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Summary
Summary
The vibrant, funny, and heartwarming story of an outcast who becomes an odd man in
If you have ever felt like a misfit in school or been paralyzed by your family's imposing expectations, if you have ever obsessed about your appearance or panicked about choosing a career path, if you have ever wondered if every single thing to which your body is exposed, from egg yolks to X-rays, might harm you, then you may be surprised to find a kindred spirit in The Man in the Gray Flannel Skirt .
Growing up in sunny La Jolla, California, Jon-Jon Goulian was a hyperneurotic kid who felt out of place wherever he turned, and who, in his own words, was forever on the verge of "caving in beneath the pressures of modern life." From his fear of competition to his fear of pimples, from his fear of sex to his fear of saturated fat, the range and depth of Jon-Jon's phobias were seemingly boundless. With his two older brothers providing a sterling example he believed he could never live up to, and his stern grandfather, the political philosopher Sidney Hook, continually calling him to account for his intellectual failure, Jon-Jon, feeling pressed against the wall, wracked with despair, and dizzy with insecurity, instinctively resorted, for reasons that became clear to him only many years later, to a most ingenious scheme for keeping conventional expectations at bay: women's clothing! Ingenious, perhaps, but woefully ineffective, as Jon-Jon discovers, again and again, that behind his skirt, leggings, halter top, and high heels, he's still as wildly neurotic, and as wracked with anxiety, as he's always been.
In this hilarious and heartfelt memoir, Jon-Jon Goulian's witty and exuberant voice shines through, as he comes to terms with what it means to truly be yourself.
Author Notes
Jon-Jon Goulian was born in 1968 and grew up in La Jolla, California. After attending Columbia College and NYU Law School, he worked as a law clerk for a federal judge in North Carolina, and then as an assistant to Robert Silvers of The New York Review of Books . He now lives, by himself, in South Wardsboro, Vermont, where he spends most of his time gardening. The Man in the Gray Flannel Skirt is his first book.
Reviews (4)
Publisher's Weekly Review
A man wears women's clothes, rejects a legal career, and otherwise baffles his parents in this flamboyant but callow memoir. Goulian, a former secretary at the New York Review of Books, has a Columbia B.A., an unused law degree, and a proud history of menial jobs and underachievement: "I own nothing, save nothing, accomplish nothing tangible and have no permanent hold on life." Goulian relates body-image issues (he had his first nose job at age 15), a militant refusal to grow up (at age 29 he was collecting stuffed animals and calling his long-suffering father "Dada"), or his gruesomely detailed sexual anxieties. Much of the book consists of Goulian fencing with relatives-including his choleric grandfather, the neoconservative philosopher Sidney Hook-as they nag him to do something with his life, but his defiance of bourgeois propriety and ambition comes off as defensive narcissism. Through all his flashy attempts to grab the reader's attention, Goulian's story never seems interesting or serious enough to deserve it. Photos. (May 17) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Booklist Review
Goulian's quirky memoir conveys his love for dressing in skirts and five-inch stilettos. His life is one many would consider a success. Raised in California, he is the grandson of a preeminent philosophical scholar and the son of a successful doctor. He graduated from an Ivy League university and law school and works as a law clerk and an assistant at the New York Review of Books. Yet this book isn't just about his triumphs. It's also about his struggles to come of age in a world in which he doesn't fit. Filled with neuroses, he's a cross-dressing heterosexual male who can't seem to escape drama. As someone who doesn't fit easily into any mold heterosexual, homosexual, rich, poor, wacky, conventional he is someone who must continually face and examine contradictions. It is his voice, with its wryly humorous, slightly self-deprecating tone, that engages the reader as he ranges from his adolescent struggles with testicular issues through young adult sexual frustrations to familial reconciliation and understanding.--Hunt, Juli. Copyright 2010 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
