A Part of the Heart Can't Be Eaten

Summary:"A Part of the Heart Can't Be Eaten, a memoir from writer, speaker, sex educator, feminist pornographer, and activist Tristan Taormino, is a meditation on family, coming of age, identity, and activism. Raised by a single mother on Long Island, she got her sex education from the 1980s TV show Solid Gold, Alex Comfort's The Joy of Sex, and summers in Provincetown with her father. Woven throughout the book are stories of her father Bill Taormino's family and coming out, culled from his memoir that she read for the first time while she was writing hers. She reflects on their relationship, a tumultuous conflict that led to their estrangement, his death from AIDS, and how it shaped her sexuality. After his death, she struggles with what will become a lifelong battle with severe depression. Living in New York City in the 1990s, she helps shape queer sexual subculture with her zine Pucker Up, her column for The Village Voice, and her editorship of famed lesbian sex magazine On Our Backs. After her first book is published, she follows an unconventional path which marks the beginning of her work as a trailblazing feminist pornographer. Brutally honest and sexually charged, the book explores themes of LGBTQ identity, gender, family, grief and loss, AIDS, depression, and queer subcultures of the 1990s"-- Provided by publisher