GAY PEOPLE'S CHRONICLE

APRIL 3, 1998

Evenings Out

Healing the body, healing the soul

Poet's memoirs explore being gay, disabled and Jewish

Body, Remember: A Memoir by Kenny Fries

Plume Paperbacks, $12.95

Reviewed by Nels P. Highberg

I first learned of Kenny Fries through his poetry, especially his collection The Healing Notebooks, which won the Gregory Kolovakos Award for AIDS Writing. His poems, from what I remember after reading this collection a few years ago, all consisted of only a few stanzas of two lines each.

Still, Fries filled the brevity of each poem with evocative, concrete details: he and his lover taking a bath together, a large heron flying by, leaves changing colors. The poems chronicled life with a lover who has AIDS, recording the everyday details of the world around them.

Fries has broadened this lens a bit for Body, Remember, his riveting memoir published a year ago in hardcover and recently appearing in paperback. Here he looks back over his entire life, cataloging events and presenting powerful details that will remain in the reader's mind after leaving the book on the shelf or bedside table.

Fries begins with his birth, an event he does not remember himself and can only recall with the help of medical documents and the memories of other family members. Hospital records state that Fries "had congenital deformities of the lower extremities" at birth. His father clarifies things a bit, telling Fries that when he was born, "each leg was no bigger than his finger; each leg was twisted like a pretzel; each leg had no arch to separate leg from foot; each leg was dimpled inches above what would have been my ankle."

He describes the operations and doctor's visits that run throughout his childhood and continue until his college years at Brandeis. Such procedures enable Fries to walk and play basketball; still, Fries grows to realize how many people stare at him and question his abilities. These stories fill the first section of the book.

Four distinct sections make up Body, Remember. In these sections, Fries begins with one of the larger aspects of his identity, with being gay, disabled, or Jewish. Then he moves to an exploration of how these parts of his life intersect. He moves from memories of growing up with a disability to relating his first trip to Israel in his early twenties.

The third section extends the story told in The Healing Notebooks with greater details. about his relationship with his HIV-positive lover, Jason. The final section relates a series of more recent events, such as a Thanksgiv-

ing trip to visit his family and meeting and falling in love with another man, Kevin.

Though the book follows a somewhat linear progression in the general patḥs between the major sections, Fries disrupts the linear style of traditional autobiographies by weaving childhood memories with adulthood events. He also divides the longer sections into shorter vignettes, revealing his skills as a poet by packing these brief passages with concrete details and descriptive, evocative language.

Integrating various memories, times, and aspects of his identity together in this narrative reveals the complexity of his life.

Personally, the description of his trip to Israel stands out foremost in my mind. Here he portrays those he met: Micha, a local gay activist; Drew and Shaoul, a gay couple living together in what Fries calls an "ambiguous" relationship; Matthew, a bearish gay man who plans to become a rabbi; and Dani, another gay, Jewish, disabled man. Through his interactions with these men, Fries ques-

tions his own conceptions of what it means to be gay or Jewish or disabled or American or any other label he, or someone else, attaches to himself.

The power of the entire book rests in Fries's ability to take detailed memories from his own life that then challenge readers to reflect upon their own lives. His narrative exposes the process Fries followed to become the man he is today, a process each of us undertakes to reconcile the conflicting forces shaping our lives and to understand how our past contributes to our present.

Kenny Fries, also the editor of a new anthology from Penguin/Dutton, Staring Back: The Disability Experience from the Inside Out, will visit Columbus in April to take part in the colloquium, "Enabling the Humanities: Disability Studies in Higher Education."

The event, sponsored principally by Ohio State University's Department of English,

A Memoir

Kenny Fries

"Sometimes you find your genius in

Your WOBnds.

Fries's story is more than a story

of the overcoming' of his disabilities; rather it is the story of becoming-becoming a person who resists being marginalized as other.'"

Riverfront Times

KENNY FRIES

the Wexner Center for the Arts, and the Ohio Humanities Council, will occur April 16-18, with most events taking place in the Wexner Center's Film-Video Theatre and Performance Space.

Fries will participate in several events, including readings on Thursday, April 16, at 3:30, and, with Anne Finger on Friday, April 17, at noon, both in OSU's Denney Hall,

Room 311, 164 West 17th Avenue. He will also speak on a panel entitled “Writing Disability Memoir and Essay" on Saturday, April 18, at 10 am, in the Wexner Center FilmVideo Theatre. For more information about the colloquium, contact Dr. Brenda Brueggemann at OSU's Department of English, 614-292-6065 (message) or 614292-7395 (voice/TTY). ♡