Jon-Jon Goulian has a peculiar strategy for coping with physical insecurity, lofty expectations and other 'pressures of modern life.' JON-JON GOULIAN'S eyes are beady and his head is small, at least in proportion to the rest of him. He went prematurely bald. He has seriously bowed legs and exasperating skin, inasmuch as it long served as the bumpy battleground between him and his acne. But his nose, well, that's quite possibly the worst of him. He has had it surgically altered not once but twice, and a third intervention may well be in order. It's no longer huge but not yet acceptable. In detailing all of this I'm not being cruel. I'm being credulous, and taking him at his word. I'm also highlighting the most intriguing aspect of his memoir, which is largely the story of someone gaping at, grieving over, fighting against and fleeing from a body that betrays him, not with disease or serious disfigurement but with flaw upon pesky flaw, a serial siege of imperfections. In another person these might cause a brief period of angst, followed by a lifetime of mildly embittered surrender. In him they prompt revulsion at the mirror, wrath at the gods, compensatory teeth cleaning, diversionary weight lifting and, finally, a highly spirited and occasionally hilarious literary investigation into all of the above. "The Man in the Gray Flannel Skirt" is both a melodrama and a comedy of acute physical insecurity, as colorful a testament to the brutalities and inanities of self-appraisal as any book I've come across. It takes its title from the element of his autobiography and the particular coping strategy most easily distilled into a few clever words and a compelling pitch for an appearance on the "Today" show. In high school, Goulian begins to dress sporadically in women's clothing, trading his athletic shoes for pumps, his jerseys for halters. The book is framed around the questions of how he arrives at those outfits, where he will go from there (other than the lingerie department) and what it all means. He introduces himself, in the very first paragraph, as a riddle in pink lip gloss who, by the way, "can't get aroused unless I'm submissive, and it helps if the woman looks like a boy." It's a shrewd come-on, in that it establishes his outrageous bona fides and makes a bold claim on your attention right off the bat. But in its very shrewdness it's suspect, underscoring a central tension and paradox in many memoirs of this supposedly self-effacing stripe. To be persuasive and sympathetic, they hinge on genuineness above all else, yet the fact of them is a commercialized performance, and the act of them is so public that it inherently casts doubt on how privately timid and tortured their authors can really be. Goulian's approach feels stagier and more breathlessly pumped up and calculated than most, down to the screenplay-pat dialogue. And that sensation is only heightened by the orchestrated buzz around the book, which earned him a reported $750,000 advance and a peculiarly New York kind of celebrity. He is famous for being about to be famous. At the end of the prologue he writes, "If you think you can handle it, hop on board, buckle up, and get ready to travel with me through the world of my life." Nearly 100 pages in, overtly pondering the puzzle of himself yet again, he proclaims, "'The Man in the Gray Flannel Skirt,' by the time it's finished, will be the crib sheet we never had." There's something off, not to mention off-putting, about these passages. They make all too clear that the line between self-consciousness and self-infatuation is porous and easily crossed. Goulian, who was born in 1968, takes you back to his childhood in the wealthy oceanfront enclave of La Jolla, Calif., where he grows up in an overachieving family of formidable intellectual heft. His grandfather is the noted philosopher Sidney Hook. His father, a hematologist, teaches at the University of California, San Diego. Mom is a lawyer, and his two brothers, both older, head off for Harvard and Yale, charting an ivy-trimmed course that their younger sibling, left alone with their demanding parents, isn't sure he can follow. "Where their stock was thick and meaty," he writes, "mine was basically dishwater." This is affirmed by a low score on one of his college boards. "As the eruption of Mount Vesuvius, in A.D. 79, was to the inhabitants of Pompeii," he writes, "so was my performance on the Achievement Test in Math to the happiness, and cohesiveness, of the three remaining inhabitants of the Goulian household." In response he quits soccer, although he's excellent at it, and stops spending much energy on schoolwork. He also undertakes a radical sartorial makeover. No one's going to appraise his academic mettle - or, later, his professional aimlessness - if they're focused on his pink overalls, his fake pearl necklace, his dangling rhinestone earrings. What he puts on is less costume than suit of armor. And camouflage, because no one's going to be able to make a straightforward appraisal of his physique, either. It commits its first bit of treachery when he's 13 and discovers what he believes to be a third testicle, which