upper-crust New Orleans Creole mother and a lowborn, Louisiana bayou-bred, military father, Jessie steadfastly battles to reconcile his existence with expectations and preconceptions of those around him -- black and white. He shoulders the weight of his black bourgeois family’s hopes through the ‘60s and ‘70s, his mother’s death, and the resulting familial melodrama that tears him and his family apart. If not broken, then seemingly irreparably bent, he wends his way through Harvard in the ‘70s and drinks his way through the Reagan ‘80s in gay bars from the LA barrio to Beverly Hills. When Jessie’s grandiose ambitions have abandoned him when he’s almost beaten, and when it’s a breath away from too late, he looks back, regards the jagged shards of his life and pieces them into a remarkable whole. 
 
The post-modern writing careens from pure ribaldry, to brutal honesty, to deeply tender, to “gonzoesque,” but at the intelligent heart of the novel is the internal struggle of dislocation, and the deconstruction of an African-American family. It is a completely unique look at race, sex, and finding redemption the hard way.

Leonce Gaiter was raised in New Orleans, Washington D.C., Germany, Missouri, and Maryland and elsewhere. He began writing in grade school and continued through his graduation from Harvard. He moved to Los Angeles and worked in the film and music industries. His nonfiction essays appeared in numerous publications, including The New York Times, The New York Times Magazine, The Los Angeles Times, The Washington Times, LA Weekly, NY Newsday, The Washington Post, Salon, and in national syndication. His fiction works include the historical novel, “I Dreamt I Was in Heaven – The Rampage of the Rufus Buck Gang,” the New Orleans noir, “Bourbon Street,” and the period road thriller, “In the Company of Educated Men.”

A Memory of Fictions (or) Just Tiddy-Boom
ISBN: 979-8-9902899-0-1: $14.99
EPUB ISBN: 979-8-9902899-1-8: $4.99
Paperback 337 pages
Distribution through Amazon and Ingram
 
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Website: https://www.leoncegaiter.com/