GAY MEN · FICTION
Paul Monette
Also known as: Monette Paul, PAUL MONETTE
Paul Landry Monette (October 16, 1945 – February 10, 1995) was an American author, poet, and activist best known for his books about gay relationships. In 1992, he won the National Book Award for Nonfiction.
I don't know if I will live to finish this.
— from Borrowed Time, 1995
Most acclaimed
The Long Shot
Vivien Cokes and her husband, Jasper, are LA royalty, and they have the lifestyle to prove it. Big parties, a huge mansion in Malibu, and complicated affairs are all part of the package. However, during a morning swim, Vivien makes a discovery that changes her life forever. Smelling smoke, she sees her home in flames, and inside, she finds her husband dead in the hot tub with his male lover in an apparent double suicide. To find out the truth behind her husband’s death, Vivien must turn to the unlikeliest of sources: a failed writer and grifter who was the boyfriend of her husband’s late lover. After finding kinship in a sort of shared widowhood, the two set out to bring to justice the people behind their loved ones’ deaths. Paul Monette has a poet’s touch, and his aptitude is on full display in The Long Shot as he immerses readers in a mystery with a cast of characters that is as diverse and memorable as the city in which they live.
Borrowed Time
1995
The new novel by the most compulsive storyteller of them all.It is a golden evening of high summer in July 1990. Robin Timariot has set out that morning on what he has planned as a six-day tramp along part of Offa's Dyke. At the close of his first day's walk he encounters an elegant middle-aged woman who seems strangely out of place among the sheep and gorse of Hergest Ridge. They exchange only a few words of conversation, but their talk is enigmatic - and unforgettable. A few days later, at the end of his walk, Timariot returns home to learn from the newspapers that, just a few hours after their meeting, the woman, whose name was Louise Paxton, was raped and then murdered, along with an artist, Oscar Bantock, who lived near by.A man is swiftly charged and convicted of the crime, but a string of inexplicable events begins to convince Timariot - and others - that all is not what it seems. Timariot, fascinated by Louise Paxton's memory, is drawn irresistibly into the complex motives and relationships of her family and friends, searching against his better judgement for the secret of what really happened on the day she died.The closer he gets to the truth, the more hideous and uncertain it seems to be. And far too late he realizes that it may threaten many powerful people. So much so that anybody who uncovers it is unlikely to be allowed to live.
Becoming a man
A child of the 1950s from a small New England town, "perfect Paul" earns straight A's and shines in social and literary pursuits, all the while keeping a secret—from himself and the rest of the world. Struggling to be, or at least to imitate, a straight man, through Ivy League halls of privilege and bohemian travels abroad, loveless intimacy and unrequited passion, Paul Monette was haunted, and finally saved, by a dream of "the thing I'd never even seen: two men in love and laughing." Searingly honest, witty, and humane, Becoming a Man is the definitive coming-out story in the classic coming-of-age genre.