he agonizes over for years before letting a doctor examine it. At that point he learns it's a hernia, and fixable, unlike his foreboding conviction that his body is out to get him. In the book's most perversely riveting chapter, he ponders the special challenge that physical intimacy poses for someone like him, who is so convinced of his own deformity, so fastidious about matters of hygiene and ingestion, and unable to settle on the appropriate erotic acoustics. "There must be some middle ground, something more demonstrative than silence but quieter than a Comanche war cry," he writes. Indeed there is. "I make a small peeping sound, like a baby chick." Goulian is then a student at Columbia, the circumstances of his admission to which won't be half as interesting to you as they are to him. He sometimes strains the reader's interest in the byways of his narrative. From Columbia he goes to law school at New York University, but doesn't follow through with a legal career. Instead he winds up as an assistant to Robert Silvers, the esteemed editor of The New York Review of Books, and later as a ridiculously overeducated babysitter. Teasing out his two principal themes, which are his lack of direction in life and his despair over the vessel in which he spends it, he writes in a rhythmic, proudly florid manner. Frock or no frock, the man knows how to shape a sentence and a paragraph. A chapter, too. He begins each with a moment of suspense or confusion that, through jaunts backward and then forward in time, is resolved only at the end. And he peppers his narrative with engaging characters, like his adorable Granny Shammy, who has "thousands of years of Armenian wisdom impressed on her wrinkled cheeks," and Silvers, who lives so deep inside his head that he fails to notice when Goulian begins transferring stuffed animals from home to the office. He's about 30 at the time, and has surrounded himself with so many of them that the menagerie no longer fits in his apartment. And have I mentioned his tattoos, which branch out wildly over the years, claiming - and obscuring - more and more of him? Not many people outside of the witness protection program have gone into hiding with as much elaborate fuss as Goulian did, and not many have emerged from it so flamboyantly. With this memoir he's poised, and posed - and presumably accessorized - for his close-up. The pink overalls and rhinestone earrings the teenage Goulian prefers are less a costume than a suit of armor. Frank Bruni is a staff writer for The Times and the author of a memoir, "Born Round."
Kirkus Review
A fretful, cross-dressing underachiever recaps a lifetime of eccentricities.At age 40, Goulian has had a busy life garnering a law degree and shuffling through a variety of odd jobs, though he admits to having little to show for it other than an uncanny sense of worldliness. His flashy chronicle begins in La Jolla, Calif., where his teen years consisted of a panicked obsession with an inguinal hernia, bowlegs, pristine teeth and, incredibly, a nose job at 15. Belly shirts, makeup and high heels became his typical dress code, a trait that "came naturally" to him but exasperated his parents and especially his grandfather, political philosopher Sidney Hook. But his androgyny became less of a worry for his family when compared with his personal defeatist philosophy ("I own nothing, and save nothing, and accomplish nothing tangible, and have no permanent hold on life whatsoever"). This resistance to constancy triggered a sudden disinterest in everything from soccer to the abandonment of his law career after attending Columbia University. Goulian writes of the comforting routine he discovered in almost a decade spent bodybuilding, but a stint at the New York Review of Books(to help defray the cost of purchasing a stuffed-animal collection) and clerking for a federal judge eventually lost their allure primarily because he "couldn't wear the clothes" required of a professional job. A curiously insistent heterosexual, the author's sassy, outspoken narrative gets kudos for its droll frankness, but it kicks and screams too much trying to be controversial. It's a rambling story fueled by the author's graphically described, awkward sexual foibles and misunderstood motivations. Flamboyant and creative? Definitely. But in a culture where few things are sacred, will anyone take notice?The musings of one hot mess.]] Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Excerpts
Excerpts
Chapter 1 It is the spring of 1985. I am sixteen years old, naked, lying on a hospital bed. I am staring fixedly at the ceiling, trying to calm myself down by thinking of my warm bed back home, and trying not to worry too much about whether those two young women in the green scrubs- medical students residents The one with the freckles, the skinny redhead, blushed when she caught me staring at her-can see the outline of my penis, not erect but still possibly visible, beneath the cold white sheet that I have pulled up to my nipples. This will be my second surgery in eleven months, so I know the drill. At least part of the drill, the part that deals with waiting anxiously for it to begin, and knowing that it will eventually end. The trick to dealing with surgery, I had learned the previous May, when I got the first of my two nose jobs (the second one coming nine years later, when I was twenty-four, and I'm thinking of getting a third one sometime soon, because my nose is out of shape again and I just can't stand it!), is to focus all of your attention on that moment eight hours later, when you are back home in your own bed, in your own room, surrounded by your own stuffed animals-the walrus, the dolphin, the seal, the starfish, and my favorite, Mr. Marvel, the koala bear hand puppet that my mother gave to me for either Hanukkah or Christmas (we celebrated both, the presents for one running seamlessly into the presents for the other) when I was seven. By focusing on that moment of pure tranquillity, you are able to avoid hyperventilating, or crying, or pulling the covers over your head. When your furry friends are on the scene, nothing is too much to handle. So here I am, staring at the ceiling, thinking of Mr. Marvel, and of the sound of the waves crashing gently against the shore far down the hill below our house, when the two young women, who have been fussing about my bed, unwrapping syringes, and making those awful clinking noises when they put the glass lids back on jars full of cotton balls and gauze, suddenly make a big production of flipping a coin. The redhead calls "heads." It's tails. She snaps her fingers and clucks her tongue against her teeth, as if to say: "Why do I always lose this game" Following this production with one eye, I am curious as to where this game is headed. The redhead, a little nervously maybe, grabs some sort of implement, quickly smiles at me, says, "This will take just a second," and then pulls the bedsheet down below my waist, just below my penis. Using no cream at all, and what seems to be a dull razor blade, she begins roughly shaving off my pubic hair. I am sixteen, and she could easily be no older than twenty-one, a disparity in age not quite pronounced enough to remove all possibility that her pretty freckled arm grazing my penis might lead to the arousal of one or both of us. Perhaps this explains why she shaves my pubes much too quickly and awkwardly, causing painful chafing and ingrown hairs that will continue to plague me weeks after the surgery is over. It certainly explains why I quickly look away from that pretty arm and back up at the ceiling, and focus hard on that moment, eight hours later, when, for the first time in three years, I will be able to go to sleep without wondering if my phantom third testicle, the source of so much painful confusion for me, and the sudden appearance of which marked the beginning of the end of my sanity and happiness, will be waiting for me when I wake up in the morning. Sometime in 1982, when I was thirteen years old, and very close to bucking up the courage to ask either Amy McKnight or Wendy Brazier out on a movie date, a two-inch piece of flesh, in shape and density not unlike a small hard-boiled egg, poked its way out of nowhere and into my scrotum. My first thought, when the egg appeared, was cryptorchidism (or, as it is more commonly known, undescended testicle). When you grow up in a family of physicians-my father was a hematologist; his brother was a plastic surgeon; my mother's brother was a geneticist whose area of special interest was birth defects-terms like cryptorchidism are thrown around casually at the dinner table at family gatherings. What I didn't manage to catch at the dinner table, I more than made up for by flipping through the pages of the two dozen scientific journals to which my father regularly subscribed, and which were strewn around the house. By the age of thirteen, I had a huge store of these terms at my disposal, a store on which to draw in case I felt, or looked, a little out of sorts. Fatigue, the great all-purpose symptom, was never just fatigue. It was a sure sign of Crohn's disease, or rheumatoid arthritis, or any one of a thousand anemias. Sickle-cell anemia always came immediately to mind, but, for the sake of variety, there was also Fanconi's anemia, or myelophthisic anemia. Tingling in the hands and feet was obviously megaloblastic anemia. Joint pain could be lupus, or it could be hemochromatosis. Depending on how I chose to suffer for the rest of my life, I chose one or the other. Blue lips and fingernails, fairly common when you swim in the ocean in winter, as we often did in La Jolla, were, in my case, either pericardial tamponade or Waterhouse-Friderichsen syndrome. A fever or headache or unexplained bruising was probably thromobotic thrombocytopenic purpura (more commonly known, to amateur hypochondriacs, as Moschcowitz's syndrome), or it might also be Upshaw-Schulman syndrome and, in either case, my sure death within ten years. And of course a mole was never just a mole. Every single mole that ever existed, if you look closely enough at it through a magnifying glass, as I always did, has irregular borders, and uneven coloring, the sure signs of cancerous tissue: "Dad! Look! What is that little splotch" "It's a splotch. You're fine." "Is it a squamous cell carcinoma" "No." "Basal cell carcinoma" "No." "Acral lentiginous melanoma" "No." "You're not even looking!" "I looked yesterday." "But that was a different splotch!" "Different splotch, same prognosis. You're fine!" Thank God I had a doctor for a father. Always putting those fears, which he had put into my head to begin with, to rest. But this potential undescended testicle-pending, of course, my father's diagnosis-presented a new problem. In order to get a diagnosis from my father, I would have to pull down my pants and let my father look at, and squeeze, my scrotum. His hairy arm would likely graze my penis in the process. To allow these things to happen would call everything I stood for as a proper La Jolla teenager into question. In La Jolla, just as one did not wear a skimpy Speedo bathing suit to the beach but, instead, wore the longer and more fashionable Birdwell Beach Britches (which, made out of nylon, had the added advantage of drying out very quickly), so did one not let one's father grope one's balls. To let your father grope your balls meant that you were, at a minimum, three-fourths gay. What was required, in this case, to preserve my manhood, was a self- diagnosis. Not an easy thing to do in the early 1980s. Those of you under the age of twenty-five, you have to remember: this was before the Internet. Getting to the bottom of this lump in my sac was not simply a matter of Googling "scrotum" and "bulge." I would have to rely on my own wits. The World Book Encyclopedia, a complete set of which we had in our playroom upstairs, was no help. I looked up "reproductive system," and saw a normal-looking man with two balls. I then considered going to one of the local libraries and looking up "testicles, disorders of," in the card catalogue. But this seemed unpromising. The small and friendly La Jolla Public Library had a limited selection of books, and would definitely be no help. The central library on the nearby campus of the University of California at San Diego (UCSD), where my father was a professor at the medical school, was another obvious option, but where the La Jolla Public Library was too limited in scope, the UCSD library seemed too vast and imposing. I would need the assistance of a librarian. She would assume she hadn't heard me correctly-"You're looking for a book on disorders of the what"-and, when I repeated myself, she would instinctively look at my crotch. With a shudder of horror, she would tell me that my search was hopeless. "I'm sorry, young man. We have many books on deformities in this library, but not the specific kind of sexual deformity you're looking for. You'll have to go to the medical school library for that, on the other side of campus." Where, of course, I could easily run into my father. A final option was asking my parents to make a doctor's appointment for me. But then my dad, naturally, would say: "Why What's wrong" "Nothing much. I just have a mysterious, egg-shaped bulge in my scrotum." "Well, let me take a look. You haven't shied away from showing me every other bulge on your body, so why start now" Which, as we know, was out of the question. So, with no other recourse open to me, all I could do was think back to that discussion around the dinner table many years earlier in which cryptorchidism had casually popped up. As I recalled, the condition generally occurred only when a boy had either zero or one descended testicle. If a boy already had two descended testicles, as I did, then the descent of a third testicle, according to the scientific literature, would be unnecessary, and would suggest that the boy at issue was not a boy at all but some other species entirely. My self-diagnosis, only just begun, had reached a standstill. Relying on my wits had gotten me no further than the hopeful diagnosis that I had a quasi third testicle, and not a real one. So I decided to put the diagnosis off until later and, in the interim, take action. Instead of diagnosing the precise nature of this mysterious egg, I would try to get rid of it. As far as I could tell, the egg had descended into my scrotum through a secret, internal doorway, and, assuming that the door was still ajar, my plan was to force the egg to go back the way it came. Initially, the plan worked beautifully. Lying flat on my back, I squeezed the egg tightly between my fingers and immediately sent it shooting back up into my body. Nothing to it. It couldn't have been easier. Out of scrotum, out of mind. When I stood up, gravity immediately pulled the egg back into the sac. Both of my attempts to deal with the intruder had failed. The intellectual approach-tame the bastard into submission by coming up with a harmless diagnosis-had foundered on the rocks of an unlikely, but still possible, and too demoralizing to think about without going crazy, third testicle. The more aggressive approach-tame the bastard into submission by grabbing hold of his neck and throwing him out-had smacked up against a revolving door. The third solution, the one that I very soon adopted, and which tided me over for three years, was doing my best to ignore him. This was not always easy. The scrotum is designed for two testicles. Mine was accommodating what amounted to three. As a result, as you can imagine, my scrotum felt tight, tense, stressed, overburdened. When I was swimming in cold water, and my scrotum contracted, it felt like my balls, pressing firmly against the skin, might burst through their casing and into the ocean. Imagine dog-paddling and suddenly finding three testicles bobbing near your mouth. Unless I was playing soccer, or taking a test, or watching a movie, that feeling of tension in the groin nagged at me continually, and all I could do was try to shut it out of my mind. There was a poster on the wall of my Middle Brother's room, which he had left behind when he went to college, which said, "When life gives you lemons, make lemonade." Below the words was a cartoon of a funny- looking man with a bushy mustache, and with the front of his scalp lifted back like the open lid of an auto-drip coffeemaker. Lemons were being poured into the opening of his head, and a stream of lemonade was simultaneously pouring out of his nostrils. It was an inspiring message. The man had been given a head full of lemons, seemingly against his will, and, rather than complaining or crying about it, he was making the best of this intrusion by producing lemonade out of his nose. A fine solution. Make the best of your limitations and move on. I would do the same. Life had given me a possible third testicle, definitely against my will, and I would make the best of this intrusion by asking no girls out on dates until it permanently disappeared, and, in the meantime, resigning myself to a life of celibacy and masturbation. At least I could still play soccer. Soccer had been everything to me since I was six years old. I had tried at least a dozen extracurricular activities-acting, singing, painting, swimming, baseball, football, tennis, basketball, water polo, surfing, sailing, skateboarding, playing the cello-and soccer was the one activity I had settled on as my ticket, so long as I continued to get those straight A's, into the college of my choice. I was so good in soccer, thanks in no small part to my incredible speed, that I was recruited to play for a special traveling soccer club, the same one my Oldest Brother had played for, called the Nomads. And I was so good playing for the Nomads (otherwise known, by opposing players taunting us, as the Gonads) that, at the age of fourteen, I was accelerated to the next highest age bracket, the Under 16s. The extra weight between my legs, easily ignorable as long as I was distracted by the heat of competition, did not make it any harder to dribble and shoot. So, in some respects at least, I could go on with my life. I would lose myself in soccer, and school, and movies, and the beach, and forget about girls for a while. The one thing I could be grateful for, the lone bright spot in this awful cloud of confusion, was that no one could see through my pants. A cleft palate, a clubfoot, a hunchback- many deformities were not so easily covered up. As long as I wore pants, my third ball was invisible to everyone but me. My confusion, when I was aware of it, was real and painful. But at least it was a private matter. Excerpted from The Man in the Gray Flannel Skirt by Jon-Jon Goulian All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.
Table of Contents
Introduction | p. xi |
Prologue: Greetings from La Jolla | p. xix |
1 An Unwilling Host | p. 3 |
2 Vertigo | p. 37 |
3 Boy Meets Girl | p. 63 |
4 ôAre You Gay?ö | p. 92 |
5 ôRemember: Always Carry a Dime to Call the Police!ö | p. 123 |
6 The Vegetable Monster | p. 153 |
7 ôThis Is Not Romper Room, Sweetie. This Is a Place of Businessö | p. 203 |
8 Most Likely to Be Remembered | p. 250 |
9 The Farewell Party | p. 264 |
Epilogue: Greetings from South Wardsboro | p. 286 |
Acknowledgments | p. 295 |